Key Takeaways from the 2024 Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference – Part Two

Welcome to the second blog post in this series on the key takeaways from the 2024 Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Annual Conference. This post focuses on the next pre-conference session our strategists attended on April 3^rd.

Playing to Win: Innovation Strategies for Sustainable Competitive Advantage

This pre-conference program delved into the realm of innovation, covering everything from generating and prioritizing solutions to implementation, adoption, and optimization. Kelly Harbour, Chief Business Development Officer for Goulston & Storrs PC, and our client, Anne Kunkel, Chief Marketing Officer for Redgrave LLP, acted as co-chairs for this session, organizing it into sub-sessions, including:

Ace in the Hole: Design Thinking for Prioritization & Ideation

Led by Josh Kubicki, Co-founder & Design Lead for Bold Duck Studio, this sub-session focused on design thinking, which is a problem-solving approach that prioritizes human-centred design and empathy to create innovative solutions. It allows you to think laterally about a subject, looking at issues from all perspectives to generate opportunities that are not only functional but also deeply resonate with the needs and desires of the user. By implementing design thinking, you can begin to view it as an experience rather than a process, helping you to reduce friction, add clarity, and make the experience more effective and efficient.

Every experience has three core elements: functional, emotional, and social. Josh refers to these elements as “design lenses,” offering the following questions to help view an experience through these lenses:

• Functional: What job is the user trying to get done?
• Emotional: What is the current and desired experience?
• Social: How does the user want to be perceived by others?

  Josh further explained that a well-designed experience is the result of validity, feasibility, and desirability. The following questions were provided to help when considering these factors:

  • Validity: What is the true problem, and how big is it?
  • Feasibility: Do I have the right resources?
  • Desirability: Can the current experience be improved by 10x?

Play Your Cards Right: Writing Prompts for Generative AI

Also serving as the speaker for this sub-session, Josh emphasized the importance of productizing content and explained how to produce this content with the assistance of generative AI. The process of productizing content involves packaging the content, such as articles, videos, or other media, into a format that can be sold or distributed as a product. It allows your content to work for you – rather than you working for your content – and helps you build an audience as opposed to just website users.

Leveraging generative AI when creating productized content can be quite effective and enhance efficiency. To get started with this tool, Josh provided a few writing prompts:

• Can you provide a clear and plain language explainer for the following content? (insert your content)
• Who would be the ideal audience for this content?
• Okay, let’s focus on this audience – I want to create a highly engaging, useful, and pragmatic email course for this content. Can you format the content to reflect this structure?
• Can we ensure this email course is 10x better than the original course?

The results from generative AI may provide 80% good, but it is up to you to add 20% excellence to it. It is also worth noting that when plugging information into any generative AI tool platform, such as ChatGPT, never attach any contracts or confidential documents.

For best practices when engaging with generative AI, Josh presented the five guiding “P’s”:

• Prime: Give it some context.
• Personna: Maintain consistency in personality, tone, expertise, and background.
• Privacy: Be mindful of what you share.
• Product: Explain what you want it to do.
• Polish: Always revise the results before implementing them. 

For a deeper dive into leveraging AI for law firms, subscribe to Josh’s newsletter, Brainyacts, or sign up for his course, Brainyacts Generative AI Blueprint.

Interested in learning more about the LMA Annual Conference and the first pre-conference session our strategists attended? Visit the first post in our key takeaways series.

What is the LMA Annual Conference?

The LMA Annual Conference is a premier event in the legal marketing industry, bringing together professionals from around the world to explore innovative strategies, forge meaningful connections, and learn about industry developments. It typically features keynote presentations, breakout sessions, panel discussions, workshops, and networking opportunities designed to facilitate knowledge sharing, skill development, and professional relationships among attendees.