AI for law firms: The good, the bad and the future

Many businesses have spent the past year navigating the increasing use of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Law firms are especially cautious due to lingering questions about the legal implications of using AI, particularly related to confidentiality and privacy concerns. Meanwhile, many professionals are exploring how AI might enhance their expertise and simplify workloads. 

Jessica Aries is one of them. 

Jessica is a seasoned legal marketer and founder of By Aries, a digital marketing agency specializing in the legal sector. She frequently talks about how law firms can use AI tools to enhance their operations, sharing her insight on social media and at various conferences. In this episode of “Spill the Ink,” Michelle Calcote King invites Jessica to reflect on the evolution of AI tools for legal marketers. They discuss the risks and best practices professionals should keep in mind when using them. They also talk about their favorite AI tools and analyze how AI is changing before our eyes.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn

• Who is Jessica Aries and what is By Aries

• The evolution of AI tools, particularly for law firms

• How your firm can strategically leverage AI to improve workflows

• The risks and drawbacks of using AI as a legal professional

• Best practices for AI writing prompts

• Why smart legal marketers make the AI to ask them questions

• The implications surrounding watermarked AI content 

• A shortlist of Michelle and Jessica’s favorite AI tools

About our featured guest

Jessica Aries, J.D., LL.M., is a lawyer turned digital marketer who helps lawyers simplify their digital marketing to build consistent visibility and profitable practice. A former in-house legal marketer at some of the largest and fastest-growing firms in the world, Jessica understands the pressures lawyers face and strives to help them perfect their digital presence to build relationships, develop new opportunities and transform their approach to marketing in an easy and approachable way.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Check out By Aries

• Follow By Aries on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube

• Connect with Jessica Aries on LinkedIn

• Say hello to Michelle Calcote King on Twitter and LinkedIn

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Reputation Ink.

Founded by Michelle Calcote King, Reputation Ink is a public relations and content marketing agency that serves professional services firms of all shapes and sizes across the United States, including corporate law firms and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms. 

Reputation Ink understands how sophisticated corporate buyers find and select professional services firms. For more than a decade, they have helped firms grow through thought leadership-fueled strategies, including public relations, content marketing, video marketing, social media, podcasting, marketing strategy services and more.

To learn more, visit www.rep-ink.com or email them at info@rep-ink.com today.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Jessica Aries: AI is gonna amplify the type of marketer you are, going to amplify the type of lawyer you are. So if you're one who's going to cut corners, it's going to really exacerbate that. But if you're someone who's really going to push the tool and challenge the tool, it's going to amplify that, too, and make you a better marketer.

[00:00:21]: Welcome to "Spill the Ink," a podcast by Reputation Ink where we feature experts in growth and brand visibility for law firms and architecture, engineering and construction firms. Now, let's get started with the show.

[00:00:38] Michelle Calcote King: Hey everyone. I'm Michelle Calcote King. I'm your host and I'm also the principal and president of Reputation Ink. We're a public relations and content marketing agency for law firms and other professional services firms. To learn more, go to rep-ink.com. 

As everyone knows, artificial intelligence has been the topic of conversation in 2023. We're all sort of navigating what it means for our jobs and how best to leverage these tools. For law firms, it can be somewhat of a tricky conversation. But some people in the field have taken a lead on this and have embraced AI and are doing really interesting things with that.

Jessica Aries is one of those people. I was really fortunate to attend a session of hers at the Legal Marketing Association Midwest Regional Conference, and she was full of useful tips. Welcome to the show, Jessica. 

[00:01:28] Jessica Aries: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

[00:01:31] Michelle Calcote King: I know you're a former attorney and you started your agency after a decade of working in-house at law firms. So let's start with you telling me a little bit about who you are and your firm. 

[00:01:41] Jessica Aries: By Aries launched really in the pandemic when, like many, I was furloughed and had to figure it out in a hot second. I actually put up a LinkedIn post that went semi-viral within our industry where I basically just put up like a headshot and said like, "Hey, I'm a COVID-19 job seeker." And it resulted in this influx of leads to my now agency. At the time it was me working in digital marketing because there was a real gap in the market at the time. As you remember, many firms hadn't quite fully embraced digital, maybe not social media the way that they had, and social media really built my business. So a lot of what we do is social media strategy and social media marketing. We focus predominantly on LinkedIn, but we have migrated into video marketing lately and doing a lot more around new platforms, emerging platforms like TikTok and Reels and Facebook Reels. So really exploring those areas. And with that has come this need for really learning what AI can do to kind of advance and make simpler the the workflows that we had in our agency. 

That's really how I got into AI. I was just looking to make things faster for us and find a way to really elevate what we were already doing and I thought, why not test it out? That's another algorithm. We're playing with the algorithms all the time. Why not test another robot? So that's how it came about. And so my agency predominantly does that. We work with lawyers and law firms to enhance and perfect their digital brands online using social media strategies and video marketing strategies.

[00:03:10] Michelle Calcote King: I love that. I follow some of your videos. We do the same thing. We like to walk the talk and really do what we do for our clients for ourselves and when people ask me how we've grown, I say, "Well we do the same kind of marketing that we do for our clients," and that's really built our reputation and helped us grow, but I think you do a really good job of that. I followed you on LinkedIn for a while and your videos are especially very good. I know the law is a more conservative industry, but the way people communicate is very much so driven by a lot of these kind of trends from TikTok and things like that. My employees forced me to get on TikTok and to learn the styles more and understand, you know, cause videos are really kind of taking over social media. So yeah, love that. 

So let's talk about AI tools. I know AI has been around for a while, right. And I think that was a point you made in your presentation. This stuff isn't new. It's actually, you know, being more and more incorporated, but it sort of feels like it came out of nowhere this year. How are you seeing the industry take on AI? What have been the reactions you're seeing?

[00:04:11] Jessica Aries: Well, I think like anything new, there's always a lot of fear, a lot of trepidation. Like, "Am I going to get myself into trouble with my bar license?" I mean, I actually have people who ask me, "Do you write policies for firms?" And I'm like, "Actually, I try to avoid that," just because I worry about the risk of it looking in some way, shape or form in the future like I'm giving some sort of legal advice. So I'm very cognizant of the fact that in our industry in particular we have to be careful on what we're adopting and what we're taking on and how we're using client data, how we're using firm data. For me in particular, I really wanted to explore just how we internally in my agency could better leverage AI because I saw a huge opportunity. But beyond that, I saw the kind of evolution. I had played around with some of the tools that were predecessors to ChatGPT before. I'm blanking on the one right now that I use the most, but I had played with a lot of them before, had seen how some of them were--

[00:05:04] Michelle Calcote King: Like Jasper? 

[00:05:05] Jessica Aries: Yes, Jasper I had played with! I saw kind of how it worked, where it had issues. And so when ChatGPT launched, which I think is really what most people think of GenAI now. Their first immediate response is ChatGPT and that's because when it became available to us, it was like taking that functionality of Jasper and giving it to us all for free. So for us, a lot of it was me trying to understand and kind of break it. I'm one of those people I love to play with it until I break it. So it was kind of challenging. What could I put into it? What would it give me back? What kind of prompts resulted in the best responses? And then how far could I take it? So I think that's where firms in particular haven't yet tested it as much and someone like me who loves to break it first is probably kind of refreshing to them to say, "Hey, I've already broken it. Here's the boundaries. Here's the pitfalls. Here's the things you don't want to step in and here's the ways to protect yourself from that." 

That's really how I got into it and how I've approached it. And the way I'm seeing people in the industry now look at it is they are really wanting to understand what it can do for them, how it can impact their existing workflows, especially now that some of the kinks are getting worked out. As well as they better understand the terms of service, they better understand what kind of information they should and shouldn't be putting into it. As well as there's new tools and new advancements and even the different tiers of offerings that now allow for you to keep some of that information that would be confidential, truly confidential.

There's this evolution I think right now of firms now being more interested in it and wanting to understand how they can leverage it, knowing that they don't have to jeopardize their bar license to use it. 

[00:06:42] Michelle Calcote King: I do want to get into the risks, but let's start with the opportunities.

What are the best opportunities for law firms and their marketing professionals with AI? What can AI do for them? 

[00:06:53] Jessica Aries: Well, streamline a lot of the work we used to do in our marketing departments. I came from in-house in a marketing department where I always felt like there was more work than there was time to do all of the work. You could literally work 12-hour days and still never be done because there was another lawyer who needed your help with something. And so where I see the biggest opportunity is taking those things that are huge time sucks from our day and simplifying them. Something as simple as I have a client alert that's going out via email, I can simplify the process of creating the social media post that's going to go, the subject line, the lead in to the actual article of the client alert that I might post on our blog or somewhere else. All of that can be simplified and leveraged with ChatGPT to just make things easier and speed up that process. 

But then beyond that, I think it's a great auditing tool, especially when you're asked to create a new campaign or a new idea for, let's say an office launch or the opportunity of a new industry group that's joining your firm. You can use it as a great brainstorming tool and just something to kind of verify that you didn't miss anything. It's a great way for you as a great marketer to just enhance what you're already doing. So I think there's just a lot of opportunities there, but I do like to say, too, the one negative drawback of ChatGPT or using something like that is you really have to already have those marketing skills before you start using it, because I think it amplifies the good or the bad. So if you're a great marketer, it's going to amplify that you're a great marketer. If you're not a strong marketer, it's going to amplify the fact that you don't really know your stuff. And so you've really got to spend that time honing those skills to be a great marketer first before you can really use the tool to its full advantage. That's how I'm seeing firms really leverage it and I'm seeing the great marketers get even better using it. 

[00:08:46] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, it's interesting when it first came on the scene, everyone had this like immediate fear that it would replace them, you know? And I sort of likened it to — cause I'm old enough to remember, you know, when social media came on the scene and Google and I was working back before there was an Internet — and it really just is an evolution in our work and learning how to use the tools available to us to be better at what we're already doing. I mean, surely it will replace some of those very mundane tasks that, honestly, most of us graduate out of and we're going to skip that level now. So absolutely. 

Let's look at best practices when using AI. In your presentation, you kind of went through a case study and you actually had AI ask you questions. I loved that thought. But let's talk in general, best practices for using AI in your day-to-day work. 

[00:09:38] Jessica Aries: My first best practice is to give AI a job. So before you sit down and just start asking it questions, I think it's important to tell the robot who it's supposed to be because sometimes we sit down and we'll just write a question to it and so it's going to pull from all over, you know, it's database of language when it responds and sometimes that's when you get the worst responses. So if you can help the robot understand what role it's supposed to be playing in this conversation, that helps you a lot. So I love to start with saying like, "Hey, you're a marketing expert at a law firm." So you're not just a marketing expert in e-comm. You're now a marketing expert at a law firm. And I think helping it set the stage of understanding what role it's supposed to play. 

And then I, as you mentioned, like to have it ask me questions about me or my business or my client or whoever I'm trying to solve the problem for. And that's where I think you really get into understanding do you know enough information as a marketer to really utilize this tool? Because it's going to ask questions like, "Who is your target audience? What geography are you trying to target? What are their pain points? What are the issues? What are the objections they have when they're talking to you in a consultation?" And I think as marketers, we don't always have access to all of that information unless we go back to the lawyers and say, "Hey, so what were the objections that someone gave you the last time you pitched them in a meeting? What were their reasons why they didn't hire you?" And that makes you actually be a better marketer to say, "Why haven't I ever asked these questions before and thought about that when creating content or when creating messaging for our firm?”

[00:11:12] Michelle Calcote King: I'm a big fan of being a good questioner. I did a lot of speaking for a while on the art of knowledge extraction because I do think that is a critical role as a marketer because we can't know what we don't know. Being good at drawing out the right information is a skill. A lot of people on my team are former journalists. And I find that a really important skill. So being able to utilize AI to help with that, to help that process is a really cool functionality. 

Well, let's talk about risks. We talked about best practices. What are those things to avoid and risks to be aware of?

[00:11:44] Jessica Aries: Anytime you're putting anything confidential into something that has a terms of service that says it's discoverable: Red flag. Like anyone who's worked in legal marketing long enough, that's a red flag, right? Understanding the terms of service of anything that you're using. Making sure you understand who owns the IP rights of the output, that's an important part, too. I did IT and privacy law. As someone who worked in that area, privacy, is a huge concern too, right? Are you putting information in there that's private information that shouldn't be shared? Names of clients? Beyond just confidential, but also things that your clients wouldn't want you to have put into something that's discoverable, for whatever reason. So there's a lot of risks in that sense and so I think having a good understanding of what should be put into the tool, what's allowable, what's not allowable, but then beyond that, also just using your brain, right? If you wouldn't broadcast it across social media, then you probably shouldn't be broadcasting it within ChatGPT, especially if you're using the free version. If you don't have the enterprise version, or you're not using one of the other tools that's a closed system. 

I know a lot of firms right now are building their own systems for that exact reason, or using tools like I heard of one called Claude that's more closed. Those are ones that, from my understanding, have that ability to kind of protect that data. So if you're wanting to use some of these tools and you're not ready to pay for the enterprise level of ChatGPT to have that production, maybe look at some of those like Claude or even building your own or partnering with someone who already has built one that will close it down for you. 

[00:13:15] Michelle Calcote King: And can you talk a little bit about the fact that they are basically watermarking any content created by ChatGPT? What does that mean? 

[00:13:23] Jessica Aries: I actually saw that that first came to light in an article I was reading-- so we write a monthly newsletter that talks about the latest things that are happening in social and digital media and marketing. And I saw a New York Times article that was talking about how these systems, they are created by a library of content that's uploaded into them and then digested, basically, and spit out. Well, that content has to be written by humans. And so the system doesn't want to have, you know, the people who created ChatGPT OpenAI, they do not want their system to be filled with AI-generated content. So what they're doing is they're watermarking the outputs that they're putting. They're putting the words in a certain order to be able to scan and be able to see, "Okay, this is AI-generated content," so they don't input back into the system content that was GenAI created. They have to preserve the integrity of their systems. 

And so, you have to be really careful of representing that this content is something I wrote and is my intellectual property and yada yada yada without realizing that this is happening on the back end. They are watermarking this data, they are using it, certain word structures, so that it signifies to the system that that is not something that's human written, and thus doesn't corrupt their system; and could be used later in the future, it wouldn't surprise me if there's tools to be able to scan and tell us, then everyone, all of us, and out you, if you're claiming something's written by you, and is really AI-generated.

[00:14:52] Michelle Calcote King: Fascinating. Which has implications then for copyright, I would assume. 

[00:14:56] Jessica Aries: Oh, yeah. Copyright. Also, if you're claiming you're not using GenAI with your client's work, and you are, big, huge issue there. Your privacy policies, too. And, "Hello, privacy lawyer over here," is always very conscious of what you're saying your policy is and then how you're actually executing your workload. So you have to be really careful with all of those areas. 

[00:15:20] Michelle Calcote King: So let's talk tools. What are some of your favorite tools that you recommend? So let's say you're a marketer at a law firm and you really haven't gotten into AI yet and you want to improve your workflow. What would be some of the tools you'd recommend they check out?

[00:15:35] Jessica Aries: Well, so I always recommend that if you're a marketer working in-house, you ask if you're, first of all, allowed to use any firm data when creating marketing materials. If there's a policy, follow that. 

Beyond that, if your firm's very strict and is like, "You can't use ChatGPT at all," then that's where I'd say, go to your personal profiles and things like LinkedIn and experiment with tools like ChatGPT. You know, test it out when writing your own LinkedIn bio and see what it gives you. Test it out with writing some LinkedIn posts to see what the outputs look like. Things like that. 

If your firm allows you to use firm data, then there's a lot of different tools I would recommend playing with. The first one, obviously ChatGPT, which is the most popular, but I do recommend upgrading to ChatGPT-4. The outputs are so much better and it has a much larger memory. What that means is it can iterate on itself. You can have it ask you those questions, you can respond to those questions. It will recall what you had said in response to those so that you can get a better response in the iterations of your inputs and outputs. Which if you haven't used ChatGPT, go play with it so you can understand what I mean by that. It basically responds like you're chatting with someone. And so if you want a more sophisticated output, ChatGPT-4 has a better memory to be able to actually give you better outputs. 

Beyond that, the other tools that I'm really loving, I love AI for data. So I'm a big user of wanting to analyze data and slice and dice it in different ways and I used to be one of those people who sat for long periods of time in pivot tables, slicing and dicing data to better understand what strategies are working for my clients, what aren't. And even the reporting that I'd get from some really advanced tools was never enough for me, so that's where something like ChatGPT with its plugin with I think it's code interpreter* will allow you to upload data and slice and dice it in different ways. So ChatGPT for sure.

Beyond that, we do a ton of video content. So I'm using a lot of video tools like Video.ai is my favorite by far. If you have, you know, a lawyer who makes a lot of webinars and you want to slice and dice them into smaller snippets that can be used on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on wherever, whatever platform you want to put them on, Video.ai is my, my favorite tool. It'll add captions, it'll highlight the places that are, you know, best for potential engagement for you. So that's a tool I really love.

And we use Descript a lot as well because we do so much video editing. 

[00:18:08] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah we use that for our podcast and video as well. Yep. 

[00:18:11] Jessica Aries: It's just so easy and it basically takes your video content and makes it like a Word document. And so you can edit your video content like a Word document whereas before having to open something like Adobe Premiere-- I mean, I have a multimedia design team that would do that, but it's still, like, just the opening of the application itself is a heavy lift on your computer. So to be able to use something like Descript is really the way to go if you're trying to edit and can even help do voiceovers and things like that. Those are some of my favorite tools and tools that I probably use every single-- actually I use them every single day in some way, shape or form, even though I'm not supposed to be editing my own videos, I'm always like, "Oh! I just want to adjust this." 

[00:18:51] Michelle Calcote King: Right. You mentioned one that I played +around with, which I loved. I think it's called Crystal AI. I love personality tests and assessment. I just find them fascinating. And I stumbled upon Crystal a couple of years ago and just ran it on friends and a few of my employees and the accuracy was scary. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

[00:19:11] Jessica Aries: Yeah, so that's part of the like LinkedIn tools, the business development side. In that presentation, I tried to think for the marketing and the BD side, cause I also used to work in business development. I actually managed BD tech for a global firm.

And I just remember how I always craved more information. And so, some of the AI tools I had showcased, one was Crystal AI, which basically scans public LinkedIn profiles and gives you a high-level DiSC assessment on that person so you know how to approach communicating with them. If you haven't played with DiSC, anyone here who's like, "What's a DiSC assessment?" It's basically a personality assessment that will tell you how to have better conversations, what kind of information is going to resonate with people when you're talking to them. I'm a very visual person, so it always comes back with all these cues that when you're talking to me, visuals work better. But for others, it might be data, or it might be, you know, paragraphs, or it might be case studies. So tools like Crystal give you insights into the people who you're potentially pitching, which is very powerful.

 Another tool that I love and use almost every day that I can't believe I didn't mention already is Taplio, which essentially works with LinkedIn and it's a tool that it has a lot of capabilities, but my favorite lately that it's launched is the ability to create content for you. GenAI-generated LinkedIn posts for you based on your past content. So it scans your past content and suggests different LinkedIn posts to share, and I use that one almost every day for idea generation. Now I do have to edit them. They're not perfect, but it's a great starting point and it saves me a ton of time. And they actually now just released a carousel generator, which is amazing. So if you've written a blog post or something and you don't have a graphic design team or you don't have-- graphic design doesn't have the time to create a carousel post for you, you can take the URL from your blog post, your article, whatever it is, and paste it into Taplio and it will generate a carousel post for you in your brand colors instantly, and then upload it to LinkedIn for you. It's crazy. 

[00:21:13] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, that's wild. I remember Taplio from your presentation, especially the carousel functionality. That's fantastic. 

Well, this has been fantastic. Is there any final thought around AI that you'd like to leave our listeners with? 

[00:21:29] Jessica Aries: I think my biggest reminder and the thing that I actually started the presentation off with that you attended, but the thing that I'm becoming most known for is saying that AI is like makeup and the sense that it should enhance what you have. It shouldn't cover it up. So remember that AI is going to amplify the type of marketer you are, going to amplify the type of lawyer you are. So if you're one who's going to cut corners, it's going to really exacerbate that. But if you're someone who's really going to push the tool and challenge the tool, it's going to amplify that, too, and make you a better marketer. So use it to enhance what you're doing. Use it to enhance what you're doing in your legal work. And, you know, don't fall afoul of any of those confidentiality rules for your firm or those privacy rules for your clients. 

[00:22:15] Michelle Calcote King: So we've been talking to Jessica Aries of By Aries. So if people wanted to get in touch with you and learn more, where's the best place for them to go? 

[00:22:22] Jessica Aries: Well, I'm always on LinkedIn, I feel like every day. So please reach out via LinkedIn or my website's a great place. You can find my TikTok there, my reels, all my video content and YouTube is another great place. I make long form videos there, too, on different topics. So if you're someone who really likes to get gritty and digest a topic in full, check out our YouTube channel. That's @ByAries marketing. 

[00:22:43] Michelle Calcote King: Thank you so much. 

[00:22:45] Jessica Aries: Thank you.

[00:22:45]: Thanks for listening to Spill the Ink, a podcast by Reputation Ink. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click "Subscribe" to get future episodes.