I’m heading East this week—first to New York City for meetings on Wednesday, then on to Washington, D.C. for the Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference on Thursday and Friday.
Interesting times in legal. If AI isn’t front and center at LMA—on stage, in the breakout sessions, in the hallways—it’ll be the first legal event I’ve attended this year where that’s the case.
The delivery of legal services—and the way legal marketing professionals position those services—is changing. Not slowly. Not eventually. We’re talking within the next two to four years, everything shifts.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai predicted on 60 Minutes on Sunday that AI won’t just assist in treating disease—it will eliminate all disease within the next ten years. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and involved in several AI based initiatives, describes jobs—lawyers included—as bundles of 20 or 30 discrete skills. AI, he says, will do 15 to 25 of them. Better than we can.
“Figure out what only humans can do—and get good at that,” Reid says.
That advice doesn’t just apply to the work performed by lawyers. It applies to the work performed by the people marketing lawyers and law firms, too.
Where the Puck Is Going
Skating to where the puck is won’t cut it. Legal professionals—and the marketing professionals who support them—need to start skating to where the puck is going to be.
Incremental website updates and new Websites altogether… SEO tweaks… email campaigns… dashboards measuring traffic from Google to a law firm website—they could soon be irrelevant.
Google’s AI-driven search (not the summaries you’re seeing now), but what’s coming this year in Google’s OpenAI ChatGPT—like conversation replacing search, could fundamentally replace search as we know it. That means no more meaningful search traffic to track.
And that’s just one small change.
Over on LinkedIn, my friend and attorney Ryan McKeen shared this reflection after listening to Sundar Pichai:
“We keep talking about AI like it’s just a tool lawyers will use. That’s already outdated.
The next wave?
AI will do the law.
- Discovery
- Negotiation
- Advocacy
- Claims resolution
It won’t just support lawyers. It’ll replace huge swaths of what lawyers do.”
I agree. And I think it’s okay. Because it means lawyers will be able to do things they couldn’t before. And the public might finally be better served. And lawyers and the people working with them may have improved worklives
You don’t have to agree with all of this. But ignoring it? That’s not a viable option.
What I’m Looking for at LMA
I’m looking forward to hearing how marketing leaders are actually using AI—not just talking about it—in ways that serve lawyers, clients, and the future of the profession.
The LMA community is filled with smart, committed, forward-thinking professionals. I’m grateful to be part of it, and I’m ready to learn.