Do you think that artificial intelligence can reshape digital marketing? It’s common to hear digital marketers say they’re drowning in data but starving for insights. The software they rely on to gather and analyze information is often expensive, fragmented, or involved in legal battles that slow innovation.
The recent lawsuit between CanLII, a nonprofit known for providing free access to legal information, and Caseway, a startup using artificial intelligence to speed up legal research, has sparked a conversation beyond their dispute. It’s a fight over who controls public data and how it can be used, with implications far beyond the legal industry.
If you’re in digital marketing and you’re not watching the courts, you’re probably asleep at the wheel.
I’ve run marketing for SaaS platforms, law firms, and a couple of sketchy crypto things I’ll never admit to again. Through it all, one pattern keeps popping up: legal decisions keep blindsiding the ad world. Not with loud bangs, but with quiet rulings that change everything six months later.
Meta vs. the EU
Take Meta vs. the EU. That ruling sliced through ad targeting like a dull knife through an avocado. Nobody even noticed until CPMs in Europe doubled. We were paying $12 for traffic that used to cost $5. This is because personalized ad targeting got kneecapped and we all had to retarget using interest groups that hadn’t worked since 2016. I remember one campaign where conversions dropped 38% overnight. We weren’t even doing anything shady, just normal lookalikes and a pixel. Poof. Gone.
Now, marketers love to pretend they’re one algorithm tweak away from profit. But the real threat is courtrooms. Judges don’t care about your CTR. They care about consent. And guess what? Most of us aren’t getting it properly.
There’s this weird belief that slapping a cookie banner on your homepage fixes everything. It doesn’t. Half the banners out there load trackers before the user even clicks “accept.” That’s illegal in most of Europe. The lawyers are starting to catch up. And if you think the lawsuits won’t cross the ocean, you’ve never seen how fast American lawyers move when they smell blood.
Over 4,000 privacy-related lawsuits in 2023 hit companies in the U.S. That’s over 10 a day. And not all of them were big technology companies. Small eCommerce brands, newsletters, local agencies, they’re all fair game now. One Shopify store I worked with got hit because they embedded a TikTok pixel without disclosing it. They settled for $25,000. For context, that store made $200,000 a year. That’s like losing 12.5% of your revenue just for forgetting to update your privacy policy.
Digital Marketers In California and The CCPA
Remember the CCPA, which is California’s version of GDPR? People laughed it off when it launched. Not anymore. I’ve seen businesses spend more time redacting user data than building products. That’s not even a joke. One founder told me they pay a VA twenty hours a week just to manage deletion requests.
Things get even messier with influencers. FTC rules say you have to disclose paid relationships. But what counts as “paid”? A free product? An affiliate link? A shoutout swap? One client I worked with sent out free skincare kits to influencers. Five of them didn’t disclose the sponsorship. The brand didn’t tell them to. But guess who got the warning letter from the FTC? Not the influencers.
This stuff snowballs. One warning leads to an audit. The audit finds missing disclosures. Suddenly you’re on the hook for deceptive marketing. That’s $43,792 per violation. Do the math. Ten posts with improper tagging and you’re flirting with a half-million-dollar fine. For what? A serum you gave away for free?
There’s a reason I keep lawyers in my Slack.
Google and Facebook can afford this. You can’t. They’ll tweak their platforms, lawyer up, and keep going. You? You’ll get crushed. I’ve watched agencies collapse because one client decided to sue over “non-compliant advertising.” And you know what sucks? The contract didn’t even cover it. No indemnity clause. Just vibes and regret.
Digital Marketers And AI Blogs
The courts don’t care about how clever your funnel is. They care whether you asked for permission. Whether you tricked someone. Whether you tried to sneak around a rule and got caught. It’s like playing Monopoly with a cop.
And now with AI in the mix, the legal stuff multiplies. You use ChatGPT to generate ad copy. Great. But who owns that copy? Can you copyright it? Can someone sue if the model plagiarizes them? It’s not hypothetical. I know a company that got a cease-and-desist because their AI-made blog post matched another post 90%. The kicker? Both were made by ChatGPT. Who do you even blame?
So yeah, I’m skeptical when marketers say “the future is AI.” Nah. The future is lawsuits about AI.
The truth is, digital marketing isn’t digital anymore. It’s legal marketing. You spend more time decoding laws than tweaking landing pages. GDPR, CCPA, CASL, LGPD… at this point, I’m alphabet soup fluent. My bookmarks tab is 90% compliance pages. My favorite Slack emoji is a gavel.
You Can Beat Your Non Compliant Competitors
Still, there’s an upside. If you get ahead of this, you win. You outlast competitors who sleep on it and you build trust. You stop worrying about getting nuked by some random privacy audit.
But don’t wait. Legal change doesn’t knock. It kicks the door in and eats your CAC alive.
So yeah. That’s the view from inside. If you’re still running your pixel without reading your terms of service, maybe take the weekend and rethink your funnel. Or don’t. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when your ads get banned, your Stripe account gets frozen, and your lawyer starts charging overtime.
And if you’re lucky, maybe your brand will make it into a class action headline. Free PR, right?
Sort of.
Do you think digital marketers have a lot to be concerned about?
