It has been about two years since ChatGPT 3.5 was released to the public and it’s likely that most readers will have tried it or at least heard about it (probably a lot). There’s been a mix of hype about its usefulness and frightening stories of lawyers who have found themselves in disciplinary hot water because the tool “hallucinated” and made up cases or otherwise failed to prove reliable. Attorneys educated in using artificial intelligence (AI) tools (and there are now many, including ones built into products regularly used by members of the profession) will tell you that they are useful and can often save time and help perform difficult tasks. They will also tell you that you still have to “be a lawyer” and closely review the outputs.
One lawyer task that might be on the lower-risk, higher-performance side for AI is legal marketing. Remember how generative AI tools like ChatGPT actually work. Many are large language models (commonly called LLMs, not to be confused with the term for advanced law degrees) and have been trained on the entire internet. They can be considered incredibly sophisticated word-guessing algorithms that pull language together to respond to a user’s prompt. These models produce music and voice, video, computer code and more, but for purposes of this column, I want readers to focus on language. If you have used an LLM, you might believe there’s an actual person in there. And given most legal marketing involves writing, these tools are particularly suited for it.
In this column and my next few, I’m going to explore the ways legal professionals can use AI tools to assist in their marketing efforts. I’ll also flag the risks that, while less than using the tools for research and drafting, are still important to note. Fortunately, they’re very addressable.
Generative AI can assist lawyers in almost any type of drafting, and legal professionals should stick to the type of writing that makes the most sense for them. So, whether it’s short-form posts on X.com or Threads, blogging, composing email alerts to clients, drafting newsletters or even authoring books, AI tools can help improve your writing and speed up things as well.
Some attorneys feel overwhelmed when faced with the blank page and struggle to come up with engaging content ideas. So, asking the AI for topic ideas may be the first assignment. An AI can help brainstorm, including analyzing current trends and reviewing evergreen topics that will resonate with potential clients and perhaps attract media interest. Once the topic is identified, you can ask the AI to generate an outline and maybe provide an overview of what’s going to be covered.
Lawyers sometimes struggle to write in a way that is approachable to laypeople versus the legalese for which we’re infamous. AI can suggest different tones and styles and then suggest different ways to re-write your words to be more accessible to your audience. It might, for example, suggest hypotheticals or lighter takes on a topic to make your drafting more interesting. As for helping to re-write to simplify language, I often use this simple prompt: “Please take the following legal text and rewrite it in plain English, eliminating complex legal terminology and making it easy for a nonlawyer to understand. Focus on clarity, brevity and avoiding jargon while maintaining the key legal points. Keep the tone professional but approachable.”
For attorneys posting on sites like X.com (formerly Twitter) and other platforms that demand short posts in a thread, a lot of time can be devoted to editing to get each post down to the correct length. AI tools can be useful for taking longer form writing and then converting it into a series of short posts that can then be pasted into the social media platform. Similarly, if you’re drafting a longer form document that has a word limit (like this column, for example), a useful prompt is one that asks the AI to take the document and reduce the word count down to the required amount but do so in a way that changes the meaning the least. The AI will then look for three-word combinations, for example, and change them to two words. The idea is that you have kept the document largely the same and in your voice, but have reduced the excess words.
Lawyers may find themselves able to take on marketing content-creation tasks that previously they would have used outside providers. One is a press release. As ChatGPT and the other products are trained on the corpus of the web, there’s no shortage of law firm press releases, so the odds are pretty good that if you ask the AI to draft a press release announcing your good news, you’ll get a very professional sounding draft. You can also ask the AI to list all the news outlets that fit with the audience you’re interested in reaching and tell you the email address for submitting the press release or the link to submit it on the news organizations’ websites.
Most lawyers will insist they’re great writers. After all, we write for a living. But, if we’re being honest, many can use help. Grammarly and spell check are obviously a godsend for many legal professionals. But generative AI can also be great as a proofreader. It can help generate headings and subheadings. It can expand bullet points. It can act as a critic and point out logical inconsistencies in your drafting. In short, it can act like the colleague you send your draft to for their opinion and proofing before you try and publish your work. My biggest fault in my writing is being repetitious in my word choices and getting an AI to find examples of that and suggest synonyms is wonderful.
Some final tips if you’re using AI tools in your marketing:
Finally, make sure you’re complying with your firm’s policies when it comes to using AI for any of these tasks. Most firms lack a policy at this point. Given employees are very likely using the tools anyway, firms might want to take the time to implement one.
