2025 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Insights

For the seventh consecutive year, and the fourth in collaboration with LMA, RubyLaw has surveyed the legal marketing landscape. The 2025 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Study reveals that technology is more important than ever for go-to-market professionals at law firms of all sizes — anchored by the surge in AI adoption. The report spotlights specific tools within the tech stack that have a significant impact.

This year’s study is the most comprehensive and representative to date and uncovered three crucial insights:

1. The technology gap between large and small firms is widening again
2. There is a growing number of technology providers in every category
3. Firms are increasingly using AI across more technology categories

The findings show that all firms are continuing to adopt and use marketing technology, with a noticeable increase in the use of AI.

Overview of the Study

The 2025 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Study surveyed law firms of all sizes, asking respondents to provide information about their respective firms, specific technologies in use and unique questions intended to shed light on how marketing and business development (BD) operations are evolving.

Survey Demographics

The participant distribution for this year's study was similar to that of 2024. Nearly one-third of participants came from each of the small, mid-size and large firm categories. Of all respondents, approximately 72% represented ranked firms and 28% represented unranked firms. We define “ranked firms” as those appearing on the Am Law 200 or NLJ 500 lists, which evaluate their revenue, growth, strategic shifts and market dynamics.

The primary output of the study is the Legal Marketing Technology Stack Blueprint, a visualization of the prevailing systems and tools used by legal marketers, illustrating the total market representation of tools employed for marketing technology. As always, all respondent and firm information is confidential.

The 2025 survey consisted of 35 questions focused on:

1. Revenue and team size
2. Respondents’ roles at their respective firms
3. Existing pain points and systems most in need of innovation
4. Current systems and tools

The survey also had a section of questions dedicated to a firm’s use of AI, stemming from the general rise of AI across the global business landscape.

Comparing Adoption Ratio Year-Over-Year

In 2023, we introduced adoption ratio — a metric used to compare how widely a specific marketing technology is used by ranked vs. unranked firms. It’s not a magic bullet for firm maturity, but it is a reliable indicator for calculating this metric.

In 2024, we saw significant changes across the entire tech stack. In cases where the change was positive, we observed a narrowing gap between ranked and unranked firms, i.e., greater adoption of particular solutions in subcategories by smaller firms.  Where the change was negative, we saw more separation, i.e., greater disparity between large and small firms.

This year, we observed a wider gap, indicating that ranked firms are outpacing unranked firms in their adoption of technology.

System	2024	2025	Percent Change
Content Syndication	0.7	1.5	118.5%
Public Relations	0.7	1.6	127.9%
Search & Social Advertising	0.7	0.9	18.2%
Sales Enablement	0.7	1.1	46.9%
Proposal Generation	0.8	1.0	35.6%
CMS	1.0	1.3	32.6%
Email Marketing	0.7	0.8	14.2%
Marketing Automation	0.7	0.9	32.1%
Accessibility	0.8	2.9	251.5%
Seo/Geo	1.0	1.0	-7.9%
Gen AI (Formerly Digital Engagement)	0.7	1.0	53.4%
Alumni Portal	0.7	1.4	88.9%
CRM	0.7	1.0	45.0%
ERM	0.7	2.1	197.3%
Events & Webinars	0.7	1.0	37.2%
Social Media Publishing	0.7	1.2	68.8%
Competitive Intelligence	0.7	1.1	53.0%
Analytics & Dashboards	1.0	1.1	13.9%
EMS	0.8	6.1	710.5%
Data Enrichment	0.7	2.9	335.5%
Talent Management	0.7	1.3	77.3%
Collaboration	0.7	1.0	36.3%

Key Takeaways

Our analysis yielded these key takeaways:

1. Technological gaps between larger and midsize-to-smaller firms are once again widening.

In the past, we noted a significant disparity in marketing technology adoption across the legal sector. By 2024, that gap had largely closed, with adoption rates between ranked and unranked firms nearly even. We attributed this slight gap to the concentration of tools at larger firms, not a lack of adoption by smaller ones.

The Growing Divide

This year's survey shows the gap is trending in the opposite direction. The adoption ratio across almost all categories is now greater than 1.0, meaning ranked firms are using technology more than their unranked counterparts. While most categories show a small difference, some gaps are substantial.

A notable example is the adoption of experience management systems (EMS). A full 80% of unranked firms do not use an EMS, compared to just 26% of ranked firms. This points to a much higher adoption rate among top-tier firms.

Significant disparities were also evident in software for:

• Accessibility, compliance and optimization
• Enterprise relationship management (ERM)
• Data enrichment

This is likely because smaller firms, with more limited resources, are prioritizing technologies that offer the greatest return on investment.

2. A rise in available technologies across all categories gives firms more choice.

In 2025, the legal marketing technology landscape saw a record number of systems and providers across all categories. 200 different technology providers were listed in 2024 and 309 in 2025. This rapid growth marks a significant positive shift for law firms.

This increased competition gives firms of all sizes the power to choose solutions that perfectly match their unique needs, budgets and strategic goals. The market is no longer dominated by a few one-size-fits-all platforms. Instead, firms can select from a wide range of specialized tools, such as purpose-built CMS, innovative Experience Management Systems, or highly specialized CRM software.

This competitive environment pushes service providers to constantly innovate, resulting in more sophisticated, user-friendly and integrated tools. For firms, this means a greater ability to build a tailored tech stack that directly supports their marketing and BD goals. Ultimately, this leads to more efficient processes, better data insights and a stronger competitive advantage.

3. AI is being used across more technology categories

AI is rapidly transforming legal marketing technology by automating and optimizing various aspects of the client acquisition and retention process. Its use allows law firms of all sizes to increase efficiency, personalize client interactions and make data-driven decisions to gain a competitive advantage. Mid-sized firms have a unique advantage when it comes to adopting new technology and AI. Unlike their larger competitors, they're agile enough to implement new tools quickly, yet they still have the financial resources to invest in them. This allows them to stay ahead of the curve and innovate faster than larger firms that may be slowed down by administrative hurdles.

Across firms of all sizes, we observed limited, formalized usage of AI in technology categories including public relations, email marketing, events and marketing automation software. However, the largest adoption of AI among unranked firms is for search and social advertising and proposal generation. AI tools can monitor online reviews and social media mentions in real-time, alerting firms to client feedback. They can also assist with responses and review strategies to help build and maintain a strong online reputation. The use of AI for proposal generation helps firms streamline key BD processes, enabling them to compete more effectively with larger firms.

Among ranked firms, the most extensive reported use of AI is for SEO/GEO. AI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of data to identify audience preferences, search trends and keywords can dramatically streamline a firm's targeting process. This allows firms to create content that is highly relevant to their target audience and optimized for search engines, improving their online visibility and attracting potential clients.

The universal adoption of AI for competitive intelligence reflects a fundamental business need that is shared by all firms, regardless of size or rank. Staying informed about competitor movements, market trends and industry changes is critical for strategic planning, making AI-powered analysis a valuable tool for everyone.

We expect firms to rely more heavily on AI in the years to come.

Uncovering AI’s Role

With the explosion of AI, new questions were added to this year's survey to better understand its use among marketing and BD teams. We are exploring:

• The specific areas where firms are using AI
• The purposes for which AI is being used
• Who is primarily leading these initiatives

Across all firms, the primary areas where AI is used are social media, content creation and internal process development -- with ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot emerging as the AI platforms of choice. ChatGPT has experienced a meteoric rise to become the world’s fifth most visited website!

For marketing and BD, the primary use of AI is generative AI for creating and editing content. However, many also use AI for marketing content management, proposal generation and website search.

Your internal teams are using AI search, and so are your clients.

For the first time in a decade, Google’s search market share has dropped below 90%, highlighting that people are increasingly turning to AI as their primary source of information. Just as traditional search engine optimization (SEO) has been crucial for years, the practice of "generative engine optimization" (GEO) is becoming the best way for your firm to be found online. Optimizing for AI means making your website's content and structure easily visible to AI tools — like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.ai — to understand and use, and can provide a massive boost in brand visibility and authority. To capitalize on this, your strategy must evolve beyond simple keywords. AI prioritizes comprehensive, in-depth content that thoroughly covers a topic. Think of it as answering all possible questions a user might have on a given subject. Use formatting like headings, subheadings, bulleted lists, numbered lists or tables, as these are highly digestible for both humans and AI.

Most firms report that their teams have a basic to moderate understanding of how to use AI and have experimented with it. This presents a real opportunity for firms to implement AI to streamline processes, create content faster and optimize their websites to be found in AI search results.

While the conversation in legal marketing technology often centers on the tools themselves, the more challenging, and arguably more valuable, discussions revolve around governance, workflows and accountability. A sophisticated CRM or marketing automation platform is only as effective as the data within it, and that is where governance becomes paramount. How data is structured directly impacts our ability to interpret buyer signals, segment audiences and personalize outreach. The architectural choices firms are now making — whether to implement a traditional, highly structured data warehouse, a more flexible data lake for raw information or a hybrid data lake house — are fundamentally shaping their approach to governance. This decision dictates everything from data quality protocols to user access rights, creating the data strategy that either enables or hinders the pursuit of true client intelligence. Without a clear governance model, firms risk creating a "data swamp" where valuable insights are lost, rendering their technology investments ineffective.

The 2025 Legal Marketing Technology Ecosystem Study proves that large firms cannot afford to be complacent or rely on their more abundant resources to maintain a competitive advantage over small firms. Irrespective of size, successful firms will better deploy their talent, while optimizing their use of available technologies, to reach target audiences with richer, data-driven insights and higher-quality, more personalized content at scale. Moreover, those who can systematize, integrate and apply new technologies to that end — including AI and large language models — will be able to do it faster and with greater resonance.