[In-house counsel, compliance officers, C-suite members: have five minutes? Your input matters. We invite you to take our five-minute survey by clicking here – and to learn more about the JD Supra/LIMELIGHT study below:]
We’re living through a pivotal shift in how legal expertise is discovered, evaluated, and trusted. And if you’re a law firm marketer, partner, or in-house counsel reading this sentence, you’re already part of the transformation.
With overflowing inboxes, crowded social media feeds, and AI reshaping how information is found, law firm thought leadership must go beyond offering insight. Successful thought leadership is about trust, relevance, and increasingly, algorithms.
This summer, LIMELIGHT and JD Supra are launching a new research initiative:
Trust, Relevance, and AI: What Corporate Counsel Want from Law Firm Thought Leadership.
We’re asking general counsel and senior in-house legal leaders across industries how they engage with law firm content, the impact of generative AI on their behaviors, and what makes them ignore it altogether.
Spoiler alert: They’re not just looking for content. They’re looking for signals.
Content Saturation Is Real—and the Clock Is Ticking
Corporate legal teams are inundated with content. Yet many still rely on it to stay current on emerging legal and regulatory issues. The challenge isn’t lack of demand; rather it’s lack of time. Content that isn’t concise, relevant, or clearly actionable is likely to be skipped entirely.
Meanwhile, research from the Harvard Business Review shows that B2B buyers are spending less time engaging with providers directly and more time self-educating. Content has become the first meeting—not a follow-up. If your insights aren’t discoverable or engaging in the right moments, you’re not just missing attention—you’re missing opportunity.
According to the Legal Marketing Association’s 2025 Legal Marketing Decision-Makers Survey, content remains the cornerstone of “effective” law firm marketing. Written thought leadership is rated the most effective tactic for attracting and retaining clients, followed by branding, in-person speaking, webinars, and attorney bios. In contrast, traditional tactics like directory submissions and awards rank among the least effective.
Marketing leaders are doubling down on content because it aligns with two top strategic priorities: building visibility in key practice areas and adopting new technologies, including AI. As firms invest more in marketing—often with budgets outpacing inflation—leaders are prioritizing high-impact, scalable efforts like content development versus time-consuming, low-return activities.
Trust Is the New Currency
In an era of AI-generated content, short attention spans, and thought leadership fatigue, the real differentiator is credibility. Law firms need to understand what earns that trust; and what immediately undermines it. In fact, 70% of C-level executives said that a piece of thought leadership had at least occasionally led them to question whether they should continue working with an existing partner, according to the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact report.
Trust is shaped by multiple factors: the clarity of your insights, the depth of your expertise, the transparency of your sources, and the platforms where your content appears. We’ll be exploring all of these variables in our forthcoming survey.
AI Is Reshaping the Buyer Journey
Perhaps the most seismic shift is how generative AI is altering how legal answers are discovered.
Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot are already being used by corporate counsel to research issues, explore trends, and compare firm perspectives. According to a 2024 LexisNexis survey, 47% of in-house legal teams have experimented with generative AI tools for legal research—and 25% are actively using them to summarize complex topics.
This means that the content AI is trained on—and recommends—is increasingly shaping perceptions of firm expertise. But these platforms don’t index your gated PDFs or parse jargon-heavy insights. They favor clear, structured, cited, and discoverable content that appears on trusted domains and is surfaced across the digital ecosystem.
In short: Your firm’s visibility in AI-generated answers may soon matter as much as your Google rankings.
What the LIMELIGHT / JD Supra Survey Will Explore
To help law firms navigate this changing landscape, we’re gathering quantitative and qualitative insight directly from GCs and senior in-house legal professionals. Our survey focuses on:
- Engagement habits: How frequently GCs consume thought leadership—and what formats they prefer
- Trust signals: What builds or erodes confidence in authorship and accuracy
- Content value drivers: From brevity and specificity to actionable takeaways and war stories
- AI’s growing role: Whether and how GCs trust AI-generated content and if they’ve ever hired a law firm based on content recommended by a tool like ChatGPT
We’re also asking about behaviors: What happens when content resonates? Does it get saved? Shared? Does it lead to follow-up with a firm? Or does it just fade into the noise?
What This Means for Law Firm Marketers
If you’re building or promoting thought leadership today, your job isn’t just to inform. It’s to:
- Build credibility at first glance
- Tailor insight to the reader’s role and sector
- Structure content for both human readers and AI systems
- Show up in the places where GCs are searching—including generative platforms
The rules have changed. And content is no longer just an SEO play—it’s an AI play, a trust play, and increasingly, a business development play.
What’s Next
Our survey is already in the field. We’ll release the full findings this fall as part of a co-branded report, live webinar, and sessions at major legal marketing and innovation conferences.
We invite you to:
- Share the survey link with your network of GCs and legal ops leaders
- Subscribe for early access to the results
- Join us in redefining what great thought leadership looks like in an AI-driven world
Because in today’s market, it’s not just about who you know. It’s about what your next client—and their AI assistant—knows about you.
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Kenneth Gary, J.D., is founding partner of LIMELIGHT, a growth communications firm for legal and other highly regulated sectors. Connect with him on LinkedIn; follow his additional thought leadership on JD Supra.
