Top AI Tools for Lawyer Marketers

If you’re a lawyer or marketing professional charged with marketing your law firm, check out these top AI tools for lawyer marketers in 2024.

You are probably experimenting with Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot or Claude for marketing and writing tasks — whether for article outlines, keyword research, topic ideas, headline ideas or summarizing long content for social media posts.

But GenAi tools can do a lot more for you.

At the Marketing AI Institute’s recent AI for Writers Summit, speakers demonstrated several wow-worthy tools that focus on streamlining and improving specific marketing and content writing tasks. Here are a few tools to consider adding to your law firm’s marketing tech stack.

Perplexity for Search and Research

Perplexity is getting a lot of love from the tech world as investors rally around the potential Google competitor. Whether it can replace Google as your go-to search tool is another article (this one). For my money ($20 a month), Perplexity has enormous potential. Unlike some other search and GenAI tools, Perplexity returns coherent, precisely targeted results with embedded footnotes that link directly to a sidebar of research sources. You can even open up a sidebar that lists all of the sources and links. (Of course, it’s up to you to determine whether you trust them.) And you don’t have to be a prompt engineer to use it — your garden-variety search query works fine. (Perplexity will ask you questions to refine the query as you go).

The quality of Perplexity’s search results is scary good and blazing fast.

The AI Marketing Institute’s Mike Kaput says he uses Perplexity to fill in gaps in his writing and research, for example, when he needs a specific example, a case study, or any type of statistic. “I genuinely find that it produces better quality results at about 10 times the speed of traditional Google search,” says Kaput.

Here is the first result the free version of Perplexity served up when asked to help with a writing assignment. The main sources are highlighted above the answer, and I’ve circled a footnote:

The free version uses enhanced GPT-3.5 and allows a limited number of search sessions and conversations (called threads) with shorter answers. The pro version pulls from multiple sources — Claude 3, GPT-4, and Mistral Large. Usage is basically unlimited and the responses are longer and include updated real-time information.

Another nice feature: By default your threads stay private, though you can share the links with collaborators. Even when you flip the switch to public, nobody can see your thread until you actually share it. And Perplexity will not use your data to train itself unless you agree.

Agora Pulse is a social media management platform that allows you to schedule social media posts across different social media sites — not so different from similar tools. Agora Pulse also tracks your performance with deep reporting capabilities to help you tweak your strategy and improve results. But the killer feature is Agora Pulse’s Writing Assistant, which uses GenAI to help you write and edit posts so they are more engaging for your specific audience and in keeping with your brand. You can ask it to write a post for you, or write one yourself, and then ask Agora Pulse to rewrite in different tones and formats, says Kaput. For example, you can ask it to make your post funnier or more engaging or more assertive. Once you’re done editing for tone, Agora Pulse can lengthen or shorten posts based on the platforms you will be posting to.

Writing Assistant by Agorapulse

Agora Pulse is free with limited features. The paid versions include reporting features with Google Analytics integration, AI writing tools with Canva integration for generating images, commenting tools, and shared calendars for teams.

While you can cobble together a similar social media workflow using other tools — including Chat GPT and other GenAI tools to write social media posts — but using Agora Pulse saves time creating, posting and especially reporting results. And using those features will likely lead to better results. Keep in mind that branding and authenticity will become increasingly important as GenAi platforms become more pervasive. Agora Pulse isn’t cheap, but even the enterprise plan costs less than similar social media management platforms.

For a primer on ways AI can be used for social media management, here’s a good post from the AI Marketing Institute on AI in Social Media.

Descript for Video and Podcast Production

Descript is a one-stop solution for producing podcasts and videos with easy-to-use editing and transcription features. Editing tools allow you to delete filler words, sentences and whole sections on a platform that looks like a normal document, as well as overdub and regenerate audio to smooth out awkward passages. The Studio Sound feature can level out voices and remove background noise, so you can enhance audio quality (say, when presenters are in separate places). In addition, you can replace video backgrounds, add captions and create promotional clips.

Plans are available for individuals and teams at $12 and $24 per month respectively. Features include transcription hours and remote recording hours (up to 30 hours each depending on the plan), video export in various resolutions, filler word removal, AI voice-to-text (which you can train on your own voice for intros or captions, for example), Studio Sound, a stock library of royalty free images, and — this is weirdly cool — “AI eye contact.” This feature corrects the video to make it seem as if you are looking at the camera (and not a teleprompter or somewhere else).

There are dozens more AI tools for marketing and more debut every day. Check back often for updates to this post. Meantime, here are a few other tools to add to your legal marketing tech stack.

Rasa.io for Automatic Email Newsletters

Rasa.io curates and writes newsletters for you automatically. You provide guidelines on topics to cover and point to the sources you trust — websites, publications, and blogs, for example — and rasa automatically generates a newsletter for you to approve and send to your clients or subscribers. Killer features: Rasa can hyper-personalize your newsletter to each recipient’s preferences by tracking their engagement. Over time, Rasa gets better and better at tailoring the newsletter, which leads to better email engagement and open rates. Pricing ranges from $190 to $490 per month.

Grammarly and Hemingway Editor Plus for Polishing Your Writing

Grammarly and Hemingway have been around for a few years but have recently upped their game. Grammarly uses AI to automatically edit your content for grammar, style and tone and has recently added writing tools. You simply add the Grammarly plug-in to tools you use every day, like Google Docs, or paste your text into the Grammarly app and it will flag typos, errors, and sentences it thinks you can improve for clarity or tone. Basic Grammarly is free and the paid pro plans start at approximately $12 per seat per month.

Mike Kaput recommends combining Grammarly with Hemingway Editor Plus. Hemingway reviews your writing and suggests how to rewrite it to be clear and to cater to a certain reading level.

“This is a major writing hack in my own work,” says Kaput. “If you use Hemingway consistently on your writing you’re going to produce much better work that is very punchy, clear and compelling.”

You can either drop your text into the Hemingway editor to identify wordy or complex sentences that need simplifying or highlight passages you know need help. You can rewrite sentences yourself or ask Hemingway for help.

Check back — we’ll be updating this post with more AI marketing tools.

MAICON is Coming to Cleveland

Thanks to the Marketing AI Institute for providing free and paid educational events like the Writer’s Summit. September 10-12, the Institute will present its annual Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference, MAICON, in Cleveland. It’s a great way to stay on top of new developments!