The 2026 LMA Annual Conference in New Orleans drew legal marketing and business development professionals from across the country for three days of sessions, conversations and the kind of peer exchange that only happens in person. CMO2go founder Erika Steinberg was there, moderating a panel on cross-function collaboration and spending a full pre-conference day with solo marketers and small-team leaders from midsize firms.
Four conversations stood out because they spoke directly to the urgent challenges midsize law firm marketers are navigating right now. Here is what each one taught us.
Why Lateral Integration Fails Before It Starts
The statistics that opened this session were stark: anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of lateral partners leave their new firms within five years, and the cost of losing a third-year associate is estimated at a million dollars. The session, “After the Parade: Turning Lateral Hires into Long-Term Wins,” moderated by Stacey McReynolds of Clyde & Co, made the case that most firms are solving the wrong problem. There’s a better way.
The firms that get integration right start earlier than most. Successful integration begins during the recruiting process itself, not on a lateral’s first day. That means including marketing and BD leaders in pre-hire conversations, completing business plans before the offer letter is signed, and setting clear expectations on both sides before they walk through the door.
Once a lateral arrives, the strongest programs assign a dedicated BD contact from day one, giving the lateral one source of information and a clear path to executing on their business development plan from the start.
When something goes off course, the advice was consistent: go back to the original plan, use it as a diagnostic, find out what changed, and use what you learned to get things moving again. The takeaway for midsize firms: lateral integration is a relationship that requires the same ongoing investment as any other client relationship your firm manages.
Is Your Firm Invisible to AI Search?
If AI tools can’t find your lawyers, can’t verify they exist, and can’t confirm your firm is credible, they won’t recommend you. That was the central argument of “The Five Pillars of AI Visibility,” led by Joe Giovannoli and Robyn Addis of 9Sail — and for midsize firms that have been slower to invest in digital infrastructure, it was an urgent wake-up call.
The session laid out five pillars that determine whether AI tools recognize and recommend a firm:
1. Schema markup on attorney bios. This is the credential check AI runs before deciding whether to mention your lawyers at all.
2. Question-based content structure. Front-loaded answers and FAQ blocks are what AI actually reads and cites. Dense paragraphs under vague headings get skipped.
3. Citation-worthy original content. Jurisdiction-specific analysis, case studies and original data earn citations. Generic content does not.
4. Consistent multi-platform presence. Inconsistent information across your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and legal directories signals unreliability to AI tools trying to verify your firm is credible.
5. Technical infrastructure. If AI can’t crawl your site efficiently, none of the above matters.
For midsize firms, there is a significant gap between where they are and where they need to be on AI visibility. The good news is, most of these pillars are addressable without a full website overhaul. But AI visibility is a conversation midsize law firm marketers need to be having with firm leadership right now.
What Competitive Intelligence Looks Like Now
AI visibility addresses how clients and prospects find your firm. But there’s an equally important question for BD and competitive intelligence teams: how effectively is your firm using AI to generate timely intelligence internally?
A pre-conference session, “AI, BI, CI: The ABCs of Data and Law Firm Intelligence,” tackled that directly. Competitive intelligence (CI) is shifting from merely compiling reports to synthesizing signals and driving business impact. AI summarizes filings, dockets, executive moves and competitor activity quickly. Business intelligence (BI) tools make trends visible over time. Together they enable trigger-based intelligence including litigation activity, GC moves, competitor hires and sector trends that support timely, relevant partner outreach vs. static PDFs that summarize yesterday’s information. A practical starting point: replace one templated report with a trigger-based alert plus an AI-generated brief, supported by a reusable prompt and a validation checklist. For firms that have never thought about CI this way, that single change can shift the perception of the function from report producer to strategic advisor. One important caution: AI can hallucinate or rely on stale data. Humans must validate the data before intelligence reaches attorneys. The firms that get this right will treat CI not as a back-office function, but as a BD intelligence hub connecting data, relationships and timely insight.
Think Like an Editor: A Test Every Legal Marketer Should Use
Lawyers are trained to build a case. They present context, background and supporting evidence before arriving at a conclusion. But most readers — and most clients — want the opposite. They want the most important information first, and everything else only if they need it. When those two instincts collide, the firm’s marketing usually suffers.
The session, moderated by Raychel Lean of Reputation Ink, offered a simple test any legal marketer can use immediately: before drafting anything, capture the impact of the story in 40 to 50 words. If you can’t, the story isn’t ready yet. This works as a discipline for your own writing and as a tool for managing partner expectations about what makes a story worth telling.A few other practical takeaways: LinkedIn outperforms press releases for most announcements because clients are already there and far more likely to engage. Build relationships with reporters before you need them. And when a case can’t be discussed directly, find the trend it represents and lead with that instead.
These conversations are exactly the kind of strategic intelligence CMO2go brings to midsize law firms every day. If any of these topics resonated and you want to go deeper, we’d love to talk. Schedule a discovery call with Erika here.