A Case Study on AI in Legal Marketing—With Help from ChatGPT
This article was previously featured in Volume 8, Issue No. 4 of "The Defense," a 2023 publication by the PACDL - Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, here.
Disclaimer:
I used the free version of ChatGPT, the text-based artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed by technology company Open AI, in creating this article. I provided a variety of prompts to ChatGPT, and the program generated several responses, each about 2,000 words. Just not the right 2,000 words. And sometimes really, really inaccurate, non-responsive and just plain wrong words. In the end, other than my chats with ChatGPT (and I condensed and edited those as well), I used virtually none of the words generated by the program—at least in the way that it suggested I use them. In fact, a great amount of human (by which I mean me and the wonderful editors of For The Defense) creativity, writing and editing, and nuanced thinking was required to shape an article that is both useful and readable. AI-enabled tools can be powerful drivers for legal marketing and business development, but as my experiment with ChatGPT shows, they must be used cautiously and with an understanding of their benefits, limitations, and risks.
What Did ChatGPT Say About AI in Legal Marketing?
My experiment started with giving ChatGPT a fairly specific request:
User (me): ChatGPT, you are a content marketing professional who has been asked to write a 2,000-word article on AI in legal marketing for an audience of criminal and white collar defense lawyers in PA, what will you say?
In response, the program rapid-fired a fully realized article of about 2,000 words, starting with a title and introduction.
ChatGPT: Title – Leveraging AI in Legal Marketing: A Strategic Guide for Criminal and White Collar Defense Lawyers in Pennsylvania.
Asking the program to “regenerate”—or try again—yielded a few variations on the theme:
Revolutionizing Legal Marketing: Harnessing AI for Criminal and White Collar Defense Lawyers in Pennsylvania
Empowering Legal Marketing and Business Development: AI’s Role for Criminal and White Collar Defense Lawyers in Pennsylvania
Not terribly creative, and too long for most print and online publications. I asked the program for 10 titles under 80 characters and got 10 shorter, but still pretty generic titles, including:
Legal Marketing with AI (generic)
Revolutionizing Legal Ads (more “revolutionizing,” and not on topic)
Smart Legal Marketing AI (what does this mean?)
Lawyers Harnessing AI (slightly more creative, but not on point)
For comparison, the title that I came up with on my own is 60 characters long, with spaces, and I think it’s pretty descriptive.
Recognizing that good titles are hard to craft, even (especially?) for AI, I moved on to the introduction. Like the title suggestions, the introductions in the various iterations of the article were also somewhat generic and formulaic—and not terribly well written.
Here’s one:
ChatGPT: Introduction – In today’s legal landscape, legal marketing has become a linchpin of success for law firms, especially in the fields of criminal and white collar defense. In an era defined by technological advancements, the legal marketing is undergoing a profound transformation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful tool, revolutionizing various industries, including legal marketing, and criminal and white-collar defense lawyers in Pennsylvania are increasingly recognizing the importance of AI in their marketing strategies. In this article, we will delve into the world of AI in legal marketing and explore how it can empower defense attorneys to enhance their practices, streamline their efforts, and ultimately, achieve better results for their clients.
I also noticed something that would become more evident as I worked through the AI-generated content: The program was making statements that may or may not be accurate. Had legal marketing become a linchpin of success for law firms, especially in the fields of criminal and white-collar defense? Are criminal and white-collar defense lawyers in Pennsylvania increasingly recognizing the importance of AI in their marketing strategies?
Recognizing that trying to edit the AI-generated introduction would take more time than writing a more compelling one myself, I moved on to the body of the article.
What Do We Mean by AI?
ChatGPT and I agreed that the article should include a working definition of AI. Although interestingly, it could not agree with itself on the appropriate definition. That may be because AI really encompasses a very big and evolving category of tools and technology.
ChatGPT’s various definitions spurred me to do some research (not using AI) and develop the following explanation.
At its most basic, AI refers to computer systems that can perform tasks that are typically done by people, and that require cognitive skills typically viewed as human, such as learning, reasoning and problem-solving (analyzing data for patterns and creating rules to predict outcomes), self-correction (continually revising and fine-tuning the algorithms to provide more accurate results based on new data), language (the ability to analyze examples of text and generate appropriate responses), and creativity (using AI technology to generate images, text, music, ideas, etc.) AI systems are “trained” on large data sets; they analyze the data for patterns and use those patterns to generate algorithms—the rules they use to “reason”—to make predictions about outcomes. AI has an immense capacity to digest data, far faster and far greater than humans. It can also perform routinized tasks efficiently, enabling time- and resource-saving automation.
AI isn’t new and is unavoidable in daily life. It powers customer service voice or website chatbots, and digital assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. It even powers search engines like Bing and navigation apps that recommend the best routes based on traffic.
AI is being deployed across a variety of industries, including banking and financial services, health care, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, e-commerce, and retail, among others. It is being incorporated into creative areas including advertising, film and TV, and music, as well as sports and entertainment. It is also being introduced to the general public for business and personal applications in programs like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Writesonic, Rytr, Bard, and others.
AI in Legal Marketing
While AI has been around for a while, it remains a nascent technology in many industries, including legal services. Many firms are exploring AI-enabled tools for a variety of functions, including marketing and business development, and more tools are rapidly being developed specifically for use in the legal industry.
When I asked ChatGPT what it would tell readers of For The Defense about uses of AI in legal marketing, it suggested the following (verified, condensed, and reworded by me):
Conducting market research on competitors, market trends, and client hiring behavior.
Analyzing historical data to predict potential legal issues on the horizon and anticipate client needs.
Generating high-quality content for websites, blogs, and social media (interestingly, ChatGPT stopped there and did not mention other potential content, including articles, alerts and newsletters, award nominations and submissions, presentation and CLE materials, and other marketing content).
Providing real time assistance to website visitors, using chatbots and digital virtual assistants to answer frequently asked questions, schedule appointments, and collect contact information.
Qualifying leads using chatbots to pre-screen prospects.
Managing social media, including scheduling posts and analyzing engagement data.
Automating and personalizing email marketing, including segmenting email lists to target specific clients, as well as analyzing engagement data.
Automating responses to client requests using chatbots and digital assistants for 24/7 availability and client engagement.
Analyzing data for insights on marketing campaigns.
Interestingly, ChatGPT also suggested the following uses for AI-enabled tools:
Using predictive analytics to assess cases based on historical data and legal precedents to predict case outcomes, improve legal strategy, and inform settlement negotiations and trial tactics.
Using AI to identify which cases are more labor intensive for resource allocation.
Streamlining case management.
Reviewing legal documents and conducting legal research.
Conducting and facilitating e-discovery.
Automating case management tasks including scheduling, sending calendar reminders, and managing case files.
Streamlining billing, including tracking billable hours, generating invoices, and payment reminders.
All great potential uses for AI tools in the legal industry—but not legal marketing. I asked the program several times to revise the response, including asking that it stick to legal marketing uses and even pointing out that some of the information it had provided was wrong, but to no avail. Every iteration of the draft article include non-marketing uses for AI.
It was almost as if the AI was trying to convince me how great it was. (Or maybe I’m ascribing human traits to the program.)
Benefits, Limitations and Risks of AI-Enabled Tools
While my experiment with the public version of Chat GPT is, by no means, the definitive exploration of AI’s uses in legal marketing, it does highlight some of its benefits and drawbacks. In general, AI-enabled tools can help law firms leverage data for insights and personalization of marketing efforts, automate routine or repetitive marketing and business development tasks, and help optimize human and technology resource allocation.
In marketing communications and content, in particular, AI can be helpful for sparking creativity—suggesting topics and themes, conducting research, providing an organizational framework, or giving you a starting point from which to craft your own content. Text-based AI tools exist that can assist in developing shorter or simpler pieces such as blog or social media posts from longer content, as well as scheduling and tracking analytics on social media.
AI tools can offer time savings by automating other routine tasks, even some client-facing interactions, if you and your clients can get comfortable with chatbots or digital assistants as intermediaries. The benefits include 24/7 responsiveness and client service; the downsides include the lack of person-to-person engagement, which may be off-putting to some people, and limitations on what these virtual stand-ins can handle (who among us hasn’t been frustrated with our interactions with the automated chat feature on e-commerce or finance sites).
If you’ve followed any of the wider business and general circulation coverage on the foibles of AI, you’re probably already aware that inaccurate and downright false information is one of the biggest potential problems of using AI-enabled tools. This has significant consequences for lawyers, as evidenced by the cautionary tale of the lawyers representing a personal injury plaintiff against an airline for injuries he allegedly sustained as a result of being hit with a metal refreshment cart. The lawyers used ChatGPT to conduct legal research, which they then used in a legal brief on a statute of limitations challenge by the airline. The problem was that the cases they cited did not actually exist. When the airline’s counsel questioned the cases in the brief, the lawyers went back to ChatGPT to confirm the cases were valid, and the AI program reportedly provided fake decisions. When neither the court nor opposing counsel could find the cases on Lexis or Westlaw, the lawyers confessed to using the AI tool, which they claimed they thought was a new, super-powered search engine. Ultimately, they were sanctioned by the court, not to mention suffering a great deal of embarrassment and reputational damage.
Using AI to do legal research and generate substantive content for thought leadership and branded content such as alerts, articles and presentations carries a similar risk of embarrassment and reputational damage. So, it’s imperative that AI-generated content is reviewed and edited by lawyers to ensure accuracy. Beyond accuracy, using AI to generate content—whether substantive content or marketing copy for a website, professional bios, award and ranking submissions and the like—can often result in generic text, lacking in creativity and nuance, and devoid of brand tone and style. If the goal of marketing content is to help distinguish you from your competitors, relying on AI-generated content will not get you there—as we saw from ChatGPT’s somewhat banal and formulaic drafts of this article.
Beyond the practical downsides, the use of AI in legal marketing also carries some legal and ethical risks. Litigation is on the rise around issues including whether and to what extent materials generated using AI are subject to copyright and other protections, as well as whether the use of copyright protected materials by AI tools could be considered infringement. These IP-related issues have already touched the legal industry. In Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GMBH v. Ross Intelligence Inc., the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware has been asked to decide whether the use of Westlaw materials, including Westlaw headnotes and the Key Number System, by a legal research startup to train its AI platform constituted either copyright infringement or fair use.
ChatGPT is only one of the growing number of AI-based applications available to lawyers and law firms—both publicly available tools and those developed specifically for law firm use. While the information provided to the program does not get incorporated into the data used to train it (its responses are generated from a fixed dataset last updated more than two years ago, in September 2021), data-relates issues, such as privacy, data security, and data ownership and use, are a concern. Lawyers and firms should evaluate these risks on a tool-by-tool basis.
The use of AI by lawyers and law firms certainly implicates ethical issues, the full extent of which will not be fully realized until sometime in the future. As we saw with the development of social media and remote work, legal ethics rules tend to lag significantly behind advances in technology, putting lawyers in potentially risky professional positions. That said, the duties of competency (especially as it applies to technology—see the lawyers in the airline case, above!), diligence and client confidentiality, as well as the rules around attorney advertising, are all implicated by the use of AI in legal marketing.
Effective Implementation of AI Tools
Understanding the potential benefits, drawbacks and risks is important to the implementation of any technology, and critical in the context of using AI in legal marketing. Having a comprehensive strategy for integrating AI-enabled technology into your existing processes can help address some of the downsides and mitigate some of the risks.
Consider the following best practices:
Understand your challenges, pain points, and goals so you know what you’re trying to accomplish by using AI.
Select the AI tools and platforms that align with your goals and budget.
Make sure that legal and marketing professionals are adequately trained in the use of the AI-enabled tools.
Consider a firmwide AI policy so that everyone understands the boundaries of AI use for legal and marketing purposes.
Stay updated on AI advancements and best practices for the integration of AI tools into legal marketing.
Final Words from ChatGPT
As a final part of my experiment with ChatGPT, I asked the program what final words it might have about the use of AI in legal marketing. Here is what it said:
“The integration of AI into legal marketing and business development is not a mere option but a strategic imperative for criminal and white-collar defense lawyers in Pennsylvania seeking to thrive in a competitive legal landscape. AI’s capacity to elevate client acquisition, engagement, and streamline case management can position your firm for sustained growth and success. While ethical considerations are paramount, the future holds exciting possibilities that can continue to revolutionize legal marketing and business development practices. Embracing AI is not just about staying relevant; it’s about shaping the future of your practice.”
While I think it’s a bit overstated—once again AI is trying to sell itself, it seems—I do agree with ChatGPT that AI holds exciting possibilities for legal marketing and business development, as long as it is used cautiously and with an understanding of its benefits, limitations, and risks.
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