LJN Newsletters

This article provides the best practices that have held up across three decades, the four facts that explain why they work, and the few things that genuinely are different now.

Many firms still involve marketing only after key AI decisions have been made, when leadership needs a press release, website copy or new language for an RFP. By then, the CMO isn’t shaping the firm’s AI strategy; they are narrating it. That’s a missed business opportunity, and the window is closing fast.

A partner asking for a deck is not asking for a deck. They are trying to solve a problem they may not have articulated, sometimes not even to themselves. Your job is not to fill their hands. It is to help them win. Those are different objectives, and confusing them is why so much pitch output is generic, forgettable and ignored.

Law firms often think of brand messaging as the language on the current website or in the latest pitch deck. Prospective clients, recruits, journalists, search engines and AI systems don’t see such neat boundaries. They see what’s available. Your newest message is always competing with your oldest accessible content.

The work a law firm does to understand its AI exposure, readiness, and strategic opportunities should not remain an internal exercise. It can — and should — inform how the firm competes, governs and differentiates itself, and plans for the future. As it happens, clients really do care about those things.

Law firms are racing for position in the new world of answer engine optimization (AEO) and AI-generated search. One of the most important tools in that race is something many law firm marketers may not have heard of: schema. Schema is standardized code added to a website to help search engines and AI systems understand what the information on a page means and how it relates to information elsewhere on the site.

A federal appeals court said Jack Daniel’s can’t stop the maker of the “Bad Spaniels” dog toy from selling the bottle-shaped parody, ruling the whiskey maker failed to show the toy was likely to tarnish its famous trademarks.

The Supreme Court recently granted certiorari in RiseandShine Corp. v. PepsiCo, Inc., a trademark dispute that presents a question with potentially significant implications for trademark litigation: whether a trademark’s inherent strength is a question of fact for a jury or a question of law for a court.