The legal market intersection of artificial intelligence, business development and measurable growth

Artificial intelligence is impacting how lawyers market themselves and grow their practices. However, it’s wise first to 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—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 the 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. 

So, 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. To lawyers, 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 the 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, 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, the tools of legal and 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, which 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 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: improve a client’s experience and 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 is 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 can even cause reputational damage because it provides precious little benefit to a prospective client. 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 

Such were the findings of a few testers 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 the firms solely on the basis of 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. 

It’s an instance where silence isn’t always golden, and AI-delegation can cause extrapolated and even compounded loss, including: 

• loss of potential business that may or may not be within your wheelhouse; and  

• 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” evokes 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 the 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. 

So 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 the enormous range of distinctive and individualized personality traits, from curiosity and compassion, to humour and perspective, and intuition and imagination, remain our superpowers. 

Heather Suttie is acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authorities on legal market strategy and management of legal services firms. Since 1998, she has advised leaders of premier law firms and legal service providers—Global to Solo | BigLaw to NewLaw—on innovative growth strategies pertaining to business, markets, management, and clients. The result is creation of new value and accelerated performance achieved through a distinctive one-of-one legal market position and sustained competitive advantage leading to greater market share, revenue and profits. 

Heather writes on these issues at heathersuttie.ca and can be reached at heather@heathersuttie.ca 

This article appeared on Slaw, September 2025.