Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Everyone is talking about AI right now. It's in your inbox, it's in your LinkedIn feed. There's probably a vendor pitch or two that you just didn't ask for, but they're here anyways. But let's be honest how much of this AI stuff is actually going to be useful to your law firm? I mean, how much is it actually going to move the needle in terms of dollars and cents? That is exactly what we're getting into today.

Speaker 1: 0:33

This episode I don't know if we're going to do a series out of it, but it is a quarterly check-in on what is the actual state of AI in legal marketing and in law practices but mostly marketing, but law practices in general today. What's actually working for us in the trenches, what is still sort of looking like smoke and mirrors and what is sort of actually kind of reshaping the way law firms attract and convert clients. We're not going to gush too much over specific shiny tools or try to speculate about, you know, some kind of AI takeover or something. This is about what we can actually do today and, yes, when we talk about actually do, we're going to stick to the stuff that we can afford to do, because, while there is stuff that's a lot cooler than this. This is what we can all definitely do, and so, whether you're running paid ads or streamlining your intake process or just trying to produce more content without burning out your team, this is what we're going to work on. We'll keep it practical, grounded, and I'm going to be a little skeptical where I need to be, because you know we don't have a lot of time for fluff and I don't want to make this podcast an hour long. So, if you've been wondering, should we be doing more with AI or are we already ahead of the curve? Where do you fit on that scale? That's what we're going to talk a little bit about today. If you're already doing all this stuff, you're doing okay. If you're not doing any of it, you got some catching up to do.

Speaker 1: 1:55

So let's dive right into Q2 2025's state of play when it comes to AI, and let's start with the good news. Ai really is actually helpful for law firms when it's used in the right places. That's the big caveat here. We're seeing a clear pattern across firms that have embraced AI the right way. They're not replacing their marketing department. They're using AI to just remove friction where there is some and save time when they can and sharpen performance when it can be sharpened. That's definitely the hardest one, but there's a lot that can be done, so here's what's actually working.

Speaker 1: 2:29

First is smarter intake and lead qualification. The days when your intake form was just a glorified contact sheet that is out the window In 2025, smart forms, ai powered chatbots, are doing serious front end work for us. They're qualifying leads before they ever hit our intake team's inbox, and platforms like Smith AI are already integrating with CRMs to screen for case fit. This uses logic that mirrors how your intake team actually thinks, and, with custom GPTs, some firms are even training their bots to recognize red flags and segment their leads based on case type, urgency, budget or whatever metrics are relevant to you. This kind of integration is no longer theoretical. We are now seeing firms reduce their lead-to-consult ratio by 20 to 30 percent just by filtering out unqualified inquiries up front. That means a lot less wasted time, faster response times, better client experience right off the bat all those good things.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Number two is AI accelerated ad copy, landing page testing, really just any content, because that's you know. They're generative AI. It's great to generate stuff, but let's be honest, no one on your team really wants to write like a dozen different headline variations for an A-B test for a Google ad. I've been a PPC manager for close to two decades now and, yeah, I don't want to do it either. But the AI, the tools like ChatGPT, jasper and some of the more niche legal stuff that's coming out these are really helpful for getting the brainstorming going. So, things that used to take hours and hours because really the first part is the hardest, right Of getting that wheel spinning but brainstorming this copy and then rewriting the CTAs into a bunch of different variations, optimizing landing pages it now takes a couple of minutes.

Speaker 1: 4:15

So you can feed existing copy or just a handful of chicken scratch ideas and ask it to either create more or rewrite it for different practice areas, tone variations, emotional angles, and then, when it comes to creating variants of those things, you can give it a system. You know, create these six variants of this on this system and it's even easier than doing it in spreadsheets the old way we used to, and it's shockingly good at mimicking our brand voice once we fine-tuned a few samples. If you're using ChatGPT or Jasper, you can do this. You can create essentially your own GPT that is custom-tuned for what you're doing, and it can be custom-tuned for your voice in general, or it can be custom-tuned for your voice and custom-tuned for the project you're going to work on, and all of the generative stuff is pretty fantastic. I will say you have to edit a fair amount, and so in that respect, it just helps us sort of get going a lot faster, which is terrific, but not necessarily the biggest bottom line improvement. But the really big win it's the speed to insight. Ai analytics tools are now helping us detect underperforming ad segments, suggesting test variants, specifically telling us what headlines could work better, even within Google ads. You have this. It's not great, but it exists. And that feedback loop yeah, it has to get tighter and that means it's going to create faster wins, less budget burned on underwhelming copy, and that will take time, but it is already happening and you can start benefiting from it.

Speaker 1: 5:42

Now let's talk about something that every law firm struggles with reviews, and you need them. You hate asking for them and no one has time to keep replying to them with anything more than thanks for your feedback. We appreciate your feedback, thoughts and whatever you're going to call this, but AI finally cracked this, so with the right setup, we can now automate our entire review process, not just, you know, with something systematic that's out of a active campaign or HubSpot or you know, just a basic automation, but we can actually automate this based on client lifecycle triggers. So after the case closes, when someone leaves a five-star rating, and we can have the AI assist significantly with the creation of that content. They can also analyze better times to send within those cycles. That's one of the key things that we can use for that.

Speaker 1: 6:32

And even better, ai can respond in our brand voice. So tools that are trained on our past replies, they can draft these professional, on-brand responses, and often with client information, if you're careful about how to build it. And these systems can reply to reviews that are positive or negative. And, of course, if you're uncomfortable with having it directly, post to your Google my Business profile, which is probably a safe thing to do. Just in case Google my Business starts getting upset about AI agents, something like that, you could just have it send it to you in an email and tell you hey, you have a new review. Here's how we would respond, and you know you want to keep a close eye on this kind of thing because it's important and one day we will probably have a system to do this automatically, completely automatically but for now, just having it output an idea from ChatGPT on an automatic schedule whenever a post comes in it makes a huge improvement in the efficiency of this process.

Speaker 1: 7:24

This is one of these behind the scenes systems that helps us really transform our whole game. It doesn't just save a little bit of time, it helps us stay consistent, it helps us stay responsive and it makes sure we get this stuff done even when we're slammed with other things. And yeah, I realize that all of this is a little bit kind of magical sounding. We started with some things that are a little bit tangible, but by the end of that, I understand how that can be a little complex. And yes, it's making some big moves, but no, it isn't actually magic.

Speaker 1: 7:54

For every tool that we're actually saving time or boosting conversions, there's another one that is being hyped up by someone who's never run a marketing campaign for a law firm, let alone a marketing campaign for a law firm, let alone a marketing campaign in general. So here are a couple of areas where, at least in my opinion feel free to disagree with me, because, everything you know, there are variable environments for these things to occur. But here's some areas where I don't really think AI has. It's not that it hasn't caught up to the sales pitch, it's not well-designed for it or it's probably antithetical to the idea. And first is SEO content that is actually competitive. And, yes, chad, gpt or Claude or whichever program, they can spit out a whole bunch of words on what to expect in a custody hearing and it does it in under a minute, but it's very unlikely that it will rank and especially unlikely that it's going to convert.

Speaker 1: 8:49

Back in 2024, google really doubled down on helpful content signals and the algorithm is getting better and better at sniffing out the generic AI inputs. Every few months, there's a wave of posts that get taken down, and if your blog post reads like it was just assembled in a factory, it's not going to stay on the search. The top ranking legal content is still doing a couple of really key things and, yes, you can use AI to create content, but you still have to do these things and that takes human input and, at the end of the day, whether you write every single word or the AI fills in the gaps, it's questionable about where the line is, but what we know are key things with Google are providing unique insights or especially jurisdiction-specific nuance about laws, and that's especially important for local searches and mobile searches. And we also want to make sure that it's structured for human readers. It can't be for keyword crawlers. This is a 20-year-old problem that we're still solving, but it has to really be structured for people. Every time the AI gets better at writing like a person, the AI gets better at detecting itself, and we also need to make sure that it really reflects the actual voice and experience of the attorney or the firm. Even if AI helped with this draft, it's got to be you, because the bottom line is that AI is fantastic. I use it constantly and it is a great, great starting point for content, but it's not a complete replacement. Otherwise, this would be an AI voice and as much as I like to think my voice is that nice. I know you guys probably hear the cuts, but firms that are relying on entirely GPT blogs without attorney oversight or without marketing person just without oversight they're seeing their traffic flatline or they're getting penalized and it's going backwards. So while AI is fantastic and it's my favorite way to brainstorm, now you got to be a little careful.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Number two on this overhyped list is one-click marketing. We have all seen the pitch for these one-click marketing automations. You seen the pitch for these one-click marketing automations. You plug in your practice area, you turn on the AI funnel and you watch the leads roll in. This sounds great until you realize it's sending the same kind of tone-deaf email to a personal injury lead in Alabama and then a state planning lead in Arizona. And this is it's just not an it's not a fun problem to unscrew, let's say, these hands-free AI marketing systems.

Speaker 1: 11:22

Well, first off, they're often not AI that's sort of the dirty secret but they're always just too shallow, too generic or just too rigid to serve small law firms really well. And when they go wrong, they don't just waste money, they really damage trust in your brand. We've talked about that on the podcast. Poorly trained automations or poorly trained marketing teams can send conflicting messages across channels. They'll deliver follow-ups at inappropriate times I mean think you know follow up on your DOI case during the parent-teacher meeting and then they'll do things like misidentifying lead intent and they'll push too hard, too soon or ask for a review or just it's not ready yet. And none of this means that the automation or the AI is bad. It just means that strategy is really important. The firms that are doing these things well and, frankly, there's just no one doing one click, but that's not the point but the firms that are doing this well, they're using AI to support their clear, tested funnels. They're not yet replacing them. They are taking bits and pieces and rebuilding those pieces to be more efficient.

Speaker 1: 12:33

Now let's move on to number three, because I have actually mentioned this and something that I'm doing with this on the podcast before, and that's AI avatars. But we're not doing this for client communication, because AI avatars are really cool. Companies like Haygen are doing awesome stuff, and I mean OpenAI has their Sora video generation engine. There's going to be a lot in this video space and it's really shiny the idea of the 24-7 avatar that can sit on your website, hold conversations with potential clients, answer questions, book appointments and even start to do basic triage. It's really tempting. But for most law firms it's just not there yet, and when I say most, I mean probably all. There's probably like 20 or 30 firms that can handle this kind of project.

Speaker 1: 13:20

But look, there's two main problems. Here's the issue. First, is the trust factor when someone's dealing with a divorce, a criminal charge, an immigration issue. The last thing they want is to talk to a talking head that feels a little off. Even a 1%, 2%, quote, unquote, uncanny valley moment. We're going to lose the lead and that is still where we are. With video, we're using this for training I talked about my program at Credly but for client communication, for building trust, it's not there yet. And second is the compliance and tone control. These avatars are really only as good as their training and when they go off script, they can really go off script.

Speaker 1: 13:59

If you want to figure out how people can get into intimate relationships with your website avatar, put it up there, see what happens and you know, maybe I've been on the internet for too long, but I suspect that will happen faster than you think. I'm really keeping an eye on this tech and I'm using it. I mean, I'm using it all the time because it's fantastic for training, where that trust is already built with internal, with employees, with you, even with clients, where you've actually worked with them for a long time, and this is something that's sort of formulaic and they don't need to hear it from you. It will get better. But in Q2, going into Q3 of 2025, it is just a high-risk experiment. When we're talking about intake, this is, you know, it is not really something we can roll out in an initial consultation, unless you want a weird article in a local newspaper about you, okay, so now that I've put those weird thoughts in your head, we need to talk about how we are actually going to audit our own AI stack, what we're using now, because the team is probably going to be using some stuff. You're probably using some stuff. We need to start figuring out what is worthwhile to use and how we can sort of move forward as the next wave of things happens. You know, constantly.

Speaker 1: 15:12

So are we actually using AI to actually improve our business or are we just experimenting because everyone else is? This is our first question and, frankly, I don't think there's a wrong answer. But here's the thing it's really easy to get excited about new tools because, I mean, I know how easy it is. I have, like, I think, 15 AI tools to test out that it's just. The backlog never ends, and when the demos look slick and the price tags are so low, it's oh, it's 20 bucks. It's not going to be a big deal. But the real test is this is AI actually saving us time, improving our leads and helping us scale content in a meaningful way?

Speaker 1: 15:48

If we're just playing with the first question and we're focused on experimenting because everyone else is and we don't want to be left behind, we need to take a step back and look at those three areas. Are we saving time, improving our leads or scaling in some way? And that's the simple framework we're going to use here. It's just three buckets, no fluff, easy to use, time saved, leads, improved content, scaled. So are you using the AI to reduce hours spent on repetitive tasks? This is time saved.

Speaker 1: 16:15

We're thinking about intake, scheduling, drafting emails, summarizing discovery documents obviously within your guidelines, but it's not about just researching stuff with ChatGPT. It's. You know. We have systems that we do and we have good sets of instructions that we can give to ChatGPT and we can use that to actually make a measurable savings of time in our work day or work week, and then we have the leads improved. Has AI actually helped us qualify better, respond faster or convert more? Even a small lift, a half a percent in speed to lead could have a significant payoff. Timing has to be there, the ROI has to be there, but it can be significant.

Speaker 1: 16:57

And then content scale. Are we producing more content without sacrificing our quality, because AI is helping us take care of the lifting? That could mean that faster newsletters, smarter ad variants, more regular blog publishing, actually getting video out all of those things are scaling content. Now, if we're not hitting at least one of those buckets, we need to rethink how we're using those tools. And here's our model for rethinking this.

Speaker 1: 17:23

We call it eliminate, automate, elevate. We're going to eliminate the stuff that doesn't move the needle. If we have a tool that is just, it's a dead end. It would be nice if it worked, but it's not going to. They're not building, they've left it behind. It's an extra step in the process. Cut it, eliminate it. If it looks like something that maybe will work, hang on to it for a second. But you really need to be kind of cutthroat in evaluating what stuff to eliminate.

Speaker 1: 17:50

And then we automate, because there are things that the AI does well or an AI assistance does well, but it's repetitive. There's a lot of it, even things like calendar reminders, follow-ups, formatting, transcripts, stuff like that. If it feels like a robot should do it, let a robot do it. It's kind of an easy way to think about it, but that is the stuff we want to automate. And then there's elevate. This is the high impact stuff. Use the AI to support the parts of your business that really matter the creative strategy, client storytelling, improving our experience, understanding more complex problems. This is the high impact stuff that we can elevate with AI. It's not going to be eliminated, it's not going to be automated. We could just make it a little bit better.

Speaker 1: 18:34

This is where the top firms are winning. They're not trying to replace their people, they're trying to make them better. They're trying to give their people the better tools so that the humans can focus on what the humans do best. But they're looking at these first, the three buckets of figuring out which one of these problems does it solve, and then evaluating based on what can be done with it. If it doesn't fall into one of the three buckets, we're probably going to eliminate it, but we do really want to understand how we can actually move the needle.

Speaker 1: 19:03

So, before we add 15 more shiny tools to the stack, take a beat, take a breath and go through the audit. Does it fit into one of the buckets? Is it something that you can eliminate, automate or elevate? Is it really doing anything, or is it something that's just elevating, something we're doing every now and then? And with everything, like we said, you got to do a little bit of editing, because what I have in my notes here to end this particular segment is to say and make sure the AI is working for you, not the other way around, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Speaker 1: 19:36

Regardless, let's bring it home AI is not magic. It is not going to fix your broken business or marketing strategy. It's not going to fix your difficulty with dealing with people, but when you use it with purpose, it is going to give you and your team more time, it's going to give you more insight and it's going to give you more leverage. That's fundamentally what all these things build for us is leverage on our business. The firms that are getting the most out of AI right now. They're not chasing trends. They are really just riding the wave. They're staying focused on the fundamentals. They're staying focused on staying upright on that wave. They're building smart systems that improve efficiency. They sharpen their targeting and then they help scale their content and their output without burning people out. And then they help scale their content and their output without burning people out.

Speaker 1: 20:24

And if there's one takeaway from really this year, or quarter two, I guess. It's that AI works best when there's already a clear plan. Everybody wants to just say, put AI in it. But what really makes things more efficient is saying here's how it's going to be integrated in this sort of compartmentalized way. And it's really to be integrated in this sort of compartmentalized way and it's really worked pretty amazingly. And looking ahead, which we're not going to do a whole lot of, but Q3 is going to be interesting. There's a lot going on in the world of AI. There's a lot going on in the world of tech. There's just a lot going on in the world and really I'm going to keep an eye on a lot of things.

Speaker 1: 20:58

But when it comes to AI, there are three key things I'm looking at specifically, both for myself and for the firms. First is AI-powered video production. I don't know that this is going to be fully scaled up to something that's client-worthy in Q3, maybe Q4, maybe Q1 of 2026. We'll see, but for social and testimonial content it's incredibly interesting. Number two is hyperlocal ad personalization, both for content and for the targeting, using the location and case type data that we have and the stuff that the ad networks will give us. This is really interesting, coupled with the rulings on Facebook's sorry, not Facebook, google's ad network. It's going to be an interesting time in Q3, but hyperlocal ad personalization is really, really interesting and I'm also taking a look again. Number three is predictive lead scoring, because lead scoring is something I've looked at a lot in the past and over the last year or so.

Speaker 1: 21:53

What people with AI have been doing is using AI to fill in the gaps in lead scoring, so they're using it to make more, create veracity in the data. So make sure everything is sort of filled in. You have complete data and, yes, some of it is modeled, some of it is based on the machine learning that the AI does, but it seems to be working. So it's something I'm definitely going to be testing in Q3. We have a handful of firms that are working on lead scoring right now and we're going to cover those things when the time's right, but for today, the question for you is simple this is your homework. What's one part of your marketing that AI could actually make better today? That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.