Let’s talk AI tools for legal marketing. Because this is no longer a ‘should we use them?’ conversation. It’s now a question of ‘what AI tools should we be using and how?’ because they are here to stay.
If you are a founder or marketer in legal and you are not yet using AI tools in some capacity, it is worth asking yourself what is holding you back. The tools available are sophisticated; we’re not talking about chatbots, using AI for LinkedIn comments (groan) and the use case now goes way beyond idea generation and content creation.
The data backs this up. Marketing is one of the fastest-moving functions when it comes to AI adoption: according to YouGov’s August 2025 survey of UK SME decision-makers, 53% of marketing teams are already using AI – second only to IT and telecoms. And Salesforce’s State of Marketing 2026 found that 80% of UK marketers have now adopted AI in some form. If you’re not yet among them, the gap is widening.
But alas, not all AI adoption is good AI adoption. In a sector governed by strict regulatory standards, where trust and credibility is paramount and advice carries real consequences, the way you use AI matters. This blog walks you through the practical AI tools that are genuinely useful for legal marketing, the pitfalls to avoid, and the ethical and legal considerations that should shape how you work with them.
Why AI tools matter for legal marketing right now
The case for using AI tools in your legal marketing is not just about efficiency, though of course efficiency is also appealing. The bigger draw should be the quality and consistency of marketing output that becomes possible when you use the right tools well.
For small legal marketing teams and solo in-house marketers, AI tools can mean the difference between a content strategy you actually execute and one that sits ‘gathering dust’ in a downloads folder. If you’re a legal founder doing your own marketing alongside everything else, AI makes it easier than ever to consistently produce and publish content that is genuinely useful.
From a practical perspective, AI tools can help you develop first drafts faster, maintain consistency across channels, and get a solid head start on SEO without immediately needing to bring in external expertise. The productivity gains are substantial: HubSpot’s AI Trends 2026 report found that marketers using AI save an average of 6.1 hours per week, with senior practitioners saving closer to 8–10 hours. For a small team or a solo marketer, that is a meaningful shift in what is achievable.
None of this replaces strategic thinking, human creativity, or careful proofing. But it speeds up your delivery and frees you up to do more of the work that only a human can do. And for legal marketers specifically, that distinction matters enormously.
Below are the AI tools I use in my own business and with my legal marketing clients, and how I use them.
Practical AI tools for legal marketers
Claude: AI but less like a bot
The quality of output is the other big pro for Claude. It sounds a lot less bot-like and uses fewer AI-isms when producing written content. Claude reasons with you, handles nuance, pushes back and flags uncertainty in a way that ChatGPT and its hallucinations often doesn’t.
Setting up Projects inside Claude lets you create a persistent memory and a set of instructions for a specific purpose. This means you don’t have to re-explain yourself every time you start a new chat. Think of it like setting up a dedicated assistant for a particular job. You can upload files, give background context, and set a custom persona or tone, and Claude will carry all of that into every conversation within that project.
Here are the top 5 Claude Projects that I use for my Saltmarsh Marketing work on a daily basis:
- Creative Agency – imagining and mapping out everything from fun memes, to mini campaigns, to spoof film scripts.
- Saltmarsh copywriting – writes draft copy for Saltmarsh marketing, from blogs to website landing pages.
- Founder LinkedIn post writer – creates first drafts of LinkedIn posts for my personal profile.
- Slide witch – helps design bold workshops and decks, structuring presentations for legal conferences, talks and training programmes.
- Saltmarsh Business Coach – acts as a strategic and creative business coach helping me to grow Saltmarsh Marketing sustainably.
Here’s what your Projects might look like, for growing your profile and your business:
- Thought leadership and blogging – briefed with your areas of specialism, target client, viewpoints and tone of voice. Draft articles, structure arguments, repurpose one piece of content across multiple formats.
- Business development writing – loaded with your services, differentiators and ideal client profile. Proposals, capability statements, emails and pitch documents.
- Speaking and events – your go-to for structuring talks and conference presentations.
Perplexity AI: research that cites its sources
Perplexity is built for in-depth research. It is up-to-date, provides direct citations, and handles dense, nuanced topics well. For legal marketing content that needs to demonstrate authority and accuracy, this matters.
The mindset shift required for Perplexity is specificity. Unlike Google, where a broad search term gets you a list of results to sift through, Perplexity rewards narrow, precise, conversational queries. Ask it a specific question and you get a specific answer with sources attached. Use the deep research mode for more complex topics and it will pull from multiple sources and synthesise a comprehensive response.
For building authoritative content that your audience and AI search tools will trust, the ability to cite credible sources is a genuine advantage. It also significantly reduces the risk of AI hallucinations slipping through unnoticed.
Letterly: from voice note to content brief
Letterly solves a specific but very common problem: the gap between having ideas and doing something with them.
If you find yourself thinking through a new content angle mid-walk, or you come back from an industry event full of ideas you never act on, Letterly lets you record your thoughts as a voice note and uses AI to structure them into something usable. It is particularly effective for turning the kind of informal, unstructured thinking that happens away from a desk into content briefs, blog outlines, or LinkedIn post drafts.
For legal professionals and marketers who struggle to find the words, or who know what they want to say but cannot get it onto a page, it removes the blank-screen friction that stops content from ever getting made.
Sembly: turn meetings & conversations into deliverables
I use Sembly to record virtual meetings and then marvel at its ability to identify next steps, deliverables, insights from the call transcript.
It can also be used to draft documentation from the call data and to query actions, questions, or discussions that you need to come back to.
Gamma: AI Powered Slides
Gamma exists to turn your brilliant ideas into engaging, easy design so you can focus your time on more strategic work. You can use it for pitches, presentations, websites, social media and documents.
Common pitfalls to avoid when using AI tools in legal marketing
Treating it as plug-and-play
AI tools require investment, especially upfront. Bad input = bad output. The firms and marketers who get the most from AI are the ones who invest time at the start to configure, train, and refine their tools rather than expecting immediate results from minimal effort.
The goal is not just to save time. It is to produce better work. Use AI to enhance your output, not to replace the strategic thinking and human judgement that makes legal marketing trustworthy.
It is still a piece of technology, after all. It’s not infallible and it’s not YOU. Don’t fall into the trap of adding to the sameyness of AI-driven LinkedIn posts whose creators haven’t taken the time to infuse their own voice, intuition and unique insight.
Skipping fact checks
AI tools do not know what they do not know. They can and do produce content that sounds authoritative but is inaccurate, outdated, or subtly misleading. It can only pull data from what exists already out there on the internet; it is never creating new thoughts or ideas. This can be particularly risky in legal content, where a misstatement of law or an oversimplified position can have real consequences.
Build fact-checking into your workflow as a non-negotiable step. When prompting ChatGPT or Claude, ask it explicitly to check for hallucinations as part of the brief. Then verify the output yourself. An AI hallucination is specifically an error or output that is misleading, inaccurate or often rather nonsensical. But the challenge we have is that these ‘hallucinations’ are often presented as fact. So it’s all the more important to ask it to check its own work and for you to review it, as a human!
Removing the human entirely
I would argue that there is no legal marketing task for which AI can substitute for human judgement entirely. The nuance, emotional intelligence, and contextual awareness that experienced legal marketers bring to their work cannot be replicated by a language model.
But conversely, there is no marketing task that you cannot use AI to give you a strong starting point. The right balance is using AI to accelerate and structure your thinking, while retaining full ownership of the strategic decisions and final outputs.
Legal and regulatory considerations for using AI tools in legal marketing
We’re all painfully aware that legal is governed by watertight regulation. You need to be transparent, accurate, and crystal-clear. So here are some sector-specific factors to bear in mind as you start to integrate AI into your legal marketing strategy:
Copyright, IP, and content ownership
Let’s talk about the murky waters of IP and copyright. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, “works generated by a computer in circumstances such that there is no human author” remains legally ambiguous. In other words, content created solely by a machine may not be legally protected.
Best practice: never publish unedited AI content. Treat AI outputs as first drafts that aren’t copyright-protected and require substantial human input before they become publishable assets.
Transparency and misleading claims
The SRA Code of Conduct requires accuracy, transparency, and the absence of misleading statements in all communications. Do make sure that your AI-generated content does not read as legal advice, and that it does not overstate the firm’s capabilities or credentials, as this can breach both the SRA Code and ASA advertising standards.
Best practice: use disclaimers wherever content could be perceived as legal advice. Have technical or nuanced content reviewed by a qualified subject matter expert before publication.
Confidentiality and data protection
AI tools process data in the cloud. Uploading client-specific information, confidential case notes, or sensitive strategic documents into a public AI tool creates a risk of breaching the confidentiality requirements in the SRA Code of Conduct, as well as GDPR obligations.
Best practice:
- Never upload client-specific data to AI tools
- Keep prompts outcome-focused and general when referring to clients or matters
- Do not use confidential drafts or sensitive case materials as training inputs
The best sources of legal guidance for you here are the Law Society, the Advertising Standards Authority, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
Using AI tools ethically and sustainably
Ethics in practice
There’s a lot of chat about “AI ethics,” but what does that actually mean in the world of legal marketing?
It means that transparency about AI use is now an expectation, rather than a choice. You do not need to flag every piece of content as AI-assisted, but you should be comfortable being honest about how you use these tools if asked, and your use should be consistent with your stated values as a firm.
Ethical AI use in legal marketing means balancing innovation with integrity: using tools that improve the quality of your output, not tools that allow you to cut corners on accuracy, transparency, or regulatory compliance.
For example, if you’re wondering whether Claude is the right tool to trust with your marketing, Anthropic’s approach to AI safety is widely regarded as the most serious in the industry. Earlier this year it refused a Pentagon contract rather than compromise its restrictions on surveillance and autonomous weapons. That cost them commercially, but they did it anyway.
Environmental impact
AI systems carry a large carbon footprint because they consume vast amounts of computer power and as such, energy consumption. This is increasingly relevant for firms with sustainability commitments. The most responsible approach is intentional, focused use: fewer tools, used well and trained thoroughly, rather than a broad portfolio of AI subscriptions used sporadically.
- Be intentional: use fewer tools well rather than many tools poorly
- Use AI to build repeatable templates and frameworks that reduce the need for repeated generation
- Where possible, choose tools from providers investing in energy transparency and renewable infrastructure
AI tools for legal marketing: a practical checklist
Before you start or as you review your current use of AI tools:
- Identify the two or three marketing tasks that take the most time and have the most repeatable elements
- Set up your key Claude projects and train them on your brand voice and existing content
- Start using Perplexity for research tasks where source citations matter
- Build fact-checking into every AI-assisted content workflow before publication
- Review all AI-generated content against SRA and ASA standards before it goes live
- Ensure no client-specific or confidential data is used in AI prompts
- Commit to training your AI tools over time rather than expecting immediate results
Final thought
As a legal founder or marketer, the question for you to consider is no longer whether to use AI tools. It is whether you are using them well enough to stay ahead of the firms that are. The gap between thoughtful, well-configured AI adoption and the plug-and-play approach is significant, as are the gains.
Start with the tools that solve your most immediate problems. Train them properly and review everything they produce. And treat AI as a capable, fast, but also occasionally unreliable assistant that needs your expertise and judgement to produce work worth publishing.
If you want some time, space and a strategic partner to think through how AI tools fit into a broader content and marketing strategy for your legal business, my Direction in a Day package is a focused way to do just that. We can look at what is already working for you, where AI can improve your current setup, and how to operationalise it effectively.
Key takeaways
- AI tools for legal marketing are a strategic necessity, not a nice-to-have. If you’re not yet using them – ask yourself what’s holding you back and where you could start.
- Claude Projects trained on your brand voice are one of the highest-value AI investments a legal founder or marketing team can make.
- Perplexity AI is the strongest option for research-driven content that requires source citations
- Letterly is useful for converting voice notes and unstructured thinking into content briefs and drafts
- AI tools require genuine investment in training and configuration to produce quality outputs
- Fact-checking, human review, and regulatory compliance are non-negotiable steps before publishing AI-assisted content
- Confidential client data must never be used in AI prompts
- Ethical AI use means transparency, accuracy, and consistency with your firm’s standards
FAQs
What are the best AI tools for legal marketing?
The most useful AI tools for legal marketing depend on what you need them for. Claude Projects are strong for content creation and brand consistency. Perplexity AI is the best option for research that requires cited sources. Letterly is useful for turning voice notes and unstructured thinking into content. The right combination depends on your team size, content output, and how much time you can invest in training the tools.
Is it safe to use AI tools for legal marketing content?
Yes, when used correctly. The key risks are inaccuracy, oversimplification, and regulatory non-compliance. All AI-assisted content should be reviewed by a qualified professional before publication and checked against SRA and ASA standards. Never upload confidential client data or sensitive case information into AI tools.
Do I need to disclose when I use AI to create legal marketing content?
There is no current legal requirement to disclose AI use in marketing content, but transparency is good practice and increasingly expected. The more important requirement is accuracy: AI-generated content that misrepresents legal positions or reads as formal legal advice can breach the SRA Code of Conduct regardless of how it was created.
How do I stop AI from producing generic content that sounds like everyone else?
The answer is training and configuration. Train your Claude project on your existing content, tone of voice guidelines, and brand examples in order to produce significantly more distinctive outputs than a generic prompt. The more you work with your AI tool and refine it, the better it gets at sounding like you.
How long does it take to see results from using AI tools in legal marketing?
Some efficiency gains are immediate, particularly in first-draft production and research. The more significant results, such as consistently on-brand content and reliable outputs that need minimal editing, come from investing time upfront in training and configuration. Treat the first few months as the setup phase and the returns will compound from there.
About Saltmarsh Marketing
Saltmarsh Marketing is a legal marketing agency founded by Helen Burness. We work with legal founders, partners, and in-house marketing teams to build marketing strategies that are commercially grounded, clearly positioned, and built to drive growth.
We specialise in helping legal professionals get visible in the right places, for the right reasons, without the noise.
Find out more at saltmarsh.marketing or book a call with Helen to talk through your marketing strategy.