San Francisco, California – Law firm marketing company, Custom Legal Marketing, is celebrating its 21st year in business. While many law firms and agencies are still focused primarily on search engine optimization (SEO), Custom Legal Marketing is embracing AI answer engine optimization in a big way.

The company, founded in January 2005 under parent company Adviatech, began at a time when Google was one of several major search engines, social media platforms had little relevance to law firms and smartphones had yet to reshape daily life. Its anniversary arrives as artificial intelligence tools and answer engines alter how people find lawyers and evaluate law firms online.

Over the past two decades, Custom Legal Marketing has helped move the legal industry through the gradual transition from static brochure websites to integrated digital strategies that fold in search engine visibility, content, local search, email outreach and video.

The shift towards AI chatbots may have been unexpected for some, but CLM started developing AI-focused strategies years before ChatGPT was shared with the public. CLM has invested in an AI-powered marketing platform that has supercharged the way their team gets results for law firms. The system is built entirely in-house and has been getting integrated into the various departments within CLM. After nearly 4 years of secrecy, CLM plans to announce the platform publicly later this year.

Custom Legal Marketing’s evolution has been driven as much by experimentation as by process. Designers, writers and developers work together on campaigns that often blend long-form explainers, visual storytelling and search-focused content, with the goal of making complex legal issues accessible without sacrificing accuracy. More recently, the company’s homegrown AI platform has become a quiet engine behind many of those efforts, surfacing patterns in search trends, user behavior and local competition that inform creative choices rather than replace them.

That mix of creativity and data has led to work that stands out in a crowded field. Custom Legal Marketing’s projects have included award-winning commercial production and web campaigns that helped small firms expand into regional practices. Many clients have remained with the agency through multiple redesigns and market shifts, citing a willingness to test new ideas while staying candid about what is and is not working.

“Our culture has always been about creative thinking and not just chasing Google’s latest move,” co-founder Jason Bland said. “Our team members having the freedom to experiment is one of the reasons we’re so far ahead of the curve on AI marketing.”