What a stressed market taught me about marketing

When I stepped into the legal technology sector as Chief Marketing Officer in January 2025, the first thing I noticed was not the technology. It was the tension. 

Lawyers are under relentless pressure to grow client portfolios, win new business, and justify their value in an environment where AI is rapidly changing what legal work even looks like. In-house counsel are more capable and more independent than ever, reducing the demand for outside work. The professionals who support lawyers - business development, marketing, knowledge management - are caught in the middle, asked to do more with less, faster than before, with outcomes that are increasingly difficult to attribute. 

This is a market that is, quietly and collectively, exhausted. 

And into that exhaustion, the legal technology industry had been pouring more of the same: feature announcements, capability comparisons, and marketing that had been copied and re-copied until it was almost impossible to tell one company from another - a problem only accelerating as new AI capabilities are announced at a pace that makes yesterday's breakthrough feel instantly obsolete. A sea of sameness in a market that desperately needed something to believe in. 

That observation changed everything about how I approached my role. 

Reading the Room Is a Strategic Skill 

My first months were spent listening - not only to what our products could do, but to what the people in this market were actually experiencing. What I heard was not a demand for better technology features. It was something more fundamental: a need to feel seen, supported, and occasionally, to enjoy themselves again. 

When an entire market is stressed, the instinct in marketing is often to match the urgency - to shout louder, move faster, and fill every channel with proof of capability. I made a deliberate choice to do the opposite. To bring humanity back in. To treat the people we were trying to reach not as buyers in a funnel, but as professionals carrying real pressure who deserved to be spoken to accordingly. 

This is something women leaders often understand intuitively. We are more likely to sit with a room before trying to change it. To ask what is actually going on before deciding what to say. That instinct - which can be mistaken for hesitation - is in fact one of the most precise strategic instruments available to a marketing leader. Reading the room is not a soft skill. It is the foundation of every message that has ever actually landed. 

The "We Did It First" Tax - And Why Mission Beats It Every Time 

There is a phenomenon in technology marketing I have started calling the "We Did It First" Tax. 

It works like this: your company builds something genuinely innovative - AI-powered document analysis, deep integrations, predictive client intelligence. You are early. You are right. And then, two years later, a newer company announces the same capability with a larger PR budget and a fresher story. Suddenly, they are the innovators. The temptation is to fight back on feature terms - to reassert your timeline, remind the market you were there first, catalogue everything you built before anyone else was paying attention.

That instinct is understandable. It is also a trap. 

Responding to the "We Did It First" Tax by doubling down on feature history simply adds more noise to a conversation that already has too much of it. The way out is not louder. It is truer. It is returning to your mission - why you exist, what problem you were built to solve - and making that directly relevant to what your customer is trying to do. Not "we also have these features." But "we exist because of this problem, and that problem is yours, too." 

Bringing the Spirit Back 

We renamed our portfolio from MarTech to GrowthTech, and it was not a branding exercise. It was a statement of intent - a deliberate choice to speak to what law firms actually needed rather than what the industry had always called itself. Language shapes belief. If you name something differently, with purpose and conviction, you invite people to think about it differently, too. 

But the moment that crystalized the approach was at ILTACON 2025, one of the legal technology industry's flagship annual events. We launched a campaign built around a single human idea: turning lawyers into rainmakers, and rainmakers into legends. We invited customers to declare themselves Legal Legends - filmed in front of a campaign backdrop, celebrated rather than sold to. The energy was unlike anything we had seen at previous events. Because for a moment, in a market that had forgotten how to have fun, we gave people permission to feel proud of what they do.

That is what happens when you stop competing on features and start connecting on identity. When you ask not "what do we want to say?" but "what does this person need to feel?" 

What International Women's Day Actually Demands 

International Women's Day is often framed as a celebration. I would argue it is more usefully framed as a challenge - not directed at companies that have yet to promote enough women, but at women already in leadership: are you doing the work that only you can do, or are you executing the job description that was handed to you? 

In a market full of noise and exhaustion, the most powerful thing a leader can bring is the willingness to go quieter and go deeper. To notice what the room is feeling before deciding what to say. To bring spirit, and humanity, and occasionally joy, into places that have forgotten those things are allowed. 

That is not a soft approach. It is a strategic one. And right now, in legal technology and well beyond it, it may be the most underutilized competitive advantage in the room.