2024 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Insights: Gaps Close, Balanced With AI and Manual Processes

Summary: As technology gaps close, Content and Experience and Data category solutions maintain importance. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) and manual processes act as counterweights.

For the fourth consecutive year, and the third in collaboration with LMA, RubyLaw has surveyed the legal marketing field and prepared an insights paper to codify and share findings with legal marketers everywhere.

The 2024 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Study illuminates the importance of technology for go-to-market professionals working at law firms, regardless of size or rank. The report highlights categories of tools in the tech stack that have outsized importance. And while AI is growing in importance, it still does not appear to have been broadly adopted or integrated systematically, other than select cases where AI-based functionality appears in particular tools. Meanwhile, manual processes — or people serving as integrators between systems or activities — remain important to many firms, such that no one should (yet) fear that full-scale automation is on the horizon.

This year’s study, the most comprehensive and representative to date, revealed the following three crucial insights:

• Technological gaps between ranked and unranked or large and small firms are less pronounced than previously reported.
• Content and experience and data software are critical to all firms, regardless of rank or size.
• AI and manual processes are both utilized and important, with neither likely to disappear soon.

Findings from this report indicate that all firms are continuing to adopt and utilize marketing technology, with most reliant on content management and publication, as well as data intelligence software. These tools are used to research, structure, prepare, edit, email, post, publish and revise content — and then measure it.

Overview of the Study

The 2024 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Study surveys law firms of all sizes, asking respondents to provide information about their respective firms, specific technologies in use and unique questions intended to shed light on how marketing and business development operations are evolving.

The primary output of the study is the Legal Marketing Technology Stack Blueprint, a visualization of the prevailing systems and tools used by legal marketers, illustrating the total market representation of tools employed for marketing technology. The secondary output is a full report, which provides an in-depth analysis of the survey, followed by ongoing programming and presentations around the insights found in this report. 

The 2024 survey consisted of 30 questions focused on revenue and team size; respondents’ roles at their respective firms; existing pain points and systems most in need of innovation; with the balance examining systems and tools. As always, all respondent and firm information is confidential.

Comparing Adoption Ratio Year-Over-Year

Last year, we introduced adoption ratio, the quotient between the normalized reported results of ranked firms and unranked firms with respect to marketing technology systems and tools, by category. It’s not a magic bullet for firm maturity, but it is a reliable indicator for calculating this metric.

In 2024, we saw significant changes across the entire tech stack. In cases where the change was positive, we observed what appears to be a narrowing gap between ranked and unranked firms, i.e., greater adoption of particular solutions in subcategories by smaller firms. (Ranked firms are those appearing on the Am Law 200 or NLJ 500 lists, which evaluate their revenue, growth, strategic shifts and market dynamics.) Where the change was negative, we saw more separation, i.e., greater disparity between large and small firms. Any change marked N/A indicated we did not have a 2023 adoption ratio in which to compare.

What is significant is that we were able to calculate adoption ratio for 100% of the sub-categories, which indicated either a massive closing of the gap by small firms or (more likely) better representation of small firms within the participant group of survey respondents, yielding a more precise perspective on what, exactly, is happening with legal marketing technology across the sector.

System	2024	2023	Change
Content Syndication	0.7	5.7	87.9%
Public Relations	0.7	N/A	N/A
Search and Social	0.7	0.7	-2.3%
Sales Enablement	0.7	1.9	62.3%
Proposal Generation	0.8	0.8	3.8%
Content Management Systems	1.0	1.5	34.1%
Email Marketing	0.7	0.9	23.1%
Marketing Automation	0.7	1.2	42.8%
Accessibility, Compliance and Optimization	0.8	0.8	-3.4%
Search Engine Optimization	1.0	0.8	-30.5%
Digital Engagement	0.7	N/A	N/A
Alumni Portals	0.7	2.6	71.5%
Customer Relationship Management	0.7	2.7	74.1%
Enterprise Relationship Management	0.7	N/A	N/A
Events and Webinars	0.7	0.8	10.0%
Social Media Publishing	0.7	1.3	45.7%
Competitive Intelligence	0.7	N/A	N/A
Analytics and Dashboards	1.0	1.1	10.1%
Experience Management Systems	0.8	N/A	N/A
Data Enrichment	0.7	1.3	48.5%
Talent Management	0.7	1.6	54.8%
Collaboration	0.7	0.8	12.1%

Key Takeaways

Our analysis yielded three key takeaways:

1. Technological gaps between ranked and unranked or large and small firms are less pronounced than previously reported.

In 2022, we shared that significant gaps in marketing technology adoption remain across the legal sector. In 2023, we reported that unranked law firms must develop tech-enabled go-to-market road maps or risk losing any future upward mobility.

While these conclusions remain correct, our perspective has changed, either due to greater resourcing and technology investments by smaller firms or to representation and participation in the Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Study. And while both may be true, the latter is definitive.

In the data, we saw nearly even distribution of participants, firmographically, i.e., nearly one-third of all participants came from each of the three small, mid-size and large tier buckets. The distribution of rankings was also less skewed, with ~60% of respondents representing ranked firms, and ~40% representing unranked firms.

In reviewing last year's report, we saw greater incidence of adoption ratio scores of 1.5 or higher. We even saw cases where we couldn’t calculate a ratio, e.g., “N/A,” noting that the disparity between ranked and unranked firms was either large (1.5) or too large to evaluate (N/A).

In 2024, we saw greater coalescence at an adoption ratio of 1, e.g., between 0.7 and 1.1, meaning adoption is nearly even between ranked and unranked firms. We still, however, saw scores below 1, which is to be expected — ranked, or larger, firms typically have access to more technology. While there is still a gap, it may reflect more of a concentration or collection of tools within a particular category or subcategory, rather than a case of smaller firms simply not adopting marketing technology.

2. Content and Experience and Data technology are critical to all firms, regardless of rank or size.

The Legal Marketing Technology Stack Blueprint is divided into six categories:

1. Advertising and Promotion
2. Sales
3. Content and Experience
4. Social and Relationships
5. Data
6. Management

Each category houses systems and tools that support activities laddering up to the category.

To better understand how firms are prioritizing systems and tools, we looked at the average adoption ratio by category to give us a sense of the pecking order of categories. While we saw relative parity across categories — i.e., all scored between 0.7 and 0.8 — only two scored 0.8: Content and Experience and Data. On the one hand, we could consider this to be a minor deviation from the categories scoring 0.7; both categories are dense, with Content and Experience housing six subcategories and Data housing four.

This bolsters the notion that these two categories are of considerable importance to law firms, and it would appear to make sense given law firms’ reliance on the publication and promotion of thought leadership and dynamic content, as well as their reliance on data for go-to-market activities. For smaller firms, leveraging tools that perform activities in multiple categories, i.e., platforms, greater efficiencies can be achieved.

Advertising and Promotion	0.7
Sales	0.7
Content and Experience	0.8
Social and Relationships	0.7
Data	0.8
Management	0.7

3. AI and manual processes are both utilized, with neither likely to disappear soon.

Across firms of all sizes, we observed limited, formalized usage of AI. Within Public Relations, Email Marketing, Social Media Publishing and Competitive Intelligence, between 2% and 8% of respondents reported their firms are using AI. This, however, may be an underrepresentation, as many tools have different forms of AI and machine learning built in.

In Digital Engagement, on the other hand, we saw more than 13% reporting using ChatGPT. We anticipate that this will only grow and become more visible in years to come. Regarding manual processes, though, more than 10% of all firms reported relying on manual systems to automate marketing processes. The fact that more than 40% of firms rely on tools like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite to manage their proposals also shows that adoption of proposal automation systems has yet to hit its peak.

No matter the case, we expect firms to rely more heavily on AI in the years to come without fully abandoning manual processes — essential ones, in particular.

The 2024 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Study proves that large firms cannot afford to be complacent or rely on their more abundant resources to maintain a competitive advantage over small firms. Irrespective of size, successful firms will better deploy their talent, while optimizing their use of available technologies, to reach target audiences with richer, data-driven insights and higher-quality, more personalized content at-scale. Moreover, those that can systematize, integrate and apply new technologies to that end — including AI and large language models — will be able to do it faster and with greater resonance

Learn More About the 2024 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Study RubyLaw and the Legal Marketing Association have partnered for the third year to provide legal marketers everywhere with unparalleled insights into the systems and tools used by legal marketers and business developers. Join us Friday, September 6, as RubyLaw and special guests share insights and discuss perspectives based on findings from this year's study. This webinar is complimentary to LMA members. Learn more and register.