The Legal Market Intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Business Development, and Measurable Growth

Artificial intelligence is impacting how lawyers market themselves and grow their practice. However, it’s wise to first consider if and how AI tactics can fulfill business development strategies that convert to achieving a measurable growth objective.

The hype around artificial intelligence is stimulating a fear factor bordering almost on hysteria for many lawyers and their law firms who are fixating on it more than any other concern in the modern global legal services market.

While fear can be understandable, mostly because for many the benefits of AI remain somewhat murky, we need to grasp the reality that AI is a tool that, right now, is within our control.

Many law firms and lawyers have been employing AI to execute rote, task-based legal work that traditionally has fallen within a practitioner’s working domain. While off-loading rote work and tasks to artificial intelligence tools opens capacity to higher level work that is more meaningful and valuable to both the client and legal practitioner, AI does not replace valuable human traits – the three E’s: expertise, experience, and empathy – that help earn a professional, legal or otherwise, a reputation as a trusted advisor.

This is why before using AI as a tactical tool, we’re smart to consider the strategy-to-objective components that enable measurable business growth.

The AI Fear Factor

Anyone who has worked extensively with lawyers knows that to get their attention, all you have to do is scare them with risk. This is because risk is more than a four-letter word; it’s a perceived threat and a major component of the fear frenzy around AI.

But here’s the thing: AI is a tool best employed as and when needed to execute a tactic.

A tactic is an action that when executed within a specific time frame supports a strategy. A strategy is one of a series of interlocking decisions that support a measurable objective. Think Objective-Strategies-Tactics tiered as a pyramid.*

Most lawyers I know tend to be tactic- or task-oriented, ticking off to-do items with a goal of getting things done. While this is all well and good, being task-oriented – and often control-oriented – can lead to treating AI as though it’s an assistant or tackling it like an opponent. It’s neither. It’s a tool. It doesn’t care what you think or how you feel. It can help get things done and best of all, if or until AI takes on a life of its own as Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, a Professor Emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto warned in his acceptance speech for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, you can tell it what to do.

Tooling Around

Once upon a time, tools of legal and many other businesses, included telephones, dictaphones, and typewriters. Then along came photocopiers, which manifested in a cottage industry of eye-wateringly priced, so called business-related disbursements that in my opinion qualified as extortion. The advent of the fax machine that enabled speed, trimmed some but not all of the fat from those juicy disbursements.

Fast-forward to our digital world where we can work wirelessly from anywhere using a computer that often fits in our pocket. While this can be beneficial to both a practitioner and client, oftentimes digital assets designed to enable convenience and delegation can result in hit-and-miss consequences.

The Hit and Miss of AI

Take, for example, AI-enabled chatbots used for client intake. Chatbots can triage prospective clients, collect preliminary information, and route inquiries to appropriate legal talent. Chatbots are allegedly designed to do two things: 1. Improve a client’s experience; and 2. Accelerate a law firm’s response time while weeding out timewasters and tire-kickers.

But let’s call a spade a shovel: A chatbot is a lawyer-oriented tactic because it’s geared to support the strategy of handling only those matters that sit dead-centre within one’s professional wheelhouse with work supplied by targeted clients qualified to pay for it, and cull everything and everyone else. Doing so supports a growth objective of increasing revenue and annual profit by fill-in-the-blank per cent.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this as a tactic supporting a strategy that converts to an objective for a lawyer or law firm. In fact, I endorse it.

However, using a chatbot as a business development tactic can backfire and even cause reputational damage because it provides precious little benefit to a prospective client since, due to its artificiality, a chatbot is cold, imperfect, not nuanced, often frustrating, and makes a potential client do all the work from the outset.

Silence of the Chatbot

This was the finding of a few testers who I asked to try out chatbots on websites of a handful of law firms some time ago. They filled in forms, hit send, received confirmation that their query was accepted, and then were met with silence. The upshot was that these testers who were prospective clients with work relevant to these firms were disappointed, made disparaging remarks about them solely on the basis on the non-response, and took their business elsewhere.

While this may have been the best solution for these prospective clients, it may not have been the best outcome for the firms. But we’ll never know because they didn’t respond or take the time to learn more about the nuances of these clients’ needs.

This is an instance where silence isn’t always golden and AI-delegation can cause extrapolated and even compounded loss, including: 1. Loss of potential business that may or may not be within your wheelhouse, and 2. Losing an opportunity to be a valuable connector who introduces a client in the time-proven pay-it-forward tactic of a referral that supports a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats strategy that tends to convert to the objective of business growth, which due to reciprocity usually includes one’s own.

Legal Service Remains a People Business

I expect this issue is symptomatic of my observation that “growth mindset” is evoking a narrow scope pertaining to growth of an individual or firm rather than growth for the greater legal community and good.

This behaviour may be due to fearfulness referred to earlier, which can morph into a notion that AI will replace lawyers – it will replace some, for sure – and cause an acceleration of production speed that will undermine the billable hour – fingers crossed. Still, I don’t think efficiency pertaining to AI and its adoption should be an all-encompassing fret factor as long as legal service remains a people business.

Yes, AI can help lawyers to be perceived as knowledge experts by generating marketing content for blog posts, newsletters, and social media platforms. However, AI has its own voice, and its voice is not yours.

This is why it’s best to use AI to research and support your ideas, and write in your own words to retain and project your own voice, thoughts, tone, and personality.

The Personal Touch

Marketing is about continuing to build profile within your chosen market. Business development is about nurturing relationships with people in your chosen market whether or not they have work for you, support your endeavours, or applaud your contributions.

Both marketing and business development enable market positioning that provides a foundation for growth within your chosen field by honouring relationships that are crucial elements of your community, both professional and personal.

And all of it hinges on human values of thoughtful listening, insightful questioning, understanding, and empathy.

While AI may have computational “thinking type” functions, it comes by its name honestly. It has an ever-increasing degree of intelligence as a result of learning by human input, but it remains artificial and has yet to have a heart.

Until it does, the curses and blessings of our humanity and enormous range of distinctive and individualized personality traits that span from curiosity and compassion to humour and perspective, and intuition and imagination remain our superpowers.

* My Objective-Strategies-Tactics Pyramid is a no-fail business, markets, and management tool that I have used in many circumstances and industries over the last 35 years because it works every time. I will be writing about it shortly. Watch this space.

This article appeared on Slaw, September 2025.