Legal Marketing Radio

About Legal Marketing Radio

Legal Marketing Radio is a podcast that covers legal marketing tips and strategies as well as news, trends, and cutting-edge innovations in the overlapping worlds of legal, digital, and content marketing.

Publisher

LaFleur

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

4 Feb 2017

Latest episode

17 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

56 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   17 Aug 2026

   Emerging Trends in Marketing and Communications with Imran Mazid

   On Legal Marketing Radio, host Chip LaFleur talks with Dr. Imran Mazid, an associate professor of advertising and public relations at Grand Valley State University, a 2026 recipient of the Pew Teaching with Technology Award, and author of 14 peer-reviewed publications on AI, public relations, and ethical communication in automated environments, about the gap between having data and having clarity. Mazid argues that most organizations already drown in metrics, but dashboards showing sentiment or engagement shifts mean little without the strategic judgment to interpret them, and he pushes back on the idea that decisions should be "data driven" rather than "data informed," with human judgment doing the deciding and data simply feeding it. The conversation turns to how AI has made content creation fast and cheap but has done nothing to build the trust and relatability that actually move a business forward, since speed and scale are not the same thing as connection. Mazid describes the research he runs in his lab, where eye tracking, facial expression analysis, and galvanic skin response reveal not just what people did after seeing a message but why, offering insight traditional surveys can't reach, and he and LaFleur explore how similar biometric testing could apply to jury research and message testing for law firms. They dig into what actually earns attention online, from value and social currency to scroll-disrupting hooks, and why grabbing attention for five seconds means nothing without a business objective behind it. Mazid closes with a case for keeping human judgment firmly in the loop: AI is a superpower for understanding audiences and speeding up repetitive research, but strategic judgment, writing fundamentals, and storytelling craft can't be automated, and communication professionals who lean on those fundamentals will be the ones AI can't replace. 00:00 Meet Dr. Imran Mazid 01:00 Data Versus Clarity 02:00 Why Dashboards Alone Mislead 03:00 Vanity Metrics and Business Objectives 04:00 Data Informed, Not Data Driven 05:00 A Marketing Cautionary Tale 07:00 Visibility Is Not Trust 08:00 AI, Speed, and the Trust Gap 09:00 Content Saturation and AI Slop 10:00 Inside the Biometrics Lab 11:00 Why Biometrics Beats Surveys 13:00 Facial Expression and Skin Response 14:00 Studying Virtual Influencers 15:00 The Anthropic Ad Testing Example 16:00 What Students Learn From Their Own Data 17:00 Open Source Emotion AI Models 19:00 Moving Studies Online 20:00 A Use Case for Jury Research 21:00 The Science of Capturing Attention 22:00 Hooks, Value, and Social Currency 23:00 The YouTube Thumbnail Question 25:00 Testing Thumbnails and Formats 26:00 Attention Versus Business Objectives 27:00 The Question Getting Too Much Attention 28:00 AI's Real Superpower 29:00 The Danger of One Model, One Provider 30:00 Expertise Still Matters 32:00 Will AI Replace Communication Jobs 33:00 Judgment as the Full Circle Close

2. 

   20 Jul 2026

   Podcasting for Attorneys With Phil Tower

   On Legal Marketing Radio, host Chip LaFleur talks with Phil Tower, a longtime West Michigan radio broadcaster who spent decades at iHeartMedia before reinventing himself as a podcast consultant, and who now manages the community station WYCE, about what actually makes a podcast worth listening to. Tower traces his own path from broadcast radio into podcasting around 2007-2008, through managing iHeart's spoken word stations, to helping local brands launch shows after his full-time radio role ended. He makes the case that a person's own voice is the most authentic way to tell a story, unfiltered and entirely under the storyteller's control, and tackles the question every new podcaster asks: how long should an episode be. His answer is that it should run as long as it needs to and no longer, with West Michigan's roughly 20-25 minute commute offering a natural sweet spot, even though national research points to 20-40 minutes as the broader industry standard. Tower introduces the content triangle he built his radio career on: being informative, being relatable, and being entertaining, and unpacks how attorneys already think in similar terms through the "three legs of the stool" in injury cases. He argues true entertainment isn't about being funny but about being vulnerable enough to create a driveway moment, and shares a personal story about breaking format on live radio to talk about euthanizing his dog, and the flood of listener trust that followed. The conversation turns practical with advice to get niche rather than broad, to mine a firm's most common case types for content ideas, and to ditch the script in favor of an outline so the conversation can go off the rails in useful ways. Tower and LaFleur close by trading real examples, including Michigan Auto Law's recurring "worst intersections in West Michigan" list as a model of relatable, shareable legal content that any firm could adapt to their own data and market. 00:00 Phil Tower's Radio Roots 02:00 Reinventing Into Podcast Consulting 03:00 Why Your Own Voice Wins 04:00 How Long Should an Episode Be 05:00 The Commute Time Sweet Spot 07:00 Landing at WYCE 08:00 Podcasting Is a Long Game 09:00 The Fear of Not Being Famous Enough 10:00 Why Voice Matters for PI and Professional Clients 11:00 The Content Triangle: Informative 12:00 The Content Triangle: Relatable 13:00 The Content Triangle: Entertaining 14:00 Chasing the Driveway Moment 16:00 Packaging Content Into Bite-Sized Pieces 17:00 Storytelling Skills Lawyers Already Have 18:00 The Three Legs of the Stool 19:00 Getting Started and Finding Your Angle 21:00 Niche Beats Broad 23:00 Mining Your Top Cases for Content 25:00 Learning From Adam Savage's Authenticity 26:00 Pulling Back the Curtain 29:00 Vulnerability Builds Listener Trust 30:00 The Dangerous Actor and Going Off Script 32:00 Wrap Up and Appreciation 34:00 Finding Interesting Guests 35:00 The Michigan Auto Law Example 37:00 Worst Intersections as Content Marketing 38:00 Stealing Good Ideas for Your Own Firm

3. 

   18 Jun 2026

   AI, Compliance, and Legal Risk With Hal Ostrow

   On Legal Marketing Radio, host Chip LaFleur interviews Hal Ostrow, a shareholder at Rhodes McKee who leads the firm's technology transactions, privacy, and cybersecurity practice, about how businesses and law firms can adopt AI responsibly without putting their data, clients, or reputation at risk. Ostrow explains that while there is no single federal law governing AI yet, the existing patchwork of roughly 20 state consumer privacy laws and industry specific rules like HIPAA provide the framework through which AI use policies should be built, with the guiding principle of using the least amount of information for the shortest possible time to get the job done. He walks through the risk differences between consumer AI tools, walled enterprise platforms like LexisNexis Protégé which uses Claude, cloud hosted private instances, and on premises deployments, explaining that the right choice depends on each organization's appetite for risk and the sensitivity of the data involved. The conversation digs into agentic AI as the biggest risk multiplier, where errors compound across tasks without human review, hallucinations become harder to detect and undo the further down a chain they go, and the question shifts from whether a human is in the loop to where in the loop that human actually lives. Ostrow also flags an emerging and underappreciated risk: NDAs are now including clauses prohibiting the use of confidential information to train AI models, meaning organizations running self training agents could unknowingly violate agreements before anyone has a chance to review what was ingested. The episode closes with a look at AI driven dynamic pricing concerns, the importance of updating your insurance broker when your AI use profile changes, and the throughline that responsible AI adoption is not about avoiding the technology but about building the right guardrails before you need them. 00:00 AI Risk and Where It Lives 01:00 Meet Hal Ostrow 02:00 Building Compliant AI Policy 03:00 Privacy Law as the AI Framework 05:00 Consumer Tools vs. Enterprise Platforms 07:00 On Premises Hosting and Cybersecurity Risk 10:00 Agentic AI and the Risk Multiplier 12:00 Hallucinations and Professional Liability 14:00 Human in the Loop and Where It Matters 16:00 AI Slop and Output Accuracy Standards 18:00 Fact Checking as a New Job Function 19:00 Dynamic Pricing and Consumer Profiling 21:00 Updating Insurance for AI Risk 22:00 NDAs and the AI Training Clause 24:00 Agentic Memory and Unwitting NDA Violations 26:00 On Prem as a Privacy Strategy 27:30 Wrap Up

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Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.