How Legal Marketers Are Quietly Winning with AI (And You Can Too)
Michelle Woodyear
At a recent LMA panel featuring Stephanie Goldstein (Holland & Knight), Jennifer Rivers (Brownstein), and Austin Lahey (Seyfarth), something interesting happened: legal marketers started swapping real AI wins. Not theoretical use cases or vendor pitches—actual time savers that are working right now.
The Reality Check
The room was using a mix of tools: Copilot (the most common), ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Co-Counsel, and Harvey. Some firms have proprietary platforms. The marketers who are making progress aren't waiting for firm-wide mandates. They're experimenting, refining, and casually mentioning their wins.
"I used AI to cut that three-page associate bio down to half a page in five minutes," one attendee shared. "And then I asked AI to write them an email back, citing articles that people only read the first paragraph of a bio anyway."
Another marketer uses Claude every Friday to review their calendar and meeting notes: "It tells me what's happening next week, what to focus on, and if I keep my meeting notes in my library, it can tell me what we talked about last meeting and what my follow-up items are."
My personal favorite? Using AI to create Asana tasks with full context from meeting notes—no more cryptic to-do items you can't decipher later.
Where It's Working
The panel highlighted some surprising wins:
Proposals: Researching relevant congressional committees, trimming wordy principal content, and drafting tailored cover letters. One marketer noted, "What would have taken three hours, we pulled together in 20 minutes."
Chambers submissions: Structuring narratives with clear "why this matters" sections that researchers can understand
Onboarding: Learning new practice areas quickly by asking AI where different legal areas intersect
The mundane: Performance reviews, HTML cleanup, transcribing PDFs to text
The Pattern
What separates successful AI users from the skeptics? Three things:
They normalize it: Casual mentions like "Hey, I used AI to pull this research together" in meetings
They refine the output: As one panelist put it, "You can't just pull what AI says and go with that. You review it, you refine it. If they're looking at sources, you check the sources."
They leverage generational strengths: Younger team members often bring AI fluency that complements senior strategists' expertise
One firm shared they're now including AI usage in partner evaluations. Another created a shared prompt library so people can learn from each other's successes. As one attendee noted about Copilot's prompt library: "You just hit that share button, and your entire organization can see what people are working with. It's really good crowdsourcing for prompts."
Your Move
Try something small this week. Use it for meeting notes. Ask it to condense something wordy.
Then tell someone about it.
