AI Again: Part 4: What's Next?

Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen and welcome back to the AI Again series. We've talked about supercharging your intake system and supercharging your document generation and automation systems with AI, and while today is the final episode in this current series, don't worry, because we are definitely not done talking about artificial intelligence. But today we are going to be quickly recapping our last couple of episodes and talking a little bit about where we go from here, both as lawyers and as marketers who want to integrate more AI, more artificial intelligence, into our practices and as participants or maybe we could call it engaged bystanders in the overall development of AI. So, diving back into intake and document generation, I want to quickly answer a question that I've been asked a bunch of times and that many of you may already be thinking is it really worth it for me to spend time integrating AI right now? And the answer is that depends. It depends a lot on the current structure of your systems, it depends a lot on your current sales and it depends on where you want to take your practice in the next two, five and 10 years.

Integrating AI, even in the relatively simple ways we've talked about, with intake and document generation, it's still a pretty significant project. What we're talking about with intake, with building your own potential LLMs that's a very serious undertaking. It's something that shouldn't be taken lightly and it is going to take a significant amount of time. And when it comes to document generation, even the automated systems we're now able to use completely, those still take a significant amount of time to set up. So what it really comes down to like with everything else in our marketing stack is that cost-benefit analysis. Is this going to solve the leaks in my intake system? Is it going to optimize our sales system at such a rate that we can afford to spend money on it, and is it going to be a distraction that's minimal enough where we can actually complete this project while not dropping the ball on any of our other marketing projects? For a lot of firms, that's not the case. This is going to be a significant undertaking and it's not going to be something that you can do in parallel with your other marketing objectives, and that's because AI not only is it a significant undertaking to build, but you also need to architect these systems. You need to understand the purpose of what you're building and the purpose of what you want out of it. And even just doing that step and getting it right on an actual engineering, technical level. That's pretty challenging. It's not something that everybody can do in an afternoon, and that's why we need to look at this cost-benefit analysis For both document generation and for intake.

We are potentially talking about significant amounts of information that need to be processed. If we're looking at a firm that does a high volume of clients, then intake and having AI integrated in that process is going to easily be a very valuable step for you to take, and the same comes for document generation. If you're generating a ton of documents, if you're an uncontested divorce law firm, you're a family law firm that only does uncontested divorce, then automating those steps can be really, really powerful for your business, because it's going to take a huge amount of back office work off of your plate. And really that's our primary question is how much time can this save us and how much money does that equate to in our pocket, whether that's savings or whether that's time to do additional work? That's what we're really looking for here in this cost-benefit analysis is does this save us enough time to be justifiable? And unfortunately, that isn't a decision I can make for you unless you want to hire me and then I'm happy to make that decision for you. You're going to need to do this evaluation yourself and figure out whether or not this is going to work for you right now.

But what's really important is that, even if you don't take those next steps and you don't start integrating AI into your process, into your firm, you need to stay engaged with what's being developed in the universe of AI. Open AI has recently released their video generation model called Sora, and they're already talking about the next version of GPT GPT-5, which is supposed to bring PhD-level understanding to our generative AI possibilities. So we are looking at a huge amount of acceleration in this market in the next 12, 18, even 24 months. And, to back me up, we're seeing the resulting stock market action, with NVIDIA becoming the most valuable company in the world. So AI is not going anywhere and it's critically important that you understand what's happening and what's next, because this is something that you're going to need to understand, not just for little things like client intake, document generation and for marketing. This is going to be integrated more into the platforms you use every day. This is going to be integrated more into the systems that run your business, and it is going to be critical for you to understand how it works and how to take advantage of it in the future.

The only caveat when people say future is that the future is kind of right now, so it's not something you can be waiting on. This is something you need to get to work on today. Whether you're implementing it or understanding it, 2024 is the time to start figuring out how this is going to be a part of your business and how you're going to take advantage of it to make more money. Now we are wrapping up our AI discussion for the moment, because I don't see a lot of changes in the front end right now. There's going to be more. We're going to see more integrated into CRMs and into other platforms, but that still takes time and we're going to wrap up this series for now. But don't worry, because we are returning to our regular programming on marketing next week and the tech that you're going to need to make all of that happen. But for this week, that's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.