The case for GenAI as a marketing tool

Trish Carroll explains why law firm marketing and pursuit teams need to get on the generative AI (gen AI) bus or go under it. Why? Because it will make marketing dollars go further and produce better results in less time.

In short

• Generative AI is increasingly being used by lawyers for tasks such as preparing for meeting or developing tenders and proposals.
• While AI is a great marketing and business tool, human oversight is crucial to ensure the validity of information, especially for lawyers.
• More training of law firm employees on the use of AI should be a priority to maximise its impact.

AI feels like it’s everywhere and all at once. Not that long ago it was a concept many in the legal profession were choosing to ignore. For those old enough to remember, it reminds me of the scepticism when facsimile machines were introduced as a replacement for telex machines. The scepticism quickly vanished when the ease of use, lower cost and speed was recognised. AI is this decade’s equivalent and, like facsimile machines, it’s industry agnostic.

For this article, I spoke with a variety of people from large law and accounting firms – managing partners and heads of client service, innovation, knowledge management and marketing, as well as a senior lawyer in a mid-sized firm whose experience of GenAI sounded a warning bell for what not to do.

There is no shortage of vendor-led research and evangelical commentary about the power of AI. For a more balanced view, read McKinsey AI Report 2025 – unsurprisingly companies with $500 million in annual revenue are changing more quickly than smaller organisations. That will change and lessons from the bigger players will benefit smaller organisations. AI has the power to level the playing field.

My remit for this article was to focus on how marketing teams can use AI to work smarter and drive growth. In McKinsey’s report, professional services firms’ use of GenAI in marketing and sales functions is second only to the technology sector’s use – 49% and 55%, respectively.

I thought I’d put GenAi to the test and asked Perplexity to do the work for me. Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that uses large language models (LLMs) to produce responses that are synthesised into an easily consumed natural language format with citations and detailed follow-ups.

This is what I asked Perplexity: “Please do some deep research on the use of GenAI in marketing and business development for law firms. List out the top 10 ways that GenAI can help. Indicate where it is most useful and provide some examples of its use, listing the specific tools and what they can achieve. Specifically focus on how a range of GenAI tools can help lawyers build better understanding of their clients, read and respond to tenders for work.”

What was remarkable about the response was how accurately it mirrored many of the examples I had been given by all those people I mentioned speaking to in preparation for writing this article. It took far less time than that consultative process, but had I not spoken to those people would I have placed as much confidence in what Perplexity revealed? The human interaction provided better insight, and the lived examples validated many aspects of Perplexity’s response.

There’s a salient lesson in this example. Any GenAI content needs to be reviewed by a human with a solid knowledge of the topic. A partner in a medium-sized firm I spoke with shared an alarming story about receiving what he thought was a “robot-generated response” from a law firm in response to a Notice of Demand. The response cited various sections of relevant legislation, but the sections had no application to the specifics of the Notice. The partner on the receiving end of this nonsense response pointed out the irrelevance of the points being made and told me, “From that moment on I was in a far stronger negotiating position.”  From this experience they formed the view AI was useless unless its use is properly supervised and those using it are properly trained. This is the lesson in using GenAI. Supervision and training. That lesson came through loud and clear from everyone I spoke to.

But back to how GenAI will make your marketing and business development efforts better. First off, go and ask Perplexity and you will get a lot of sound ideas that I am not going to repeat here.

In my view, the game-changers for marketing and business development are using GenAI to enable superior preparation for client meetings and to produce better proposals and tenders. These are two activities that are as time-consuming to do well as they are important to do well.

Better client meetings

The use of GenAI to prepare for meetings with potential and existing clients is a no-brainer because you can quickly acquire an understanding of the client’s business, industry and challenges and interrogate it to enable better quality discussions.

Try Google NotebookLM | Note Taking & Research Assistant Powered by AI.  You can upload documents, link a website, ask questions of the website and content, use the button to generate audio and this will build a podcast which discusses the content. What a feature for people who prefer absorbing information this way.

You can take the output and spend the time you would have previously spent obtaining it to consider what it means. A few law firms told me that it’s standard practice now to prepare for meetings having used GenAI to cut through whatever information will help them engage better with clients. One example was reviewing a large institution’s most recent investor update and financial reporting a few days before the meeting to discuss the client’s priorities. This pre-work enabled a better and more productive meeting.

Be warned. Don’t rely on AI-generated insights without questioning their accuracy. AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on and, if that data is incomplete, biased, or outdated, the outputs can be misleading. Hence the need for human oversight and engaged thinking and challenging what AI has produced. AI’s genius is in synthesising information quickly and it can apply reasoning, but it cannot apply critical thinking – that’s where HI (human intelligence) comes in.

Better proposals and tenders

Another time-consuming and often loathed activity is preparing proposals and tenders. Tools such as Chat GPT and Jasper AI help craft tailored proposals.

GenAI uses technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to streamline the process and make it more efficient.

NLP can analyse complex RFP documents, break them into manageable sections and generate responses aligned to the client’s needs. ML enables AI to learn from past bids and analyse patterns in successful submissions, and GenAI can identify what worked in the past and apply those insights to current bids. Over time, it makes better suggestions as it learns from your past wins and losses.

AI can create first drafts by pulling from a vast amount of information, your own data and past successful bids, and publicly available resources, and AI tools can review for compliance with RFT requirements, flagging any missing elements or deviations.

For proposals and capability statements, AI can analyse past data and client preferences and suggest content that directly addresses the needs and priorities of a specific client, making the proposals more targeted and produced in less time.

Be warned. AI works best when combined with human expertise. It can help you understand the language in bid documents, suggest improvements based on past successes, and generate first drafts, but strategic insight and close review must come from skilled human bid writers. Training teams to work effectively with AI tools is key to achieving the best results. s

Getting started

A trusted colleague of mine, Sue Woodward, is a font of practical AI knowledge. She’s recently developed a 5-minute assessment tool to help you see where AI can save time and improve how you work. It comes with a free 30-minute discussion. Take a look  https://blueprintadvisory.com.au/

Stuart Fuller, the immediate former Global Head of Legal Services for KPMG International, made his views on the subject very clear when he said, “Not being proficient in the use of AI will quickly become a competitive disadvantage and it won’t take long before AI is a table stakes requirement.”  Fuller’s opinion on AI reminded me of that great line in a very old shampoo commercial, “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.”  Sounds about right to me.

Trish Carroll is the principal of Galt Advisory, a business that helps law firms and individual lawyers devise and implement successful marketing and business development strategies. Contact her at trish@galtadvisory.com.au.