Imagine trying to break into an industry, trying to build proof and trust, and starting from zero. Well, here is how I landed my first legal marketing case study without spending a dollar on ads. I barely had warm introductions, no industry connections, and no friends who were practising lawyers. I did have some track record as a digital marketer, so I proceeded to learn cold outreach from zero and learned to leverage A.I. tools.
Here’s exactly how I did it, and how you can replicate this method to break into any B2B industry in Singapore.
The Challenge: Trying to Build Trust in the Legal Industry
In my last business, I relied on SEO content and paid ads to grow to six figures. This time, I wanted to do things differently. Six months into executing SEO, I realised I was competing against established digital marketing agencies with huge SEO budgets.
Secondly, these days, due to the low perceived barriers to entry, everyone on the internet claims they’re a digital marketer.
The worst part? They are running “irresistible offers” (Alex Hormozi, no thanks to you!), for example, unlimited tasks for a fixed price.
I didn’t want to go down that route. I decided it wasn’t a sustainable (nor enjoyable) business model.
Instead, I decided to niche down to the legal industry. I wanted to solve ONE specific problem for ONE specific market. The challenge? Trying to break into the legal industry is a high bar. Pun intended. Lawyers want to see case studies from their industry before they’ll talk to you, and I had zero case studies.
The Solution: Lead Generation From Alex Hormozi’s Acquisition Framework
I got this framework from Alex Hormozi. If you’re in digital marketing, you probably know who he is.
There are generally four types of lead generation/client acquisition.
First is warm outreach. I spoke at Legal Tech Fair 2025 hosted by Law Society Singapore. I got invited to speak because I blogged about SEO and digital marketing for lawyers. I think someone from Law Society read it and liked it. I made a couple of lawyer contacts, but not many. I reached out to them, got one referral and some good insights about the legal industry.
Second is cold outreach. This was eventually how I got my first case study. I spammed 10% of Singapore’s legal industry. That’s 600 lawyer inboxes. Singapore has about 6,000-odd practising lawyers.
Third is by posting content. This is accomplished through building reach, presence, and trust through content marketing. Think posting on Instagram, short reels, YouTube videos, and SEO content. I did this initially. I started ranking for a couple of legal marketing keywords in Singapore. This generated one or two enquiries. Yet, in spite of ranking on the top of Google, the law firm that enquired asked for case studies.
Fourth is paid ads. My favourite and go-to is Meta ads. I decided not to go down this route until I built a couple of case studies in the legal industry. Plus, I was curious about cold outreach. Yes, it’s embarrassing for a marketer to be good at paid advertising, SEO, and not know anything about the traditional cold outreach methods!
How I Scraped the Web for My Cold Outreach B2B Lead Generation Campaign
I built up a list of around 600 prospects by scraping a law firm directory. This took around a month of processing the data because I didn’t know anything about Python nor automation scripts when I started. It was manual, there was a ton of false data, and many firms listed on that directory were outdated and weren’t even local!
It wasn’t rocket science. Yet, the difficult part wasn’t scraping the internet. It was that I wasn’t proficient at scripts yet, nor did I have a developer’s perspective of how websites function.
It was also my first time doing cold outreach for B2B sales. I guess I “succeeded” on my first try because I have years of marketing background behind me. The result? I connected with a business development manager who was an ex-lawyer at a mid-sized law firm. She referred me to Kelvin Ong from Contigo Law. He came on board and that was how I got my first case study in the legal industry.
Prior to this, I had done cold outreach to acquire SEO backlinks, so I applied similar principles. I used Hunter.io to get the emails, and I used Mailshake to schedule automated emails.
Later, I found out that today’s cold email outreach landscape has changed. Since everyone is getting spammed in their inboxes, deliverability has dropped to an all-time low, and inboxes and spam filters are more sensitive!
You can find formal or informal directories of different industries online. If you’re in B2B lead generation… simply apply same principles!
The Manual Method: Web Scraping with Chrome Plugin
I used a web scraper to scrape the law firm directory. It’s entirely free. You can find it at webscraper.io. This is the free software or plugin I used to scrape that entire directory.
Yet today, you don’t have to do this. I’m going to show you a more advanced method I’ve been playing around with.
AI Powered Scraping with Python Scripts
It is amazing what AI can do today. There’s an interesting term for this. It’s called vibe coding.
In short, use Grok, ChatGPT, or Claude, put in a prompt and say something like “I want to scrape this directory with IDLE/Python, I am a complete beginner, teach me step by step as if I am new to code.” You’ll be extremely amazed at how detailed and intuitive this process is. I personally am on the paid version of Claude and Opus 4.5 is the most intuitive model I’ve experienced thus far. Yet, when my tokens run out, I’ve used Grok and the free version of ChatGPT to check and edit my code.
I launched all my scripts either from Python’s basic editor and shell or the computer’s terminal itself. It is free and easy to use!
Now… staring at basic code seems daunting. But I promise you, once you get the hang of it, it’s fun, interesting, and really just about inputting basic keystrokes and buttons. You don’t even need to know how to actually code. Whenever you run into a problem, you can simply have a back and forth conversation with free public LLMs, and 90% of the time, you’ll have the desired result.
IDLE is one of the most basic code editors. You will be surprised that you do NOT need fancy frontend platforms like N8N or Make.com to get quite good results. That said, you could learn N8N if you prefer a visual interface. It provides a frontend platform for you to visualise workflows. I actually started with Make.com before moving to code.
I used vibe coding, launching scripts from IDLE to scrape websites, get hold of scraped data, and pass it into LLMs to give me detailed analysis on companies. I went on to play around with the data by generating ice breakers personalised to each law firm for my outreach emails.
My Thought Process of Using Agentic AI in Outreach Campaigns
I find processing batches of data better than working with one entire workflow where it may break, or when certain parts of it need to be refined. For example, if I have 200 rows of data on an Excel sheet, it’s better to process 20 of them first than to build up an entire workflow (or code flow) to process all 200 at one go.
Hence, I have multiple scripts for each function, for example, pulling emails from HubSpot or mass updating data in my CRM. Then analysing the email and the firm’s data. Then personalising it based on scraped data from the internet. It takes me three to four scripts to get to the end product, in batches of 20. This works for me, as opposed to building a humongous workflow on N8N or Make.com.
So when it comes to using AI, the end product of 100% code automation or 100% AI reliance may get you hallucinated results. For example, if your emails are too standardised, then you won’t pass the email spam filters.
I am of the opinion that 60% to 65% automation and AI reliance with at least 30% manual oversight, editing is the golden balance.
Today, one must assume that EVERYBODY is doing email cold outreach. I mean, as a business owner, you DO get spammed, pitched in your inbox incessantly right?
You can imagine that spam filters, Gmail, and inboxes are sensitive when it comes to cold outreach campaigns. They’ll be quick to filter your email into spam folders.
This is why we want to ‘personalise’ each outreach to get by spam filters. The individual receiving it would also perceive you to have put in more effort in understanding their company and their profile.
You can personalise at scale by relying on Spintax, using placeholders in outreach tools, and writing out personalised icebreakers for each email address (with the help of LLMs of course).
I’ve set up my agents to scrape website data, then pass the data into an LLM to determine if their firm is a full service firm or a specialised one, like shipping or M&A or intellectual property. I also manually review and rewrite the icebreakers that my LLMs produce for me!
Hence, I am fundamentally not being disingenuous when using AI workflows to automate certain processes!
In this process, I actually do get to understand their business better!
How to Use Agentic AI as a Scraper, Researcher, and Personalised Creator
The first time I did my outreach campaign, it was not personalised. It was not precise either. I didn’t research who the managing directors and partners of law firms were. I didn’t narrow down an ideal customer profile.
I just went bazooka and hit many spam filters.
I was just emailing any lawyer that my scrapers could get their hands on. That was because I didn’t have the bandwidth to process 300+ law firms, and I didn’t know how to leverage code and AI just yet! (Sorry to lawyers who received my ‘spam’ emails!)
Today, you can prompt an LLM:
“Give me a script where I have domain name, firm name, and email. Find me APIs where I can search Google to research that individual’s profile. Scrape the website for the lawyer’s team page and extract the profile data. Then pass the data into a free LLM like Gemini to personalise that email.”
There are LLMs callable by APIs on Gemini and Groq that are free. Just go to Google AI Studio or Groq.com and create a free account. Nonetheless, there are limits for free usage.
The better you are at prompting AI, creating and launching agentic AIs from simple code editors, and working with different APIs like Gemini, Apify (a pretty good scraper that bypasses a lot of bot detection software), and Groq, the better your results.
What you want to do is build up this process and use AI to help you as a researcher, as a scraper, and as your analyser. This way you can come up with a more targeted list and scale any B2B outreach campaign in almost any industry.
The Bottom Line
I hope I gave you the overarching ideas on how to generate leads with the help of AI in any B2B industry without spending on ads, just relying on cold email outreach. Using simple tools like IDLE, free LLMs, and free APIs.
I did it without any connections in the legal industry that is perceived to be elite and prestigious in Singapore. You don’t need connections. You don’t need an ad budget.
You need a well thought out process that leverages AI capabilities.
The bottom line: get AI to be your researcher, your analyser, and your personalisation assistant. Use AI to help build out agentic AI that you can launch from the simplest of code editors. Use AI as a feedback loop whenever you run into a workflow problem. You’ll be surprised how intuitive some of the better LLMs are. I personally LOVE Opus 4.5. It’s not the fastest in response but it’s intuitive!
You can scrape any directory online, personalise based on the contact’s email, and scale an outreach campaign. The sky’s the limit for cold B2B lead generation!
