Meh, Deliverables

Let’s be honest about something agencies, mine included, don’t love admitting.

For years, legal marketing agencies sold stuff. Ads. Landing pages. Blog posts. “Content.” We put it in proposals, counted it on invoices, and lawyers judged us by how much of it showed up each month.

That made sense when making stuff was hard. Writing good ad copy took time. Building a landing page took a designer, a developer, and three rounds of “can we make the logo bigger?”

So the stuff looked like the value.

It wasn’t. It never was.

The robots can make the stuff now

You know this already. AI can write a hundred ad variations before you finish reading this sentence. It’ll build you a landing page, a FAQ, an email sequence, and a month of social posts, and it won’t complain about the revisions.

Here’s what happens when you can make something in unlimited quantity for basically nothing: it becomes worth basically nothing.

That’s not a hot take. It’s supply and demand.

If your agency’s business model is billing lawyers for production, that’s a problem. You’re competing with a tool that costs pennies and never sleeps. Good luck.

But I don’t think production was ever the job.

What you were actually paying for

Take a pretty standard campaign for a personal injury firm. The deliverables look something like this: search ads, a landing page, some retargeting creative, and someone managing the budget.

Four things. Easy to count. Easy to compare across agencies.

None of them matter unless someone has answered the harder questions first:

Why are we running this campaign at all? Does the firm need more cases? Better cases? A specific kind of case? Is the problem even marketing, or is it that nobody answers the phone after 5pm? (It’s often the phone.)

Who are we actually talking to? Someone searching “car accident lawyer” an hour after a crash isn’t the same person as someone who has spent three weeks getting jerked around by an adjuster. Same keyword, maybe. Totally different conversation.

Why this firm? Every injury firm “fights for you.” Every one of them “cares.” Every one of them “doesn’t get paid unless you win.” If your messaging could be swapped onto your competitor’s website and nobody would notice, it’s not messaging. It’s wallpaper.

What should someone believe before they pick up the phone? That you’re big and scary to insurance companies? That they’ll actually get to talk to a lawyer? Those are choices. They change every word on the page.

What counts as winning? Calls? Signed cases? Signed cases worth more than the cost of getting them? If you don’t know, you can’t manage the media. You’re just spending it.

Ads written without those answers are just words. A landing page built without them is just a template with your headshot on it.

The thinking was the product. The deliverables were just how it showed up.

Taste is still scarce

AI can give you infinite options. What it can’t do, at least not without someone who knows what they’re looking at, is tell you which option is right for this firm, in this market, for this client, right now.

That’s taste.

Taste is reading a headline and knowing it’s technically fine but sounds exactly like every other firm in town. It’s knowing that a slick, polished page is going to feel cold to someone whose spouse just got hurt. It’s knowing that what the partners want to say about themselves usually isn’t what clients need to hear.

You don’t get taste from a prompt. You get it from watching a lot of campaigns work, and a lot more of them not work, and paying attention to why.

If anything, AI makes taste more valuable. When production was expensive, a mediocre agency could hide behind “well, it looks professional.” Now everything looks professional. Professional is free. What separates good marketing from noise is the quality of the decisions behind it.

So what should lawyers do with this?

A few thoughts if you’re hiring (or firing) an agency.

Stop buying volume. If an agency’s pitch is that they’ll crank out thousands of pages of content for you, they’re selling you the cheapest thing in marketing. Ask what all that content is supposed to do. Who’s it for? Why would anyone read it? If they can’t answer, that’s your answer.

Pay attention to the questions. In your next agency meeting, notice whether they ask hard questions about your firm, your clients, and your competition before they start talking about deliverables. If they jump straight to the production calendar, they skipped the part that matters.

Pay for judgment, not hours. Production is becoming a commodity. Expertise isn’t. Price the relationship around strategy and results, not how long it took somebody to build a page.

Expect your agency to use AI. You should. If they’re not using it to move faster and test more ideas, you’re paying for inefficiency. Just make sure there are actual humans with actual judgment deciding what’s worth making.

Nothing’s really changed

Here’s the funny part. The agencies that come out of this fine won’t be the ones that produce the most. They’ll be the ones that think most clearly about what’s worth producing.

And that’s what the good ones were always doing.

The best agency people I know never thought of themselves as ad writers or page builders. They thought of themselves as people who figured out how to connect lawyers with the people who need them. The deliverables were just evidence of that thinking.

AI took the cost out of the evidence. The thinking is still the job.