For many individuals and small businesses, a legal issue starts with uncertainty about where to turn. They may not know what kind of help they need or how to find it. For Rocket Lawyer, a company long associated with legal documents, addressing that uncertainty meant explaining a broader role in customers’ legal needs without letting a technology story overshadow the service itself.
In this PRNEWS Q&A, Deborah Holstein, Chief Growth Officer at Rocket Lawyer, discusses the communications work behind that shift: how the company made the case internally for a change in focus and how it approached messaging in a category where trust is essential.
PRNEWS: What prompted Rocket Lawyer to broaden its value proposition beyond legal documents? 
Deborah Holstein: At the cornerstone of legal protection and the legal system are documents. That’s where Rocket Lawyer started. While authoring a new legal document is the right legal solution for some legal matters faced by individuals and small business owners, it’s not the solution or a complete solution for every legal matter we know they face.
A majority of individuals and solo and micro business owners don’t feel like they know enough about the law or their unique legal matter to even decide what the best legal solution is for them. They tell us that they would prefer to work with an attorney, if they could.
PRNEWS: How did you build internal alignment around that change?
Holstein : I want everyone to recognize the same problem because I need everybody’s thinking to come up with the right solution for it.
It takes some time because not everybody is going to be convinced in the same way. You sometimes have to think about how you talk about operations, finance and product. [She describes sharing customer and market insights in ongoing conversations, rather than expecting a single presentation to win everyone over.]
The more people you can bring into your problem, the more likely it is that they’ll all be a part of the solution.
PRNEWS: How did you explain the new experience to customers?
Holstein: We shifted our messaging to focus on the full, complete legal matter, as opposed to just a solution we had. We were trying to encourage people to come with their questions: ask a question, bring a contract you have a question about.
One of the first legal matters that we started promoting was, ‘Hey, I have a contract from my customer. I don’t know if I should sign it.’ That’s a huge legal matter that we didn’t have a way to help them with before. A lot of these solo and micro business owners are working with companies far bigger than them that have in-house attorneys writing these things. They feel very intimidated, and they’re like, ‘I don’t really know what an indemnity clause is. What should I do with this?’
We were pushing on that because we wanted to see how many new and different kinds of people would have this need. We had the research to show it, but you never know until you put it out there. We started to get huge amounts of people sharing their documents and getting insights from what the AI can tell them about what they should do or look at. A lot of them were also leaning into talking or asking questions to an attorney.
PRNEWS: How do you describe the relationship between AI guidance and attorney advice?
Holstein: There’s a bright line between legal information and legal advice. As soon as you’re ready to say, ‘I want to know how the law applies to me and what should I do,’ you need an actual human, living, breathing attorney to be able to apply their practice and your situation to the law, and that becomes legal advice.
[The company’s message, she says, is about user choice: “What we’ve found is that people like that agency and that choice. They’re not being shunted one way or another.]
PRNEWS: What does building trust require in a sensitive category like legal services?
Holstein: In legal, you don’t want to just have a most likely response. You want to have a response you can trust.
She says Rocket Lawyer uses lawyers to train and prompt its AI and makes it possible for users to connect with an attorney during the process. This is really focused on making sure that your legal matter gets addressed.
PRNEWS: What are you watching to assess whether the approach is working?
Holstein: We’re watching, of course, cost of acquisition. We’re watching return visits and what they’re doing in those return visits. We are watching whether they’re using multiple different aspects of the experience as opposed to just one or another.
We’re really focused now in figuring out what are the few legal matters that are going to be the cornerstone of our investment. We don’t have infinite dollars or infinite resources, so we need to make sure that what we’re doing is focused and optimized so that we can break through and bring in people that we know are going to get value out of what they’re doing here.
PRNEWS: What communications advice would you offer other communications and marketing leaders?
Holstein: Trust your instincts. You are closer to customers. You are closer to how they’re getting information. You’re seeing it in real time. Tie what you’re doing to the business fundamentals. Share your insights and what you’re seeing and learning. Share early and often.
Bring up those insights in conversations in different contexts—not just a big presentation, but in general updates, when you’re reviewing copy or a new product experience. You want to be bringing those insights and updates into the day to day because that also helps people make that connection.