How generative AI can help you market your legal practice

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to the ABA Journal Legal Rebels podcast where we talk to men and women who are remaking the legal profession, changing the way the law is practiced, and setting standards that will guide us into the future.

Victor Li:

We’ve talked a lot on this show about how generative AI tools are changing the legal industry, and a major worry for many lawyers is that these tools could replace them or make them redundant. But what about the potential of generative AI to help lawyers generate business market themselves more effectively and yes, make more money? Well then today’s show is for you. My name is Victor Li and I’m assistant managing editor of the ABA Journal. My guest on today’s episode of the Legal Rebels Podcast is a good friend of the program, as in this is a second appearance. Gyi Tsakalakis founder of AttorneysSync. And EPL Digital and digital marketing expert is here to talk about business development and generative ai. Thanks for joining us. Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Victor. So glad to be here and I consider myself a good friend of the show, so thank you for that introduction.

Victor Li:

You might be the best friend of the show, actually. I think it’s either you or Nikki Black that’s leading the horse race these days. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m in great company and I am grateful to be here and can’t wait to talk.

Victor Li:

Excellent. Yeah, I’m looking forward to this as well. So obviously I just gave a very, very short version of your bio. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? Sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I started my professional career as a trial attorney at a very small firm, and as a young attorney was tasked with going out into the world and figuring out what the firm should be doing and what lawyers are doing online. And as I did that research, short version was a lot of lawyers, this is back 2007, six said people won’t use the internet to find lawyers like me, and I was agreed to disagree. So in 2008 we founded a digital agency that works solely with law firms. Then in 2013, I founded another agency that’s outside of legal altogether, and I do some speculative tech, legal, tech investing and advising, Lawmatics and a couple other portfolio companies. So I’ve lived at the intersection of law practice and technology now for coming up on 20 years. So I’m getting pretty old.

Victor Li:

Well, you and me both. So what made you decide to focus on legal to marketing? I mean, what was it about lawyers? I mean, it’s not a skill that’s really taught in law school. Most people have to figure it out for themselves, trial and error. So what was it about legal marketing that really made you decide, okay, this is what I want to do with my time? Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think naturally because coming from being a lawyer and knowing a lot of lawyers and knowing some of the frustrations that lawyers face with trying to navigate this marketing stuff and seeing what was out there in the marketplace at the time, I was like, gosh, this is just ripe opportunity for delivering a better service, more transparency, more accountability. And so that’s really how we got involved in legal. It was because I was a lawyer and like I said, then six years later we expanded into some other verticals. But lawyers are my people. I’ve been going to tech shows since I just got started. I mean, most of my professional network is in law practice, law tech. And so I think that was a natural fit for us to be in with

Victor Li:

Law. Gotcha. So what was the main complaint about marketing that you would hear from lawyers? Is it just, oh, I don’t know what to do? Or is it just too many, many things and I don’t know which ones to focus on, or I don’t have enough time or I didn’t get into the law to have to learn about SEO and social media and advertising and that kind of stuff. What was the main complaint that you would hear from lawyers about marketing? Well, you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Really just nailed it right there with all of those. But if I had to pick maybe two of those, it’s the time lawyers, they don’t have time. I mean, if you’re a billable lawyer, time is your inventory. And so spending it on things that aren’t billable is expensive. And I think the second thing is the, it’s just a lack of subject matter knowledge. Like you said, they don’t teach business and marketing, although they are starting to teach business and marketing in some of these law schools hat tip to Ruby Powers. I know I’ve been a guest in her class. And so that’s great to see that transition, but it’s time and subject matter expertise. And really it’s ultimately, to me it’s about connecting the dots between what you’re putting out into the world and how it’s actually helping your firm grow. That’s the part that even the lawyers that have enough knowledge to be dangerous, it’s really challenging to connect all these pieces together to go from add impression to click all the way to fee.

Victor Li:

And so what was before the advent of generative ai? What was the main way they would generate business and market themselves? Was it networking? Was it referrals? Was it advertising, social media? It seems like there’s always something for them to learn. So was that part of the struggle that this idea of, oh, well I just learned how to do this now I got to learn something new?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think so. I mean, to answer your first question for forever lawyers thought, and there’s still this thinking out there that you just do good work, do good legal work, your clients will talk about you and tell their friends, and then more legal work will come. And that’s true, and that should really be the cornerstone. I always tell people I’m like, and the interesting part about it that lawyers miss is that it’s not just the legal work itself because in many law practice contexts, the client has no idea what quality legal work actually looks like, but they do know what it’s like to be treated with respect to be responded to. And so there’s this service component to law practice. And in fact, lawyers that do a great job of providing great service, they tend to get more referrals. And that’s still a thing. But really what’s changed over the, at least in the last 20 years, is the tools at our disposal to be able to provide great service to, I always say Marshall, the evidence of our good reputation for whether it’s professionalism or service or whatever it’s going to be.

The other resource that I’ll tell listeners to go to if they haven’t already is cleo’s Legal Trends report, which was they did some survey data and AVO has one, Martindale has one where they ask legal services consumers, how would you go about finding a lawyer? And it’s not surprising, a lot of it’s word of mouth referrals, but now these word of mouth referrals instead of just taking place in real life and via phone calls and maybe emails, you’ve got messaging systems, you’ve got social networks, you’ve got blog subscriptions, you’ve got search engines. So anyway, the fundamental like and trust stuff about business development and still exists, it’s just how these messages are being communicated that’s really changed and really proliferated in such a way that it can be overwhelming pretty quickly.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. Alright, so let’s take a quick break for a word from our sponsor and we’ll talk some more about this. And we’re back. So obviously let’s talk about generative ai, the theme of today’s show. So for people who aren’t familiar with it, can you explain a little bit about it and how it can be used by lawyers?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sure. I don’t want to get too technical, but whether you’re using chat GPT or you’re using copilot or you’re using Google Gemini, the short version is that generative AI takes has a corpus from which it can pull a response to. And so when you enter a prompt, it tries to predict essentially what kind of response it thinks that you’re trying to elicit based on what you put into the prompt. So what does that mean? Well, you can write in a context of marketing. Very simple thing could be like, write me a blog post of 10 things I should do, or 10 things I should know about. If I’m thinking about filing divorce, then we’ll spit back a blog post. Now the relative quality, quality of that response is going to be largely dependent on the prompt and some of the nuances of how you’re using tool.

But there’s huge issues with it. We talk about hallucinations, it’s not reliable. Is it plagiarizing? Is it copying? Where’s the source data? And so my view of how we think about it in the marketing context, it’s a great tool for inspiration. So you got writer’s block and you need to list some of the things that I should be talking about if I want to write a post about divorce. That kind of prompt is very, very effective. But I think it’s gotten kind of lost in the whole messaging around this that this is, and we talk about even the context of law practice, that it just is the replacement for human beings. It’s not the replacement, it’s just another tool in our arsenal to help us do things more efficiently. And so the thing I always tell people, I’m use the bot to do the things that the bot’s good at and then do the things that as a human being that the human being’s still better at and certainly editing and reviewing and empathizing and a lot of the different service components to law practice and into legal marketing, they still require a human being.

It’s not a replacement.

Victor Li:

And I mean, I’ve looked at some of these blog posts and played around with the tool as well and the kind of like, Hey, write me a blog post about this or write me a blog post just to see what it’s like. And I mean, you can always tell when you’re seeing the canned language and you’re seeing the very kind of general responses to things and how it’s not necessarily in the voice of the person. And as a marketer, I mean, how authentic do you have to be in order to, because everyone always says you be yourself, market yourself based on your strengths and people respond to the individual. So how do you sort of craft that so that you can still use, like I said, chat g BT or some of these tools to help you get going, but then you inject enough of yourself in there so people are like, okay, that was written by so-and-so I like this person, or I thought that was well done. I’m going to look at some more blog posts by this person.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think it goes exactly to what you just said, which is I always frame it like this, do it the chat, GPT cannot the chat GPT cannot share your stories. The chat GPT can write generic stuff. The generative AI can write generic like 10 bullets. It can do talking points based on what it’s pulled, but it can’t tell the story of how you helped a client or something you’ve specifically learned in your practice, or maybe there’s something unique about what you do or maybe there’s something that you’re passionate about in your community. And so surfacing more content and publishing more content that really focuses on that, that’s the great distinguisher. And I think another thing that’s come out that’s emerging out of this whole generative AI thing is that there’s a bias against the bots. And so I see folks that will go on LinkedIn and they clearly copied and pasted something from chat GPT into their LinkedIn post.

And when you can tell it makes them feel less authentic, you’re less inclined to engage with it. I mean, would you go on LinkedIn and comment on a post that you know is written by a bot? You’re less likely to do it. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s all sorts of gray areas here because chat CT is getting better. The prompt engineering is getting better, you can revise it, but at the end of the day, the authenticity is the key part. That’s the thing that’s going to endear you to people that’s going to attract people that want to actually know and trust and hire you. And so I’d be very careful if you are pumping out generative AI content that’s very easily identified as generative AI content, I’d be very careful about what that’s doing to your quote brand online, right?

Victor Li:

Yeah. And that kind of like you said, I mean the software is getting better and better, but I mean it’s never going to replicate how someone would write, especially if they don’t have tons and tons of your writing to be portray. Or can it get to that point where let’s say I take all of my old blog posts that I’ve written personally and then I put it in chat GPT and be like, here, spit me out a post about drunk driving, but write it like I would and I post all these links to it. I mean, will we ever get to that point? You think?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So? I do think we’ll get to that point. In fact, I think we’re approaching this kind of touring moment. But again, it depends, as you said, if you feed the machine, if you say No, look, the corpus is solely going to be things that I’ve written or now because they’re turning everything into language so it can consume video and create transcripts and create text off a video. So if you feed it video interviews, if it’s just doing it based on me, I do believe it’s going to be pretty indistinguishable. And you talk about DeepFakes and video, and if you look at some of these cutting edge ones, they’re getting pretty close. And so I do think eventually we’re going to get there that it’s going to be, in most contexts, it’s going to be very, very difficult to tell. And there’s all sorts of philosophical and existential and societal and cultural ramifications of that.

But I’m in the camp that, yeah, I think that eventually it’s going to be very difficult to tell the difference. But here’s the thing, even when it gets that good, if it’s watermarked or if it’s you disclose or have a disclaimer at the beginning of it that this is fake or whatever you’re going to use, that in and of itself is creating this bias against the content. Because again, even if you didn’t give me the disclaimer, you didn’t give me the watermark and I couldn’t tell, I might be inclined to say, oh, look, this is great, and I’m having the reaction that the person wants me to have in terms of contacting, hiring them. If you tell me that it’s a bot, I’m going to be less inclined to trust it. And it just feels fake. It just doesn’t feel like I’m actually consuming content from the expert that I’m contemplating hiring. So that’s what I think is, it should be a major concern for lawyers who are using it today.

Victor Li:

So what about for other forms of business development? I mean, what are some ways that lawyers can use these tools to help them find clients, bring in more money, identify people that might potentially become clients, leads, things like that. What are ways that they can use these tools? So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There’s a huge asterisk with a lot of the stuff I’m going to say because there are privacy issues and there’s devil’s in the details of how you implement, but I just want to give some ideas so that we are creating something for people to go and do further research on. But deploying the GPT on your firm data to identify patterns in client personas and seeing which clients are most profitable for the firm, identifying language that your potential clients are using so that you can craft messaging that’s more resonant with those potential clients. It’s amazing for coming up with ad copy variations. So if you type in, this is my existing ad, give me 25 permutations of this ad copy to go test, it’s very useful for that. It’s very useful for identifying gaps. So if you’ve got an existing piece of content and you’re like, if you feed it into the GPT and you ask it to share other topics that you might have missed, I think for blind spot identification, it’s very, very effective.

So there’s all sorts of applications, but again, if you think about it, it goes back to that same point of like, well, what is the GPT better at doing than I’m good at doing? And that is looking at large bodies of text and identifying patterns and synthesizing information. And so I think in those contexts, I think it’d be very, very effective in terms of client development. And so again, I tell everybody, do what the bots cannot and let the bots do what they’re better at. One thing that we talk a lot about is in terms of the intake process, what role can AI play in the intake process? And whether it’s chatbots or voice-based automated communication, look, if someone calls your firm and is like, Hey, I’m looking for the date of my deposition chat, GPT and AI and generative AI can probably handle that.

If someone calls and says, my brother was just killed in a car accident, you got to have a human being to field that. And then there’s a million different contexts in between those two examples. But I think finding the ways that you can implement it to, we talked about time, there’s no question that it can free up some of your time, automate the tasks that it’s good at automating, which also gives you more time to do the other business development tasks, the empathy, the listening, the service, the face-to-face networking. I think that’s the real advantage here, not just as a supplement or a replacement for human beings in the context of business development.

Victor Li:

Right. Well, and also especially for small firms and solos, if they can’t afford to hire someone to help them with a business development or help them with their marketing or whatnot, mean, would this be a good way to kind of substitute for that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Absolutely. And again, if I think it’s a great thing to type in questions you have, how are lawyers today marketing themselves? Give me 25 ideas for marketing campaign ideas. I’m a local divorce law firm in my city. What are some ways that you might market a firm like mine? And honestly, I’ve been impressed. It’ll talk about things like local community events and how to design a campaign around that. And so I think from strategic standpoint and ideation and brainstorming and some of that content gap stuff that we talked about, I think it’s really, really effective from that standpoint. And again, if you’re willing to pay the 20 bucks a month and getting the souped up version of it, it’s even that much more effective. And there’s all sorts of different plugins and tools that you can add to it to modify it. But again, I think it’s just really important for people to understand that as a tool, if I understand what it’s doing, really, really effective, but this isn’t just like copy and paste or hook the chat G-P-T-A-P-I to your WordPress, API and go nuts. It’s got all sorts of issues that you’ll create with search engines. And honestly, again, I think the big risk here is the reputational harm that it causes when it just looks like you’re just pumping out this fake content.

Victor Li:

Alright, so let’s take another quick break for a word from our sponsor. And we’re back. So we talked a little bit in the last section about how these tools are developing and where things are heading. Let’s take a little bit more of a forward look and let’s talk a little about where this technology might be heading. So where do you kind see the state of generative AI as far as marketing and business development going inside the next year or the next five years? Do you think lawyers are going to start using it a lot more? Do you think there’s still going to be resistance to it? Do you think that there’s going to be more adoption? I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do. I think when you start to see the benefits that it provides in terms of the time savings, and again, even some of the things this solution to writer’s block, it’s just remarkable how effective it is. And so there’s going to be the, call it a hybridization, but the generative AI is going to fill in the gaps and automate a lot of the things that we’ve had to do in terms of marketing and business development. But it’s not going to replace that human element, at least in the short term. And again, I think the biggest obstacle for where this intersection happens is going to be in trust. And so where the generative AI erodes trust between your target audience, potential clients and existing clients, people are going to be, they’re going to resist. But when you see that, when it’s accomplishing its objectives, it’s automating things and freeing up time and the feedback from the person on the other side of it, whether it’s in the intake context or it’s in the social media context, is a positive experience. They’re consuming generative AI assisted content or generative AI assisted messaging, and they’re having a positive experience, I think people are going to say, wow, this is really, really beneficial to my practice and it’s giving me more time to focus on those human service things that I wasn’t able to focus as much on before when I was doing a lot of the things that generative AI is now automated for me.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. So let me ask you a hypothetical question. Let’s say I’m starting a law firm. I’m not going to, but let’s just, let’s say I’m a glutton for punishment and I’m just going to start my own law firm. So obviously million things that you have to do and swimming upstream and everything like that. How are you going to set things up? How are you going to stand out from the crowd and things like that? So let’s say I came to you for help. I’m like, Gyi, I don’t even know where to start. I’m completely overwhelmed. I’ve heard about these generative AI tools. I’ve heard they can really help as far as marketing, but also doing research and things like that. I mean, would you recommend that I just kind of jump in and use it while still obviously not relying on it to generate all of my content, but just would you recommend that I implement it into my firm just on the research side or on the marketing side or both? Or would it depend on where my strengths are and what my capabilities are? Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ll try to avoid the, it depends, but that is the right answer. But I’ll try to avoid the, it depends questions. I think certainly from a research standpoint, there’s no question that it’s very, very effective. How do lawyers themselves, I mean as simple as that kind of prompt and then the follow-ups, and you’ll get better at asking the prompts as you play with the tool. And I think most lawyers would be impressed like, oh, hey, that’s something I hadn’t thought of that I could do and go execute on In the publishing context again, as long as you’re conscientious about you’re not feeding it client information, all of your rules, professional conduct are being followed, I think that it can be a supportive role in the publishing context. I wouldn’t be relying on it for subject matter expertise or citing cases or anything like that, or necessarily legal research.

But certainly in terms of like, Hey, what are the things that people who are looking for a divorce layer, what do they care about? Those kind of questions I think is really, really effective to use the prompt to get ideas about how you might craft messaging. I think it’s great for teasing out different, whether it’s taglines or marketing, advertising headlines ad creative. And again, as it keeps evolving, it’s not just text. You can create imagery with this, you’re going to be able to create video content with this. And so I think if as long as you’ve got not, you’re understanding kind of what some of the risks are and you’re very conscientious about how you’re using it in terms of what you’re entering into it. And then of course you’re reviewing everything that comes out of it and editing it as appropriate. I would certainly advise folks to be on it, certainly in the research, the ideation and the kind of outline q and A type of usage. I think there’s no question that it’s extremely valuable for helping the lawyers tailor their marketing messages.

Victor Li:

Lemme just ask you personally too, I mean, have you been surprised at just how, I mean, obviously it hasn’t been completely adopted by people in the legal industry, but I think there’s, fair to say, there’s been more adoption of these tools as compared to some other piece of technology that have come down over the last couple of decades. Have you been surprised? It’s just how quickly some people in the industry have embraced this? I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Have. I always think about the cloud paradigm. So when software was on premises and cloud started coming out, I remember, and maybe some of this is just the time that I came out, sure. People that have been doing this longer than me have other examples of this technologically, and you can LinkedIn or at me on X or whatever to tell me about your story. But I remember the lawyers being like, there’s no way that cloud is going to be secure. There’s no way I would trust cloud. And I remember Jack Newton fought this battle and a lot of other cloud pioneers. Tech show is a constant topic of conversation for years, and there was so much resistance to it and ethics opinions and all this stuff. And then this thing comes along and total opposite. I see lawyers all the time, I go to a law firm’s website and it’s clearly got AI generated content.

You go to the chatbots on their website and it’s clearly generative AI enabled chatbots. And I always ask myself, what’s the difference? And I think some of it’s the frictionless of it, right? It’s so easy to use. It’s so easy just to either download the app or go to the URL, type it in and you’re just like, wow, I don’t have to write anything anymore. I don’t have to write emails, I don’t have to write text messages, I don’t have to write blog posts. But I also think it’s like we’re kind of deceiving ourselves. Lawyers are looking at this and they’re like, the upside seems so good from an efficiency standpoint, but they’re not really looking at what’s coming out of it with a critical eye and saying, that doesn’t sound like me, or people aren’t really going to buy that. This is me. So anyway, I think we’re going to have our reckoning with this, but the lawyers that are doing it in a way that it’s seamless, that you can’t tell that they’re using it, that their stories are still coming through, those are the ones that are going to win the future.

Because at the end of the day, marketing is still largely about standing out and gaining a reputation for knowledge, skill, and experience and service. And right now, the GPT, yes, it can be fast. Yes, it can pull data points that you might not be able to access, but in terms of providing that real expertise and that real level of service that lawyers deliver, it’s just not there yet.

Victor Li:

Yeah, no, I think you’re right about how just intuitive it is, because I remember, I think when I first got into legal reporting, I think that was when TAR was first starting and everyone was like, well, my editor especially was like, oh, this is incredible. This is going to revolutionize everything and blah, blah, blah. And I mean, it was an incredible innovation and whatnot, but I remember then I learned about it a little, and even just very superficially, I was telling me about seed sets and this, and my head just started hurting. I’m like, I don’t understand this stuff. This is, so then obviously I could understand why it was so beneficial, but it wasn’t like I was going to run out and be like, oh, I have to get on this or I have to do this. But chatt is, anybody can use it. Anybody can sign up for it, and anybody can type in a prompt and get something back. And I think, yeah, you’re right. There’s something very intuitive and very simple about it that draws people in.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I mean, look, if you’re a Microsoft user or a Google user, it’s baked right into your workspace. You really just literally just click a button to enable it, and all of a sudden, it’s like suggesting prompts. Marketing people have known Google Analytics has had automated insights, and Google Ads has been providing insights and suggestions, even though I wouldn’t suggest people use the Google ads insights and suggestions. So that’s a conversation for another day. It’s baked into everything. So it’s almost unavoidable. And again, it’s intuitive, it’s easy to use, and it is frictionless in terms of its access to all of the tools that we use professionally.

Victor Li:

Gotcha. And finally, to wrap up, if our listeners wish to get in touch with you, I mean, you had mentioned it a little bit earlier, but what’s the best way to do so?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You can type in my long name into LinkedIn. I’m active on LinkedIn, GYI won’t spell my last name. Usually it just comes up. I’m also active on Twitter. Or you can contact me through attorney sync attorney, SYN c.com. And I love talking law practice and tech, so feel free to hit me up anytime.

Victor Li:

Great. Thanks again for joining us. Gyi, I appreciate it,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Victor. My pleasure. Really great chatting with you today.

Victor Li:

Yeah, good to talk to you again, and I guess I’ll see you on a tech show, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Can’t wait.

Victor Li:

Yep. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please go to your favorite app and check out some other titles from Legal Talk Network. In the meantime, I’m Victor Lee, and I’ll see you next time on the ABA Journal Legal Rebels podcast.

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