Amy Shepherd Talks AI-Powered Business Development and the Future of Legal Marketing

Amy Shepherd has spent two decades turning cutting-edge ideas into measurable growth for Am Law firms. Now an advisor at Gladstone Growth Strategies and founder of Amy AI, she’s helping marketing and BD teams see where artificial intelligence fits—and where old-school resilience still wins. In this episode of Real Lawyers, Kevin digs into Amy’s playbook: from building Ballard Spahr’s blog and podcast network to surveying firms on real-world AI adoption.

Watch the full conversation below (or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the usual spots).

Episode Outline

• 00:52 — How Ballard Spahr scaled its blog and podcast stack and why focus beats flash
• 03:32 — Reading client volatility and tailoring content to how people actually consume it
• 05:57 — Champion lawyers, pandemic inflection and making digital publishing feel effortless
• 09:11 — Career advice for young legal marketers: patience, curiosity and relentless resilience
• 15:25 — From an AWS blogging legend to Amy’s own light-bulb moment on AI
• 22:06 — AI’s “white space”: freeing associates to build networks earlier in their careers
• 31:18 — Early survey data: firms nail governance yet lag on basic AI literacy and tooling
• 38:55 — Why LexBlog Compass can rescue thought leadership from 15-page bios
• 45:00 — Content hubs, digitisation and making authority discoverable for LLMs
• 54:04 — What drew Amy to Gladstone’s roundtables and its new AI advisory

Key Takeaways

• Visionary champions turn niche topics into firm-wide momentum
• AI governance is ahead of day-to-day experimentation, so literacy gaps remain
• Digitised content hubs will decide who shows up as an authority in search-driven AI
• Associates can use AI to clear grunt work and start real BD far earlier
• Resilience, collaboration and timing still beat any single piece of tech