Michael Idinopulos, co-founder at MyMai – a generative AI-powered business development platform for professional services firms – is a headline speaker at the Law Firm Marketing Summit in London in October. In this Q&A, the former senior McKinsey & Company executive discusses the opportunities for firms to embrace AI across their marketing and business development teams and the impact it can have on client growth.

How should law firm marketing and business development teams approach the use of generative AI?

“Everyone’s experimenting with ChatGPT for content creation: blog posts, social media and so on. That’s cool and fun, but ChatGPT doesn’t know enough to be super useful. It’s like a smart, eager new marketing intern who reports for work with no training, no experience of your business, and no idea who your clients are. Not great. But when you teach generative AI (GenAI) how legal marketing and BD work, and when you infuse it with data about your clients, relationships, interactions, insights and experts, it becomes a game-changer.”

What areas of the marketing and BD process should law firms be using GenAI?

The big opportunity with GenAI is the holy grail of all marketing: one-to-one client engagement at scale. The best marketing engages a client on the topics that matter most to that client right now. That’s a challenge because every client is worried about something different: a law suit, a reorg, a CEO transition, a merger, whatever it may be. BD teams are really good at tailoring the message to the client. They know their clients, they follow the news, and they meticulously craft emails that will resonate. But it’s a manual process that doesn’t scale. With GenAI, we can automate that process. CMOs are under pressure to deliver more impact but they aren’t getting more headcount. GenAI is a way out of that dilemma.

What areas of marketing and BD are not appropriate for GenAI?

My answer may surprise you: content creation. When Firms A, B, and C all use the same AI bots to churn out ‘insights’ on the same topics, they all sound the same. Clients tune them out and everyone loses. Real insights come from experts, not from AI. AI’s true value is on the distribution side. It allows you to deliver those insights to the right clients at the right moment with the right context to cut through the noise.

What are some of the risks and challenges firms face when using this technology?

Data, data, data. First, there’s data quality – the quality of your CRM data, relationship data, finance data and so on. As the saying goes: garbage in, garbage out. Second, there’s data access. Which colleagues are allowed to see what data, and how do you make sure no one is exposed to data they’re not authorised to see? Finally, there’s data integration: connecting the plumbing across systems to generate a complete view of your clients, your relationships and your firm’s assets. These challenges are manageable, but they’re still challenges.

What are the potential benefits of using AI for marketing campaigns?

This is all about growth. More client outreach means more mindshare, more client conversations, more meetings, more opportunities. Specifically, it means opportunities to expand a firm’s footprint within current clients. Most firms don’t need more clients. What they need is more contact with different parts of the business so they can serve a client in three or four areas rather than one or two. Generative AI can make that happen.

How will the adoption of AI change the law firm marketing and BD function in the long run?

We’ll see a much more tech- and data-enabled function that punches above its traditional weight by driving firm growth through opportunity generation. It’s not going to be more people but it’s also not going to be fewer people, either. It’s the same marketing and BD teams delivering three to five times the impact because they’ve traded in their hand tools for power tools.

Michael Idinopulos is speaking at the Law Firm Marketing Summit, which is co-hosted by GLP and takes place on 15 October at RSA House in London. Click here to read the agenda and here to book a delegate place. For sponsorship enquiries email [email protected].