AI as an Accelerant: Tools Helping Legal Marketing Teams Compete Smarter

[00:00:00] Jennifer Scotton: I’m going to say you don’t need to be an expert in AI or emerging technology to start. What you do need is curiosity, a willingness to experiment and a clear sense of what matters most to your team and your clients.

[00:00:22] Announcer: 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.

[00:00:39] Michelle Calcote King: Hi 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 thought leadership marketing agency for B2B professional services firms, including law firms. To learn more, go to RepInk.com. So we’re going to talk about AI today, and I know AI’s been the topic of much discussion over the last year, and in many ways it’s becoming the great equalizer, which is really exciting. Small and midsize law firms are discovering that with the right AI tools, they can deliver sophisticated marketing that rivals their larger competitors. I’m joined today by Jennifer Scotton to discuss the AI tools legal marketers can use to compete with firms many times their size. Jennifer is the chief marketing officer at Constangy, a nationally recognized law firm with attorneys across 21 states. She’s also a registered corporate coach and a DISC-certified practitioner. She has 20 years of legal marketing and has over a decade of leadership with the Legal Marketing Association at many levels. She brings deep industry insight and a passion for innovation to the podcast today. So thank you for joining me.

[00:01:53] Jennifer Scotton: Thank you so much for having me, Michelle. I appreciate it.

[00:01:56] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. I’m really excited to talk about this. But before diving in to all things AI, tell me a little bit about yourself and your firm.

[00:02:04] Jennifer Scotton: Sure. Well, first and foremost, I just wanted to tell you, I really admire what you and your team have done here with the Spill the Ink podcast. Thank you so much for having me again. But I also know that lots of people can tend to start podcasts but not keep them going, and the really hard part is continuing to move forward. So thank you. Well done on that and your wonderful team. Well, as you mentioned, I’ve been in legal marketing for 20 years or so. And my career has really focused on the intersection of marketing and communications and business development and technology. What really lights me up is when I am working with a firm where I can innovate, and innovation in all forms makes me really excited. So in my role at Constangy, I have led an amazing team and continue to lead that supports all of our marketing and business development activities and our strategy and helping our lawyers look good everywhere that we possibly can. And that’s my aim, really, is to always help position our lawyers in a way that presents their expertise in the best light and creates efficiencies for them and innovates their practice. So lots of innovation focus there.

[00:03:24] Michelle Calcote King: Love it. Yeah, that’s great. And I love how we are framing this discussion around AI and how it’s helping firms compete with firms that may have a much bigger budget, bigger marketing teams. The fact that it’s kind of the great equalizer is I’ve found really true. So tell me a little bit about your experience implementing AI at your firm.

[00:03:47] Jennifer Scotton: Sure. I’ve been very fortunate to work at a firm that has embraced AI and not just embraced AI, but embraced AI very thoughtfully. We have implemented a firmwide AI policy. I was honored to be involved in that process and help shape that to cover various facets, not just the legal side, but just ensuring that we are using it ethically, responsibly across the board. And I personally view AI not as a replacement for people or the things that we do, or what we bring as legal marketers, but as an accelerant, particularly for those firms that have a small marketing team. Because it really just extends our human expertise and it makes us more efficient, and we have explored AI across a range of different functions. I think content generation is always the example that you hear, but also for brainstorming, having it act as your creative collaborator coming up with different creative designs. Video production is another one. And also just automating those repetitive tasks that we do that take up time but don’t lead to the ROI. So AI just helps us move faster. But more importantly, it creates space for that higher-value thinking and relationship building. And that’s where we see the real ROI on my team.

[00:05:15] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, I love that. So where do you think AI, how do you think it’s, what are some of your predictions for how AI’s going to shape legal marketing? There’s a lot of talk about how it’s going to shape the practice of law, but how will it shape legal marketing in future years?

[00:05:32] Jennifer Scotton: We are definitely on the cusp of a major shift in how law firms do business, how they operate, and that also accounts for the marketing team. So AI is completely going to be at the center of that transformation, much like email and the internet once reshaped our industry. AI is totally redefining the way that we work, communicate and serve our clients. I think that the firms that lean in, that learn how to personalize client experience using AI, streamline their operations and also enhance their marketing output, are going to create a real competitive advantage for themselves. And the ones that continue to resist, and I’m sure you have heard this too, but stories of many firms that are staunchly resisting this and say you can’t use it at all. I think they’re going to find themselves increasingly outpaced. And it’s not just about the tool, the tools itself, but really about that growth mindset. And at the beginning we may have seen clients saying you can’t use it at all. But now we’re seeing a lot of clients saying, how are you going to use AI to help show some more value on my bill?

[00:06:44] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, I know. It’s amazing how quickly that shifted, right? From being scared of using it to show me how you’re using it to make your work better. Yeah. It moves fast. Well, so I know that you recently launched a new website for the firm, and as part of that, you guys developed some custom GPTs. Tell me a little bit about that.

[00:07:05] Jennifer Scotton: Yes. Well, that has really become a go-to resource for us. We use ChatGPT all the time, and I use it as my creative collaborator, not only helping me brainstorm, but telling it, ask me the questions that will help me get to the best answer for me. So when it comes to prompts, the key there is always specificity and context. The more guided you can be with tone, audience, format, intent, the better your results are going to be. And I like to equate that to kind of managing a junior team member. So maybe somebody that’s right out of school, they’re going to do best with clear direction and with feedback about what you do and do not like. So before I tell you about those custom GPTs, there are also, tip for your audience, prompt improver GPTs out there. So if you’re just starting out with ChatGPT or Perplexity or any of the other tools, you can look for a GPT that will teach you how to improve your prompts and it will walk you through how it improved it and why. And I used that constantly as I was first learning on ChatGPT, so that I could always get the best output for myself. And now if I’m not getting the output that I’m exactly seeking, I’ll go back to that prompt improver GPT and say, okay, how do I fix this? So when we were going through our website redesign, we developed a number of custom GPTs that would help us specifically for that. So one that helps structure your metadata in a consistent way across the firm, all of your pages. Commonly, one for brand voice. We wrote another one that was just for attorney bios because we were moving to a new format. So the content was the same. The actual meat of the bio is the same, but the way that we’re formatting it and the way we’re telling that story were slightly varied. So that really helped us make all of that consistent across like 300 bios. That’s super helpful. I can imagine how helpful that would’ve been in previous redesigns of websites. But yeah, that’s been really helpful to us.

[00:09:14] Michelle Calcote King: That is to me a brilliant way of using AI. Because it’s so good at sifting. You’ve already got the meat of the content. You just need it to be slightly different. You need it to go through and analyze large amounts of data. And attorney bios in a big law firm are kind of the obvious thing there. So you’ve talked, you’ve been using ChatGPT. What about some other tools? Because I know that, well, I mean, I’m a heavy user of ChatGPT, but I know that there’s lots out there too that legal marketers can utilize and I’d love to hear your tips on that.

[00:09:51] Jennifer Scotton: Yes. Well, another one that I love to share is Aragon AI. So that is a headshot tool, an AI headshot tool, and for us, Constangy is mainly remote first. We do have several offices that are in office in the traditional sense, but one issue that we were having was we didn’t necessarily have the budget for some of the larger photography studios that come to all your offices and make sure that your photos are all very consistent with lighting and posing and backgrounds and that sort of thing. And so that was a real challenge for us. And using Aragon AI for our headshots has really simplified it and also saved us a lot of money. And the team there is great. They’re building it even further. We’ve worked with them on a number of customizations, but you really only need six to 11 photos of a person and you can upload them and it generates 50, 100 headshots for you to choose from. They actually just implemented a new piece of that tool recently, which is, I think it’s called Remix or something like that. So you can change the outfit. So if you like the way you look in a headshot, you can say, okay, but I would never wear that totally bright pink ensemble. I need you to change that up. And so they can put some other outfits on you or change background or something like that.

[00:11:13] Michelle Calcote King: That’s amazing. Yeah. And it feels like just a year ago that the technology wasn’t that great, but now it’s come so far in such a short period of time. It’s wild.

[00:11:24] Jennifer Scotton: I’m laughing because I like to tell this story whenever I share in my AI presentations. The very first time I did it was probably the fall of ’23, and oh, my photos that it output showed me in, showed one uniform that looked like a Star Trek uniform. Another one, I’m wearing a headset, but I’m just wearing like this part of the headset, so I look like I’m in a NASCAR pit crew or something, but I don’t even have both sides of the headset. And then another was like my face just didn’t look quite right. Yeah. And it was kind of funny. So I kind of like to look back on this and see how far that they have come. But now the background’s on point, the looks, the poses, the clothing, all on point. It’s just amazing how far it’s come so quickly.

[00:12:11] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. And if your attorneys are happy with it, they’re a difficult audience to please when it comes to that kind of thing. So I can imagine it has to be good for that many attorneys to buy in. Yeah. So tell me about what other kinds of tools have you used? I mean, do you have any project management or video? I know there’s so many areas that AI has been revolutionary. What other tools have you used?

[00:12:37] Jennifer Scotton: Yeah, so another tool that we sought out specifically for its AI integration is called ClickUp, and that’s a project management tool. So we actually replaced Basecamp with ClickUp. And what we love about it, we have the, I think it’s called ClickUp Brain AI add-on. It really helps with automating repetitive tasks. It makes inputting tasks so much easier and you can set up drips and campaigns and things like that that really save so much time. It also has like a time-tracking tool and all kinds of stuff already built into it that has simplified our workflow so much.

[00:13:18] Michelle Calcote King: Amazing. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, my team’s looked at ClickUp before, so I know that it’s got powerful tools.

[00:13:24] Jennifer Scotton: Yeah, it can be a little bit overwhelming because there is a lot that it can do, but I just watched a bunch of videos as did other members of my team so that we could set it up in the way that worked best for us.

[00:13:35] Michelle Calcote King: Nice. And do you use that, is that just for your marketing team or is that a firmwide tool, or do you use it just for your team?

[00:13:43] Jennifer Scotton: We use it just for our team specifically.

[00:13:46] Michelle Calcote King: Nice. Yeah, it’s amazing how many in-house marketing teams don’t realize the power of a project management tool. Because often if it’s not implemented across the firm, they don’t realize that they can take it on. We’ve actually worked with clients and help them implement project management tools themselves. So it’s really smart that you’re doing that for your team internally.

[00:14:06] Jennifer Scotton: Yeah. Well, and one of the other things that we wanted to make sure we did was establishing historical knowledge within the project management tool, because I was in a situation when I came in that just the way files have been structured and things like that, it was really hard to find that historical knowledge. And so I wanted to make sure that if I get hit by that proverbial bus or a key member of my team, which, please, no, ever, right? But that we would have that information. We can say, okay, well how did we handle this last year? Or how did we handle this four years ago? So we’ve been very intentional about how we set that up.

[00:14:44] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. Yeah, really smart. Tell me about video, because video’s that other area that I think we’re equally scared of, but also somewhat, there’s, we see a lot of opportunity, and we being marketers in general. So tell me about that.

[00:15:03] Jennifer Scotton: Yeah. Well we found a tool that we’ve been using probably for close to a year now. It’s called OpusClip, and I love that tool because you can take one of your videos, so we use it a lot with webinars and things like that. You upload it into the tool and either it will automatically generate like snackable content from your webinar or your video, whatever that is, or you can say, focus on this certain theme, and it will find all the clips with that certain theme, cut them out, put the captions and everything on them in just like that bite-sized content. And that has been a total game changer for us because video editing can be so tedious. So that’s been really clutch for our team and moving with, especially with a small team, moving forward with more video.

[00:15:50] Michelle Calcote King: Amazing. And then I know you told my producer about Picky. What is that?

[00:15:57] Jennifer Scotton: So that is a tool that is great for turning text content into actual videos. So you can upload your script or your article, your blog posts, whatever, and it can automatically create one for you. Now I will say, I think as most AI, you still have to touch it after, right? Because there’ll be some things that you’re like, oh, well that voiceover sounds a little bit robotic. Or you know, I would change the way it pronounces a word. Constangy is one word that nothing can ever pronounce correctly. So I always have to figure out what exact phonetic spelling I’m going to put in there. And it seems like it’s different every time. You can customize the stock photos that are in there. It has stock photos, it has stock videos. So yeah, it makes it much easier, whereas previously I don’t even, I can’t even imagine how much time it would take to storyboard a video with a script and all that kind of stuff and put it together.

[00:16:54] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah, it’s funny, we’re already like having these war stories internally about how long it used to take us to do certain things versus how long it takes us to do things now, and I know when we’re older, of course I’m already in that age where I can remember when the internet came out, but I know this generation is going to have those —

[00:17:11] Jennifer Scotton: Shut your dirty mouth.

[00:17:12] Michelle Calcote King: Right? Yeah, exactly. I know this generation is going to have this moment of telling younger people, oh, I used to spend hours doing, you know, think about hours sorting through attorney bios and putting them in the right format. So I love hearing that we’re already doing that. So let’s say you’re a legal marketer and you have limited time to explore these tools. Where would you say, and that marketer’s feeling behind, they’re listening to all these amazing things you’re doing, where should they start? What’s that sort of roadmap for getting started?

[00:17:47] Jennifer Scotton: Sure. So I would say with limited time, as I know we all have, be careful that you just start small. You don’t have to adopt everything at once. You don’t have to try all the cool tools or put them all in action all at one time. You’re just going to get more overwhelmed. So I would say start with one key pain point for your team. Figure out what is something that is a huge time suck for you. And then research tools. Try something out, do a little pilot and see how it works for you. See how it improves the time that you would otherwise be losing, and do a little pilot for that. Another good way is to kind of lurk on the LMA message boards because not only can you find out about some good tools there through the chats, but you can see what other firms are doing and what other people are asking about. One common thing I’ve seen is what are you saying about AI in your proposals or what does your AI policy look like? That sort of thing. There’s one more tool–

[00:18:50] Michelle Calcote King: Oh yeah. Let’s hear it.

[00:18:52] Jennifer Scotton: –I wanted to share with you folks.

[00:18:52] Michelle Calcote King: Yes, please.

[00:18:53] Jennifer Scotton: And it’s called There’s An AI for That. And so if you have identified your pain point for your team, say that it is video editing or something like that, you can set up alerts for new video editing tools as they come out and it will send you the tools. But also as you go and look at that tool on their site and figure out, here’s what it does, here’s how the reviews look, it can suggest alternative tools for you that maybe are more established and have more reviews or something like that. So I love that because it is truly doing the work for me in terms of finding new tools and that website is just a wealth of knowledge.

[00:19:35] Michelle Calcote King: Amazing. Yeah. That’s fantastic. That’s really great tips and I sincerely appreciate you being, well, one, being so AI forward and then being willing to share. So if there’s one final thought you’d love to leave our listeners with, what would it be?

[00:19:50] Jennifer Scotton: I’m going to say you don’t need to be an expert in AI or emerging technology to start, especially start using it strategically. What you do need is curiosity, a willingness to experiment and a clear sense of what matters most to your team and your clients. So those tools are going to change and I’ve seen it just in the couple of years we’re finding a new tool all the time and saying, oh my gosh, this saves even more time. Let’s switch to this one. But you have to be very careful not to chase the shiny object. Have the mindset to be adaptable, be client focused. Stay grounded and always focusing on growing and innovating. That’s going to carry you forward. But just start small. Like I said, doesn’t have to be everything at once. Doesn’t have to be flashy. Sometimes the most meaningful change that you can make, especially with AI, is just something that makes your team’s day-to-day things easier.

[00:20:57] Michelle Calcote King: I love that. I love focusing on the use case, the pain point first, and then exploring from there. I think that’s a really great tip. So we’ve been talking today to Jennifer Scotton with Constangy, and thank you so much for your time today.

[00:21:10] Jennifer Scotton: Of course. Thank you so much for having me, Michelle.[00:21:16] Announcer: 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.