We can’t send you updates from Justia Onward without your email.
Unsubscribe at any time.
In an ideal world, lawyers would have the time to do it all, including developing their own legal marketing. Unfortunately, the reality of time constraints in a law practice often kicks marketing to the backseat. Check out this post to learn how AI tools like ChatGPT can help make you more efficient.
For a busy lawyer, time is a limited resource. One of the most challenging parts of being a practicing attorney is simply finding the time to get it all done! When faced with competing deadlines in your cases, a never-ending checklist of things to do, personal commitments, and more, you may find that the time to effectively market your practice simply does not exist.
You are not alone in this situation. Luckily, there are tools to help you succeed and more effectively streamline tasks like your legal marketing efforts. The artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT is making waves for its potential, and that includes helping you get a head start on the task of effectively marketing your practice.
Using ChatGPT to Market Your Practice
Before we move on to prompts, you can learn more about how ChatGPT works, as well as some legal marketing uses, in this recorded video of our previous Justia Webinars presentation on ChatGPT for legal marketing.
ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) AI. It essentially is a very sophisticated version of autocomplete that analyzes its dataset to determine the next most-likely word in response to the prompt you submit. To the average user, it functions like a conversational chatbot with which you can converse. It is free (with an upgraded plan available) and gaining traction every day across various industries. ChatGPT is very easy to use and very powerful, but it does have its limitations. For instance, ChatGPT does not understand legal nuance and may be factually wrong in its response. You should double check anything it writes for factual accuracy, especially on state laws. We showed examples of accuracy issues with ChatGPT in our webinar here.
Despite its limitations, however, ChatGPT can help streamline work for you and your marketing team, leaving you more time to focus on the nuts and bolts of your daily practice.
Crafting Your Prompts
At its core, ChatGPT functions by responding to your user inputs, called prompts. You submit a prompt, and ChatGPT offers a response. You can reply to this response to refine and revise the information, data, and content ChatGPT created.
First, let’s cover what you should always do when using ChatGPT for legal marketing. Namely, letting ChatGPT know your practice, telling ChatGPT the tone of the response you want, and treating ChatGPT as an interactive service.
Give ChatGPT an Overview of Your Law Firm Practice
To effectively leverage ChatGPT and ensure you get the best responses to your prompts, you will want to first give a background of your law firm practice as a prompt. ChatGPT will remember this information as part of the discussion history when it answers later prompts. For example, you might say, “I am a lawyer practicing personal injury law in Los Angeles, focusing on car accidents, truck accidents, and premises liability cases.” ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 have a context history that is currently 4,096 tokens, or approximately 3,000 words, shared between the chat input and output. ChatGPT uses this history when answering later prompts. Because of this limitation, you may need to repeat what your law firm does to keep this information in the last 3000 words so that ChatGPT continues to use this information as context when answering later prompts.
Tell ChatGPT the Tone You Want in Its Response
When generating text that might be used for clients, you should also provide instructions about how you want ChatGPT to respond to your prompts in tone and style. Try telling ChatGPT to provide a concise summary of a common legal issue in client-friendly language.
You can also tell ChatGPT to give the response using certain formats; for example, instead of saying, “Describe the eviction process,” you could tell ChatGPT to offer a bulleted list outlining the steps in the eviction process for a new landlord.
Revise and Expand on Responses
ChatGPT is an interactive service. You can, and in many cases should, ask ChatGPT to revise the content it has drafted for you. For instance, you can prompt ChatGPT to change the tone, length, perspective, etc., or expand on certain points in a previous response. And you can ask ChatGPT to correct responses you find factually incorrect. If ChatGPT has made a mistake, prompt it with this fact and ask it to rewrite its answer. Basically, you can use ChatGPT to refine its own output.
The goal here is to use ChatGPT prompts as a way to make you more efficient in marketing your firm.
List of Prompt Ideas
After our webinar on using ChatGPT for legal marketing, our audience sought additional resources to help them get started on prompt engineering.
We heard these requests and have created this list of initial prompts to help you get started. But remember, you do not have to stick to this list! You should follow these initial prompts up with more prompts to fine-tune the response and tone you are seeking. And, of course, ChatGPT is a tool to help you with your firm goals, but a tool you should never blindly trust.
15 Prompts for Law Firm Marketing
As noted above, you should start with a prompt describing your practice in both terms of subject matter and locality and the tone you would like the responses in. This should be done before sending additional prompts with requests or questions to ChatGPT.
Now on to the list of prompts.
- Provide a list of legal marketing ideas for my {locality} {practice area} law firm. We show what happened when we asked ChatGPT this question in our webinar here.
- What are the most cost-effective legal marketing services?
- List {number} of blog topic ideas for my {locality} {practice area} law firm.
- List the webpages I should have on my {locality} {practice area} law firm website.
- What are the webpage sections I should have for a webpage about {practice area} in {locality}?
- Using {sections}, write a webpage about {topic} in {locality}. You can view how we approached writing a car accident webpage for a Denver personal injury lawyer using ChatGPT in our webinar here.
- Rewrite {this content} for a law firm website focused in {practice area} and based in {locality}.
- Write {number} of law firm name ideas for my {locality} {practice area} law firm.
- Write {number} of taglines for a law firm that values {quality}. You can view some taglines we got when we asked ChatGPT for taglines in our webinar here.
- What are social media post ideas for a {locality} {practice area} law firm?
- Provide SEO ideas for a {locality} {practice area} law firm website. You can view some SEO ideas we got when we asked ChatGPT in our webinar here.
- List target SEO keywords for {locality} {practice area} lawyers. You can view some SEO keywords we got for a car accident page for a Denver personal injury lawyer when we asked ChatGPT in our webinar here.
- Summarize {law or statute} for a new law firm client.
- Draft a script for a YouTube video promoting a {locality} {practice area} law firm.
- What questions should I send my clients to get their feedback on the legal services we provided them?
Hint: The content you input to be rewritten can be your rough draft of a page or your current version of that page. You can also ask it to rewrite the content it drafts in a different way. For instance, rewrite this page in a friendlier tone.
Hint: Think of the qualities your firm wants to emphasize for your potential clients, such as hard-working, tenacity, a track record of success, etc.
Final Thoughts: Why Do You Care?
ChatGPT can help you with legal marketing ideas, as well as produce creative, high-quality content for your clients and potential clients. ChatGPT is a great tool to help you start and effectively scale your legal marketing efforts.
Related Posts
