Legal AI startup Spellbook hired a new CMO — and she has strong opinions on avoiding 'creepy' AI marketing

Adtech vet Brian O'Kelley's startup is pivoting to AI agents and rebranding with a new name

OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'

Taboola is buying a rival adtech company to gain a bigger foothold with lucrative finance clients

The new CMO of a legal tech startup has a message for marketers: Stop using AI to pretend to be human.

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.