Legal AI startup Spellbook hired a new CMO — and she has strong opinions on avoiding 'creepy' AI marketing
· Business Insider
Meltem Kuran Berkowitz
- Legal AI startup Spellbook has appointed Meltem Kuran-Berkowitz as its CMO.
- Kuran-Berkowitz wants Spellbook's marketing to help it hit the $100 million mark.
- Spellbook is embracing AI, but she draws the line at using it to impersonate human communication.
The new CMO of a legal tech startup has a message for marketers: Stop using AI to pretend to be human.
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Spellbook, which offers AI tools for drafting and analyzing legal contracts, exclusively told CMO Insider that it had appointed Meltem Kuran-Berkowitz as its chief marketing officer.
She is taking the top marketing role full time after a brief stint freelancing for the company. Kuran-Berkowitz previously spent five and a half years as head of growth at the payroll and workforce platform Deel, overseeing the company's growth to $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.
Kuran-Berkowitz joins Spellbook as it, too, is leveling up. In October 2025, the company raised $50 million in Series B funding at a $350 million valuation, led by Khosla Ventures. In March, the company secured a $40 million debt facility, which it said it would put toward acquiring rival generative AI companies.
The legal tech space is booming. Investors poured $2 billion into startups building for the legal sector in the first half of this year, per the market research firm Crunchbase, as AI has transformed one of Silicon Valley's sleepier corners into one of its hottest. Legal AI specialists like Harvey and Legora are competing alongside tech giants like OpenAI as law firms and corporate legal teams race to adopt tools that promise to automate grunt work.
Kuran-Berkowitz said an early measure of her success will be helping the company hit $100 million in revenue by the end of this year.
Getting there, she said, means making far more potential customers aware of the company. She doesn't plan to flood them with AI-generated marketing, though.
"If we're going to get somebody's eyeballs, whether it's in an email or an Instagram post, we're going to be honest with you about it: it's going to be made from another human, and we're not going to waste your time," Kuran-Berkowitz said.
There are places where Kuran-Berkowitz thinks AI can be useful in marketing, from mining sales calls for insights to building internal presentation decks. She draws the line when it starts to impersonate human interaction.
"My inbox has blown out with cold emails because now everybody can write them. Now, everybody finds the one niche thing we have in common," Kuran-Berkowitz said.
She gave the example of AI-personalized cold emails that manufacture tenuous connections with lines like: "I was in Italy once."
She said that kind of AI-generated familiarity "feels creepy."
"I feel very strongly towards those things, and I just don't want to do that to people," Kuran-Berkowitz said.
Spellbook CEO Scott Stevenson also has strong opinions on his employees' use of AI. Earlier this month, he wrote a memo encouraging staffers to write the rough, "D+ version" of their ideas first, before leaning on AI to polish their proposals.
Spellbook's marketing plan
Kuran-Berkowitz said she doesn't want to follow legal tech startups like Harvey and Legora in going down the celebrity-sponsorship marketing route. Instead, she wants "every single touchpoint with the customer to be meaningful," and explain what the product does.
Her media strategy involves showing up in the places where Spellbook's potential customers already spend their time — from closed communities to newsletters — without, as Kuran-Berkowitz puts it, "ruining the vibes."
"Where can we fit ourselves nicely without ruining the vibes? And then what can we produce and add to the vibes?" she said.
This summer, for example, Spellbook created a $1 million fellowship fund for law students to help them streamline wonky legal workflows.
Ultimately, Kuran-Berkowitz wants to expand perceptions of Spellbook beyond the redlining tool that made its name. She wants Spellbook to be the default brand people associate with managing contracts.
"The world runs on contracts," she said. "That's just a fact, and the contracts run on Spellbook."
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