Rachel Shields Williams, Product Management Director of Client Intelligence at Sidley Austin LLP*
If you’ve attended any legal‑industry conference in 2025—whether the agenda focused on client intelligence, KM, pricing, or AI—you’ve undoubtedly felt it: the ground is shifting. The pace is faster, the conversations sharper, and the audience broader. And at the center of this shift sits the modern legal marketer.
For decades, marketing’s value in law firms was tied to visibility: the right pitch, the right event, the right message to the right audience. Visibility still matters, but now it’s only the starting point. What firms urgently need today is meaning—insight that connects data, context, and strategy in a way that reveals opportunity and supports smarter decision‑making.
Legal marketers are no longer storytellers alone. We have become strategists, connectors, and translators—the people who help firms turn information into direction.
The Three Eras of Legal Marketing
Brand & Events: Marketing as the firm’s megaphone.
Insight & Experience: Marketing as a connector, linking CRM, client feedback, competitive intel, and experience data.
Data & Innovation: Marketing as interpreter and strategist, transforming multi‑source data into clarity.
Nearly every firm today is drowning in data: client information, relationship mapping, experience records, pricing trends, sentiment analysis, and now AI‑generated signals. But having data is not the same as using it.
Data alone doesn’t create value. Meaning does.
Meaning is created by the people who can translate data into insight, insight into narrative, and narrative into action. Technology can tell us what happened; people—especially marketers—explain why it matters and what should happen next.
Marketers sit close to clients, practices, industries, and competitive moves. When they connect CRM intelligence with experience databases, layer in pricing insights, and pair it with relationship context, they provide something no tool can: human interpretation.
This interpretation answers critical strategic questions:
– What story is the data trying to tell?
– Which opportunities are real, and which are noise?
– How should we frame this for a client?
– Where is revenue most likely to grow?
– How does this support the firm’s priorities?
Dashboards alone won’t answer these questions—but marketers can.
Why the Story Matters More Than the System
Technology rarely fails because it lacks capability. It fails because its purpose wasn’t communicated clearly enough. This is where marketers shine.
The modern legal marketer brings a set of skills uniquely suited for a data‑driven firm:
- Data Storytelling: Turning analytics into actionable conversations.
- Empathy Mapping: Understanding what users value and fear—and communicating in their language.
- Behavioral‑Change Strategy: Helping people adopt tools by framing relevance rather than features.
- Cross‑Functional Fluency: Connecting insights across IT, KM, finance, pricing, and practice groups.
- Strategic Communication: Framing innovation around client value and business outcomes.
Law firms do not need more numbers—they need clarity. When marketers connect metrics to meaning, tools to purpose, and data to opportunity, marketing shifts from a support function to a strategic force multiplier.
Technology can scale efficiency. Marketers scale understanding. And in a world where meaning drives decisions, that understanding is the real differentiator.
Rachel Shields Williams is Product Management Director of Client Intelligence at Sidley Austin LLP, where she leads data, AI, and client intelligence initiatives. She is also President of the Legal Marketing Association (LMA), a member of the College of Law Practice Management, and a recognized speaker and author on data-driven innovation in the legal industry. She may be contacted at LinkedIn here.
