Revisiting Technology: The Paperless Office

Episode Notes

Transcript

Kennedy-Mighell Report: Revisiting Technology: The Paperless Office – 2/27/2015

Advertiser: Got the world turning as fast as it can? Hear how technology can help – legally speaking. With two of the top legal technology experts, authors, and lawyers: Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to the Kennedy-Mighell report, here on the Legal Talk Network.

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to episode 147 of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in St. Louis.

Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode we talked about my reflections, primarily, on attending LegalTech New York 2015 and some of our observations – the both of us – about the current state of legal technology. In this episode, we want to continue our new and occasional series of fresh looks at old technologies that might have been forgotten but might now be ready for prime time. Next up, and for some, the holy grail of technology, the paperless office. Tom, what’s in our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, we’ll be revisiting the idea of the paperless office and whether we’re any closer to it. In our second segment, we try to understand the undying devotion to Wordperfect 5.1 that some lawyers continue to have. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip, website or observation that you could use the second that this podcast is over. But first let’s get started on our first segment, our first topic, and that’s the paperless office. Back when we recorded our 2015 resolutions episode, one of your recommendations, Dennis, was to revisit something old and see if it’s new again; if it has been revitalized, if people are talking about it again. What I would call – I guess – the mythical paperless office, is definitely something that fits into that category so we thought it would be a good idea to talk about it. We’ve been talking about paperless for years, and there’s a lot of lawyers – I think there’s a lot of lawyers – who greatly reduce the amount of paper in their practice. But would I argue – and I will argue soon – that there are still a lot of lawyers who feel like they’re still buried in paper and still haven’t made much of a move to the paperless office. What about you, Dennis? How close are you to the paperless office these days?

Dennis Kennedy: I was working on my taxes the last week and I can say that I felt as far away from paperless as it’s possible to get. I still have stacks of receipts and papers and stuff like that and I’ve got some things scanned and I kept trying to do better at it. But ultimately, I still find a lot of paper around me. I try to think of some of the reasons for that, there’s still a lot of paper that comes to us on a regular basis. It’s still a little bit easier for me to read on paper as opposed to some monitors and some screens; so that has something to do with it. And I was thinking about what you said to start out, Tom, that there are lawyers who think they’ve greatly reduced the paper in their practice, and I sort of thing some of these things have happened as a result of what others have done, more so than what we’ve done. So I think I’ve really helped myself on the paperless side by not going to paperless billing and online billing and online statements and I think a lot of that started to help. So I’m closer than I’ve been in a long time, actually, but it just seems like there’s still a long way to go.

Tom Mighell: I think so too. When we think about where we thought we might be this year based on where we actually are, I don’t – and I’m speaking more for the general legal population rather than just you or me – I don’t think that I thought we would be in any different a position. With most things, lawyers are slow to adapt anything. And I’ve got to believe that there are still tons and tons of lawyers out there who are still clinging on to paper. I work with – and for the purposes of this discussion – I’m going to do some comparisons to what I do in my regular job, which is work with corporations. And corporations, not lawyers – although they have legal departments, but in general – there’s a lot of non law firm companies that I work with that think the same thing. For some reason, they need to keep that paper. What’s different though, I think, is that for some of these companies, they do. There are some regulators that still require paper records, amazingly. There are some laws, or practices that require what we call the wet signature, or original signatures on contracts, on other kinds of documents. But, I don’t know, Dennis. In the legal field, I sort of of feel that most of these requirements are going away to a certain extent. More and more courts are allowing e-filing. I would think that most courts do, I have no idea what the more rural areas are doing so I could be wrong about that. But it seems to me that the requirements to keep things in paper – for lawyers anyway – are diminishing. With the e-signatures act, and the ability to sign things electronically. The need for signatures and paper is not as necessary. I don’t know, am I off-base on that? What could be the reason why people are keeping stuff in paper still?

Dennis Kennedy: I think that if it comes to being on paper, it’s likely to stay in paper, so that’s always been an issue. I think that to react some of the things that you were saying, what I find is that a lot of people asking me if we can really use email for signature and send PDF’s back and forth. So there is, for a number of reasons. Speed: you can get documents signed the same day at the same time. All of those things are good. I think there’s sort of less of a requirement these days for notarization and things like that in a lot of cases, and that helps. And I think people are more comfortable in general with electronic documents. Where I think you start to get a lot of paper is when it comes to you as paper and you figure you have to deal with it. When you still get original documents, I really think it’s hard to scan and throw out. It’s not hard to scan but I think that throwing out part of it is difficult. And then there’s all these file rooms and file folders and file cabinets full of paper that people are trying to decide what to do with. So I think that the paper’s still around but I think there is a trend that’s out there and I think we’ve talked about it on the podcast before, about the millennials who’ve never really owned a printer. And because I’m co teaching a class in law school, what I realized was that I was in this unusual situation – they’re written assignments as a drafting class and the students send turn in their assignments to me by email; word documents. And then I’m the one who prints them out and hands them back with a grade on them, which is this odd place where I didn’t realize that buying paper was going to be part of teaching this class. Whether you think of it as workflow or the inflow of documents, that’s changing. And I think that’s definitely had some impact on the amount and type of paper we use. Also I think there’s a certain comfort with PDF’s and other types of scanned odum cents.

Tom Mighell: So here’s what’s interesting to me is when we decided to talk about this, I went back and looked at last year’s ABA Legal Technology Resource Center survey; just to see, just to look at. And what’s interesting about the survey and what i want to talk to you and others about this is there really  aren’t questions so much about going paperless. The questions are all about scanning and do you use scanners. And here’s what’s really interesting: only around 70% of the law firms that were surveyed, and those include solos, so solos all the way up to the biggest firms in the country reported having scanners – which seems low to me. But that’s just the availability of the scanner. That doesn’t really say using. When it comes to actually using the scanning software or the scanner itself, then that’s actually somewhere between 48% and 60%. When you’re asked, do you use the scanner, whether it’s a flatbed scanner, or a sheetfed scanner, or even a portable scanner, between 48 and 60%. Even when the technology’s available, 40-50% of lawyers are not scanning documents. So I think that sort of bears up with what you say about if it comes as paper, it stays as paper. What’s interesting to me is that of those groups that are actually using the scanning, solo lawyers tend to be scanning more on average than lawyers in firms that are larger and I think that maybe that’s because it’s easier to do that. I think – and one of the things that I’m going to talk about when we get to next steps and lessons – are to break that cycle, that if it comes in paper it stays in paper, you’ve really got to have a process. It’s developing that process that’s repeatable and consistent. And I know a lot of firms are doing this, probably larger firms, but a lot of the companies I work with are doing this also. I’ll just use one client as an example. They don’t create a lot of paper, but they receive a lot of paper from outside the company. They get invoices, they get documents from vendors or customers, they get a lot of incoming mail, that sort of thing. When the paper comes in, it all goes to the same place. It goes to – in this case – the mailroom, essentially, where there’s a high speed scanner. It’s used to scan everything in. They make it available on a shared drive for the users who can then move it to other places, do other things with it. After a certain period of time, usually 30 days, maybe 60 days, that paper is automatically destroyed. 30-60 days to make sure that everything’s okay with the scanned copy. I know that there’s law firms that use a process that’s similar to that; or sometimes assistants or lawyers are just using a simple Fujitsu ScanSnap – I know that’s one of our favorite scanners to talk about – as paper comes to them. But I don’t believe that it’s happening as often in law firms as it really can be happening or should be happening or else we’d be having more lawyers using scanners.

Dennis Kennedy: I’m sitting here as we speak as I look at my Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 and it’s just made a world of difference for me. But I still don’t have a great workflow of getting everything scanned into there and we’ll talk about how there’s multiple components to the paperless notion. And I think that it’s not so much for me – and into speaking personally for me – of the scanning part, because I think that scanners do an amazing job these days. But it’s the latter parts to the process that are what are the inhibiting factors for me. And I guess when you talk about solos leading the bigger firm lawyers, that makes sense to me to because I think the ScanSnap is about $500. And I think as a solo, it’s a fairly easy technology decision but I think in a bigger firm, even though it’s not that much money given the hourly fees and the amount of revenue involved in law firms. But I think the idea of a law firm is going to spend $500 to give each lawyer to a ScanSnap to sit on his or her desk is probably not very likely, so-

Tom Mighell: But – just to interrupt for a second – you don’t really need that because even when I was working at the law firm, the high speed copy machines all had scanners built into them. You don’t need a ScanSnap at every desk. You can go and feed all your paper you get for the day through a high speed scanner in the corner copy room and it’ll take you 5 minutes to do it. So I agree, I think it’s probably cost prohibitive to give everybody a Fujitsu ScanSnap in the bigger firms, but there’s still options for it.

Dennis Kennedy: I agree with you on the high speed scanner, but my analogy there is if you’re going to start an exercise or fitness program, you need to eliminate every potential excuse that you have not to do the exercise or to get started in the program. And when you have the scanner sitting right in front of your nose on your desk, you’re basically taking away all the excuses. With the high speed copier scanner, then you can always say, “Oh, here’s my stack of stuff that has to be scanned, I have to walk all the way down the hall to do this.” You come up with a bunch of excuses the same way as you do if you’re going to work out. So I think that, bizarrely, if you think about it, that also enters into the picture.

Tom Mighell: Alright Mr. Making Excuses for the lawyers, the way to solve that problem is is that the paper doesn’t actually get to the lawyer. That if it’s the mail, or it’s discovery response, or if it’s some other documentation that the lawyer’s receiving from outside, then it doesn’t get to the lawyer until it’s electronic; the lawyer doesn’t see it. You can control that. Now the paper that the lawyer creates, you’re right; not much you can do about that. There’s ways around it, but I agree with you. It’s hard to get to that point because people are ingrained, they like to do things a certain way. So maybe it might be helpful to think about the components that you mentioned. So what are the components that we’re talking about for a truly paperless situation?

Dennis Kennedy: I think there are 3 steps, and as you point out, I don’t think we’re going to overly-focus on in this podcast; there is this whole process notion. But I think the components are scanning, storing, and searching or finding. I think what’s interesting in what we think about revisiting is we go back to the common themes that we’ve been talking about. Processor, powers, speed, storage, bandwidth, the Cloud, smartphones, apps, those common themes. I think some of those all have an impact on this in each of the categories. But I think that we can break those down. I think it’s the storing and naming thing that for me causes most of the backlog these days. So I don’t know if you want to work through each of those, Tom, and I think there’s maybe a fourth component which is avoiding turning original digital material into paper; which could be another piece of that, sort of like the anti-scanning or anti-printing component. But we talked a bit about scanning. So the scanners I think people are pretty well-set on. But before the podcast Tom, you and I were talking about it; I think it’s the smartphone and the tablets and the cameras in there and using them as a scanner that to me are really starting to make a difference in my paperless approaches.

Tom Mighell: Well frankly, that’s what I do too. And when you talk about the different components, for me personally, granted, I don’t have a law practice anymore, I’m a consultant. But I’m really in that sort of mythical fourth component that you’re talking about. Don’t turn the digital into paper in the first place. For work, i am almost completely paperless. I literally have no paper. Everything’s electronic, if the client wants to print out something that I send them, that’s their prerogative, they can have it in paper. If I get paper documents from a client, which I try to discourage – but sometimes I’ll be in an interview, somebody will bring paper examples for me to look at – I will immediately scan those records. I’ve got my phone or my iPad with me, and there are some terrific scanning apps on both of them that will grab and capture things really nicely. I think it’s interesting, though, and I agree with you, that these apps make it easier for people to scan. But I just don’t think that lawyers think about them enough. I think that they don’t necessarily think about scanning as much as they think about maybe taking a picture of a document – which essentially is what they’re doing by scanning, but they don’t equate it in the same way. But coming back to the stats, the LTRC Legal Technology Resource Center survey says that only 5-6% of lawyers who use smartphones or tablets in the courtroom – now unfortunately, this is only the courtroom – are using smartphones to scan documents while they’re somewhere in the courthouse. now that’s probably a limited question and there may be probably more lawyers using scanning apps, but I found that it was really telling that in a place where you’re likely to get paper records on the other side or from the court or something like that, that very few people are using that. I use it all the time when I’m traveling. I immediately scan my paper receipts and get rid of them. My paper receipts are gone. I’m using those apps all the time and they’re really some pretty good ones. Giving examples here, I prefer Genius Scan, which actually has both Android and iOS versions. And then I was talking with Dennis earlier about the podcast about Evernote’s new Scannable App, which has been getting lukewarm reviews, but I think it’s actually pretty amazing how it can grab onto an image and do a pretty nice scan without you having to do much at all with it. Dennis, do you have any scanning apps that you prefer?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, a couple of things I wanted to say was that I think there was this evolution that you go through – and maybe some people can skip the first step. But I think it was a revelation for me to say oh, I can use a camera in my phone to take a picture of a document. And like I said, you just store it as a photo. And then once I started to use Evernote – and I believe this is in the premium version only, but you can correct me if I’m wrong on that, Tom – but you can scan directly into Evernote so I scanned documents. And like you said, once you’re traveling and you say oh, I got the hotel receipt, boom. I just scan that right into Evernote. Taxi receipt, boom; into Evernote. I go to do an expense report I have everything all in one place, this is great. And the next thing you know, you’re starting to take and scan in handwritten notes, mind maps, anything that’s in front of you. And I think, Tom, you were also talking earlier before we did the podcast about Scannable and how you felt that it was just ready to go out and scan anything that it found. But I feel the same way. Once I get going on scanning with my iPhone like that, I’m like okay, what else? What else is out there that I might just pull in here? So I think that that is one of those things where you say I have this with me and there’s this quote that’s attributed to Steve Jobs is, “The best camera for you is the one you actually have in your hand.” It’s sort of the best scanner is the one that you have in your hand. So I think the smartphone or tablet really plays an interesting role in scanning. And I’ll say also that the Cloud is a big help because you can store everything and you can access it in multiple places, so then you say now I see this great benefit of scanning too. So it’s not just to file and save space, it’s so that if I’m somewhere. Again, in travel is a great example. If I have some documents that I need to have in one place, I just scan them all and then I can access them wherever I am. So I think that’s great, so Dropbox, Evernote, those sort of things. But I’m going to keep coming back to what I call the storage and search piece, Tom. Because what will hang me up, and it does even as I’m thinking about it now, is I start to say, should I put all these in one folder, should I name them, should I not name them, just give them default names and just search through them? That bit of organization and so storage organization search, that’s where I think I still struggle with paperless. The same concept has been around paperless since the beginning, but that where do I store them, how do I name them, how do I search them, I still think is a big problem for me. So I don’t know where you’re at these days, Tom.

Tom Mighell: No, I agree, I think that’s still the hardest part because I think that it starts with having a place if you’re scanning a document, having a place for that scan to go. If I’m scanning it with my phone and it just stays on my phone, then that’s a waste of time because I don’t want to take the time to move it off my phone to another place. But if it’s automatically sending it to a Dropbox folder or to Evernote or to another location, then that makes a lot of sense. If I am using the Fujitsu ScanSnap on my desk or I’m using the high speed scanner down the hall and that’s automatically sending it to a network drive that I’ve got for that, that makes it a whole lot easier. Although getting it then into a structure and a format where it’s searchable, becomes more interesting. The ideal situation would be that it gets fed into some sort of document management system where you can search. Ideally, you’ve scanned it using optical character recognition so that it’s a searchable document, and putting into some sort of system that allows you to do that I think is your ideal situation. But people who are using and storing electronic records on shared drives, don’t have that luxury. You can’t search on shared drives the way that you can in a document management system or even in Evernote or Dropbox or things like that. And so having a good name in convention having good structure for your folders and files becomes more important and I really think that’s a place where people start to break down and it just becomes harder than they expected it to be.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, to use an example that I ran into recently – and this would happen whether I was scanning or I was bookmarking or I was doing any number of things. Tom, you and I have talked about doing a new edition of our Collaboration Tools book and you would say oh, here’s a great use for a paperless scanning type of approach. Every time I jot down some notes, have some ideas, find an interesting article, one an excerpt or something, I would like to throw it into one place where I can find it later. And then I start to go down the same rathole I’ve gone down for 25 years which is to say is it book research, is it research that I might use for something else? How do I name it, where do I file it, if I go into too many nested folders do I end up spending more time organizing that than I want? Also knowing if I OCR it, that i can search it, but then the search results may not be as convenient for me as throwing it all into one folder. So I think you’ve got to work through all that stuff and I suspect we’ll get to the point with tags and search and things like that that the actual throwing things into a folder notion is not as important. I don’t know about you, Tom, but for however many decades it seems we’ve been in the folder metaphor. It’s really hard to break out of it even though you can kind of see how the tagging and tag plus search would really work here, but how do I make the move to that?

Tom Mighell: I agree. I think that’s the hardest part. So we’re running late on this segment; let’s take it out with some of our best tips and resources and things like that. I think from my standpoint, the best tip is really to start with the process. I’ll just hammer it again and say that if you’re not in the habit of doing it, you’re not going to do it. And so developing that habit of automatically scanning things or having a process to get that paper scanned will get you closer to being paperless and there are ways to develop that process and resources that can help you out with that. Dennis, what about you?

Dennis Kennedy: I think that this time of year while you’re looking at taxes is actually a good time to look at this and say, can I do something where I get something like the ScanSnap. And I put in, as Tom says, some kind of process that seems doable. And maybe to say, let me describe what my personal stuff and the tax related and financial stuff and just develop some kind of process and maybe it’s where I say every Saturday morning, I’m going to spend 15 minutes taking everything that came in during the week and scanning it and putting it into a folder that says 2015. That’s a good place to start and see how that works for you because once you get into that habit of just scanning things, that actually makes a big difference. And if you say I know it’s going to be limited to 15 minutes on a Saturday morning and maybe it’s less, then you’re not saying I’m looking at thousands of pages from a year that I’m going to sit down and run these through a scanner which means that’s just never going to happen.

Tom Mighell: Yeah, I agree. And two quick resources that I think we both recommend: the Law Practice Division has a book, Paperless in One Hour, that has some great tips and strategies for going paperless, and then David Sparks, who’s been a guest on this podcast before has an electronic book in the iBookstore called just Paperless. Also a really, really good resource on becoming more paper free.Before we move onto our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.

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Tom Mighell: And now let’s get back to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy. Tom and I were joking around in our end of the year look back at 2014 podcast and asked what the odds were that we’d hear more than one lawyer in 2015 complain about how everything has gone downhill since the glory days of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Tom told me this week that the joke was on us as he saw an extended online discussion lauding and singing the praise of WordPerfect 5.1. Tom, what is up with that?

Tom Mighell: What was interesting from our podcast was that we had both gaged the odds at 100% that we would hear a number of people praise WordPerfect at some point this year. And it only took into February before, for me anyway, the odds paid off. I’m a member of the State Bar of Texas Computer & Technology LISTSERV which is a great group. People ask questions about technology issues all the time. Last week someone asked, where’s the best place to purchase 6 licenses for WordPerfect for computers running Windows 7. There were a couple of answers and then someone came in and said, “I’m a Word user; what are the advantages, if any, of WordPerfect over Word?” Which I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a Word user ask that question. And that started literally a landslide of comments stating that WordPerfect is clearly the superior platform, that Word was forced upon all of us by the monopolists at Microsoft. Two things that I found that were interesting from this discussion. I stayed out of it largely. I have my biases, but I stayed out of it largely. But the first was – and I’m going to touch nerves by saying this – the first was the age of the people responding. I did a quick survey, and I would say that the average person responding was licensed around 1980, with a whole bunch in the 70’s and a few in the 80’s, and it makes sense to me that this generation is going to prefer WordPerfect. Interestingly, no responses were from lawyers licensed after 1991 on there. So no younger lawyers. I would wager all of them are using Word at some point. The other interesting thing is that from the responses, I just don’t think that a lot of the people who are using WordPerfect or who have used WordPerfect since their early days of being a lawyer, have even tried using Microsoft Word. But they don’t have a problem bashing it. They just are going by what they’ve heard. That there’s no reveal codes in Word, it’s just too hard, there’s just too many problems with it. I think that ease of use is definitely an important requirement for any software. And most of the comments talk about how much easier it is to use than Word. And far be it for me to say it that Word is an easy tool to use. It’s not; it’s a powerful tool, it has a lot of features. But I would also say that given the right resources, given the right training. I was talking today, Dennis, with our friend Adriana Linares, and she converts firms from WordPerfect to Word all the time and she talks about this constantly that with the right training, you can do everything in Word that you can in WordPerfect and then some. I used WordPerfect until 1998; I never looked back. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see the reaction from WordPerfect users. It’s still interesting to see it nonetheless. I had nothing against WordPerfect, I was just shocked at the viaments. I was shocked, and then at the same time not shocked at the viaments of the response.

Dennis Kennedy: I guess that yeah, I’ve heard this for a long time and it does really puzzle me. Because I think there are things to get all excited about with technology, but word processing is just not one of them. For me, I’m a writer, and I will use this to paraphrase Steve Jobs. The best processor is the one right in front of me. I just really don’t care and I’ll experiment with things because they’ll do things in a different way, but I’m not going back in time. And certainly the idea that you’re looking at some kind of DOS program like it was the pinnacle compared to things that you can do now in terms of automation and things like that, just seems ridiculous to me; so I’m always surprised. In fairness to WordPerfect, because I saw that they had a booth in LegalTech New York and this will bear out your survey, Tom, because I was talking to a younger lawyer friend of mine and I pointed out the WordPerfect booth and he first was absolutely amazed that the company was even in business and then he started laughing. So to each his own in terms of tools, and so sometimes old stuff is great. I’m just not convinced that in the world of software that if you go back 25 years, in terms of usability, all the things we’ve learned, and to have a computer that runs WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS just seems ludicrous to me. And so we were kind of joking in the podcast, Tom, but we knew it was going to happen, and like you, I’m just surprised as February – and you’ve already witnessed one avalanche of the WordPerfect love. So it’s great that there’s a program that people are so committed too.

Tom Mighell: Well the WordPerfect X7 definitely works on Windows. There’s a Mac version also, but I have to say I’m interested to say where WordPerfect heads. I don’t have any heads to access WordPerfect’s market segment, but I really want to know. And if anybody listening to this podcast can tell me, what industries use WordPerfect besides lawyers. I can’t think of another industry that’s still using WordPerfect besides lawyers that have been licensed 25 years or more. The Legal Technology Resource Center survey says that between 15 and 20% of lawyers have WordPerfect – doesn’t necessarily mean they’re using it, but have it – and I think as older lawyers start to age out of the market, I would imagine that number’s also going to decrease. I also find that they’re behind on mobile. Microsoft has really come forward with some strong offerings for the phone, and for the tablet, both for iPad and Android phones and their Windows phone – not to mention their own Windows mobile. And the WordPerfect offerings are very, very disappointing. And I just think that Corel doesn’t understand the mobile market; which to me, is the future, and I think is just another nail in the coffin of WordPerfect. But I’m still very interesting to see where this whole thing hits.

Dennis Kennedy: And now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip, website or observation that you could use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: I’m going to recommend an app that is – and I’m giving a preview to one of the apps that I’m going to talk about during ABA Techshow. It is a nonlegal app, it is a frivolous app, and the makers of it call it the dumbest app you’ll ever have, but it’s actually pretty smart and it’s called Look For. Look For just gives you a screen with about 6 colors on it, you can choose the color that you want, and Look For is essentially just to get someone’s attention. Let’s say you’re in a crowd and you need to catch somebody’s attention. Let’s say you’re in a movie theatre and it’s dark and the person coming in to see you can’t find it. You just tell them to look for blue or look for green or look for yellow and your phone will flash that color and show it to you. It’s very simple, it’s very dumb, but I could see a lot of utility in this app when you’re in places and people need to look for you or something, or a cab’s coming to pick you up. All they have to do is look for a specific color. It’s a free app on both Android and iOS, it’s kind of cool. Look For. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: Could be fabulous in haunted houses, too. So normally I recommend free stuff, things that don’t really cost you anything, but I’m stepping out of character with this parting shot. I just am highly recommending the Bose QuietComfort 50 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones. Which are sort of the standard in the noise cancelling headphone world. I was travelling a lot and I just was realizing how noisy it is in planes. And even if I’m listening through headphones, I was turning my iPod up to its highest volume and I was having trouble hearing and I was going, this can’t be good for my ears and how loud is it really in planes? So I went for the $300 and decided that noice cancelling was the most important feature and bought the Bose QC 25’s and tried them; and it is a different world. It doesn’t kill all the noise on the plane but is amazing and as soon as I turned them on. Even in airports, you just appreciate how much noise there really is in the background. And it was great because I’m listening to music at a much lower volume than I did before and podcasts as well and the impact is really amazing. Tom, I don’t know if you use these or other noise-cancelling headphones, but gosh, I just really like these. It’s probably the best money I’ve spent on improving my health in a long time.

Tom Mighell: Those are over the ear, right?

Dennis Kennedy: Yes.

Tom Mighell: I use the Bose QuietComfort that are the in-ear. I just didn’t want to carry something that big around with me, I carry too much stuff already. But I will tell you, that the in-ear buds, the noise cancelling ones, are almost just as good as the over the ear. They cancel almost as much noise. I second their recommendation, they’re a joy to use, it’s really nice. I actually use my Bose in-ear buds to do conference calls and things like that  when I need to take calls on the road.

Tom Mighell: Definitely. So that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast; information on how to get in touch with us, as well as links to all the topics we discussed today, is available on our show notes blog at TKMReport.com. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site. You can get to the archives to all of our previous podcasts in both places as well. If you have a question you want answered or have a topic for an upcoming podcast, please email us at [email protected] or send us a tweet. I’m @TomMighell and Dennis is @DennisKennedy. So until the next podcast, and while I’m waiting for my own Legal Talk Network T-shirt, I am Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. Help us out by telling a couple of your friends and colleagues about this podcast.
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