Summer Reading for the Tech-Savvy Lawyer

Episode Notes

Transcript

Kennedy-Mighell Report: Summer Reading for the Tech-Savvy Lawyer – 8/9/2015

 

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 157 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 tried to answer the question, “Is this the golden age of podcasting?” Now, Summer’s here and many people, including us, use this Summer to catch up on reading books; yes, actual books. Summer reading lists and suggestions abound this time of year. So in this episode, we decided to jump into reading waters and share our own lists – a little bit at least – and actually discuss how technology is actually changing the whole Summer reading experience. Tom, what’s on my agenda for this episode?

 

Tom Mighell: Well Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will be discussing our Summer reading lists and whether technology is changing the way we – and I guess other people – are reading books. In our second segment, we’re going to talk about the Florida Bar’s theming tectonic shift on technology. And as usual we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip, website, or observation that you can start using the second that this podcast is over. But for our first segment, let’s talk about Summer reading. Every Summer we start to see articles about Summer reading lists, the best beach reads for people; people start to talk more about books for some reason during the Summer. So we thought we’d join that discussion and talk about reading technology and what we might individually be reading this Summer. Dennis, what got you thinking about this topic other than the fact that it’s the topic of the season?

 

Dennis Kennedy: Well it does seem like you see Summer reading lists everywhere. And actually, my reason for it is now even more acute since it’s based on our conversation before we started recording. Because I always try to do the 52 books in 52 weeks reading thing each year. And I was feeling a little behind because I was at 25 books at this point. But now I learned that I’m significantly behind you, so that’s put even more urgency on me to get up to speed. So that made me think about it and then I had a couple of experiences recently. I’m just going to highlight one that made me think about how technology is changing the way we read. So I really like an author named Philip Kerr who wrote a series of novels. There’s a whole bunch of them based on a detective in Nazi Germany named Bernie Gunther – sort of like the Mike Hammer, Raymond Chandler type of character, and I really like these books. I saw him do a reading and speak about his new book called The Lady from Zagreb. And I started reading the book right before we went on vacation, and I knew I couldn’t get it finished before we went on vacation. That was when we went to Europe so I knew I wasn’t going to take the book with me. So I went on to Amazon and I bought the Kindle version so I could finish reading the book on the plane. So I thought of it as my first hybrid reading experience where I was actually willing to buy the book twice so that I could read it. And the way we read is actually changing quite a bit. So you have the eBooks, the paper books and audiobooks and everything else. So I don’t know, Tom. I’m starting to change the way I do things but I thought maybe we’d set the baseline for our listeners. What are the ways you actually read books these days?

 

Tom Mighell: Let me actually turn it back around to you, because what I saw in the notes and the outline for our podcast, I noticed that you talked about this as a hybrid reading experience. Let me ask you, what percentage of books are you reading that are paper books versus electronic books these days? And then I’ll share my answer.

 

Dennis Kennedy: I still read a lot of paper books. Electronic, sometimes I read more extended pieces, so sometimes it is longer PDFs than eBooks. So I would say I’m in the probably not much more than 25% of eBooks at this point of what I consider book reading.

 

Tom Mighell: Here’s why I thought was interesting when you called it a hybrid reading experience, because for me it means something completely different. And granted, I haven’t done it yet but I’m going to do it now because I actually downloaded a book today that offers this. I am primarily an eBook reader; I’ve given up paper books. I read on the Kindle app on my iPad almost exclusively and have never looked back at paper books. Now, having to read a paper books seems – primitive is not the right word – but it seems like a burden to me to have to have a book when I can actually have a lot of books on my iPad. But when you talked about a hybrid reading experience, what I consider to be hybrid these days is what I think Amazon with its Kindle and its book reading platform really made. I think one of their smartest buys was to be Audible, the audiobook company. So I bought a book, it’s a book called Operation Shakespeare. It’s about a true story about some sort of international sting that took place in about ten years ago. And as I bought it, it said, “Would you like to buy the audio companion for $4.89?” That’s it. So along with the book, I also got the audio book downloaded to my phone. And Amazon uses a technology called Whispersync, so that wherever I finish off reading the book, if I want to go out for a run or go walk my dog and I want to listen to the book, all I have to do is turn on my Audible app and it synchronized exactly to where I left off in the print book. And so to me, I’ll call it the future of the hybrid reading experience where you’re moving from paper to electronic. We’re moving from electronic to audio and back and forth again and they synchronize with each other. And just now, for the first time, I’m going to try that and I think that’s an interesting new way to consume information.

 

Dennis Kennedy: Well I think it personalizes to you and then also I like the notion. You even have that at this point, whether it’s Kindle or your iPad or if you have multiple iPads or your iPhone that you can pick up exactly where you left off. And that is kind of a cool thing. So the fact that you can do that in audio, actually I think points to add to some of the difficulties of paper in a way. Because it’s harder to imagine how I could say I’m reading the paper version of a book and then I can pick up immediately where I left off when I go to my iPad, for example. So let’s just dive right in to regular books, because I think there’s pros and cons to it. There’s the sense that a really nice book is nice to hold in your hands. It can be easy to read, it’s that familiar experience. As I’ve gotten older, there are certain types of sizes or fonts that are difficult to read. I actually prefer to see what the print of a book is now before I actually buy it. The paper version of books is difficult to travel with, frankly. You don’t want to take a bunch of books with you on a plane because they’re heavy, they’re unwieldy, you don’t have that much space. Also the thing that keeps me from moving really fast into eBooks is I’m a public library person; I love the library, my local library. I go there a lot, that’s how I find new books and that’s where I explore different authors and things like that because I’m not buying it, I’m going to the library. That’s why I would say the biggest percentage of books that I read are still paper books. But Tom, sounds like you’ve really moved full on into eBooks. What are the pros and cons of eBooks?

 

Tom Mighell: I want to stay with print books for a little bit because I agree with you. The one thing for me that was the worst part of giving up print books was just the notion of holding a book in your hands. And that’s what I heard from most people is they like that experience of having a bound book. There are some very nicely put together books that just feel like a great experience where holding a Kindle or an iPad in your hand can be a very impersonal, cold experience. And I think that’s one of the main things that I miss from reading books. What I think for me are the cons of print books though are, like you mentioned, carrying them around. I’m much more likely to put three or four books on my Kindle than to carry three or four books with me when I go on vacation to Europe next month damaging those books. You put them in a backpack or you put them in a briefcase or something, they’re going to get scratched up, they’re going to get pages bent, they can get damaged very quickly. And then, for me anyway, I only have a finite amount of bookcase space. And so what do you do when you’re done with those books I’ve got in my closet? For a long period of time, I was selling books back on Amazon and for some reason nobody wants to buy those anymore, mostly because I would guess people are reading eBooks more. But I’ve got a closet full of paper books that I don’t have to worry about with the Kindle. Now let’s turn it around and talk about it. I don’t use the Kindle device, I prefer to use the Kindle app on my iPad mostly because I want to cut down on the number of devices that I have. But again, I have as many books as I want. I can either put them on my iPad or just have them in the Cloud. Amazon will keep my entire library for me forever, as long as I want, and I can download them whenever I want to – even if I change over to another device and put it on my phone or put it on my computer if I want to. These books are searchable, so I can search the books, that’s something you don’t get in a print book. You can highlight a word or a phrase and get a dictionary definition or you can go to a Wikipedia entry about it. Kindle’s got a really nice feature called X-Ray, where you press the button and it will take all the character names that you see on the page. And for some of the books, it will actually give you a description about who that character is, which frankly is very useful in books that have lots and lots of characters and it’s hard to keep people straight. The X-Ray feature is really nice. And then as we mentioned before, the synchronization is really what makes it nice. I was at the vet today and I was spending some time in the waiting room waiting for them to do some stuff with one of my dogs. And I was able to pull out my phone and pick up my book just where I had left it at home earlier and it was easy to get to. And again, with the audio coming online and doing that, I think that’s going to be really nice as well. You and I may talk in a future episode about Amazon’s Echo. I’ve been playing around with the Echo lately, and that’s another feature that the Echo has is it’ll play your audio books as well and it will synchronize there too so you can just call up an audio book on the Echo and listen to a book at that point. So I tend to think that those outweigh the benefits of a book. But then I also find – and Dennis, I’ll come back to you – I also find that libraries are starting to rent out eBooks more and more often. Is that just not something you’re interested in or is the selection not quite so good in a public library? I’ll confess, I haven’t been to a library in a really long time.

 

Dennis Kennedy: No, that is available and is something that I’ve noticed on my OmniFocus is that’s something that I want to start doing; there’s a couple of series of books. Tom, I know that you and I both watch the PBS show Grantchester, and there are series of books that go along with that. And basically, they’ve been really hard to find and my local library has gotten one or two of them but they’re always checked out. So I’m not sure that I’m going to like it enough that I want to buy those books and I have enough things on my list. But if I could rent eBooks like that, especially things that are in high demand, that might be a good thing. So to me, you see one advantage of eBooks is that if the library is out you have the potential to be able to still get the book through the library and rent it. The consistency of the text size, you can set it to what you want I think is really important. And one of the things you touched on – but I’ll touch on it in a different way – is that you can add a lot of really useful features to eBooks. So you can put video, you can put hyperlinks; you can have a different kind of rich experience. So as much as you say you love the feel of a book, the smell of a book, all those sorts of things, eBooks can start to add features that are interesting in their own way. One of the negatives of eBooks that I found is I’ve been doing a lot of author readings. And it’s nice because you can buy the book there and get the author to autograph it for you. That’s really cool and with some exceptions, that’s not possible, really, with an eBook version. Although the science fiction writer William Gibson I know has signed people’s kindles in lieu of signing their book. And I think he uses a special white ink for that. I’m sort of agnostic about the device and the reading tool because they all seem fine to me. I guess one thing on the eBook side, I haven’t quite figured out – I don’t know whether you have, Tom – is doing eBooks on the beach. That seems to me that still is a better place for the paperback book.

 

Tom Mighell: I think it’s better from the standpoint that if you get damage to a paperback book, it’s not such a big deal than if you damage an electronic device. But in terms of the ability to use one on the beach, certainly the Kindle was designed for being out in the sun. And the E Ink background, the E Ink display, is really, really great for it. And frankly, it’s very interesting because that used to be Amazon’s major selling point. I used to see all the commercials about iPad users sitting out trying to read their books by the pool and they couldn’t do it but the Kindle reader was having no problem. I don’t see that very much anymore, so I’m wondering why they’re not talking that out. It is certainly possible to read an iPad. They put some anti-glare onto the screen so it’s easier now than it used to be, and maybe that’s why we don’t hear protests from Amazon so much anymore. I would be more worried if I’m out on the beach about getting something wet. So I want to make sure that whatever I brought out there had sufficient covering to make sure it didn’t get sand in it or get water or the ocean or anything like that as part of it. But I see a lot of people on beaches or around swimming pools with electronic book readers these days.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So the other format that I think is interesting, I’ve used in the past books on tape and CDs less so lately because I listen to so many podcasts. But that’s the audio format, which I know you’ve been doing more of, Tom, and I thought about using it especially for longer books. So let me give you an example: There’s a new TV series called Outlander based on Diana Gabaldon’s novel, a sort of fantasy romance time travel novel. I like the show, the novel itself is about 800 pages, which is tricky for me to read, it’s a thick book. But I’ve heard that the audio version is really read well, so I’m interested in that as something to try. And then also, I always go back to WIlliam Gibson, the science fiction writer’s first novel, Neuromancer, where he sort of coined the term, “cyberspace,” and it gets associated with that novel. It has a U2 soundtrack and really well read and really an interesting experience. So that’s something I haven’t done as much as you, Tom, but I can certainly see how it can fit in for some people; especially on the commute.

 

Tom Mighell: What’s interesting is you and I have a really different approach to that, because I find that the hardest books for me to read in print – whether it’s ePrint or regular print, are nonfiction books. For some reason, I can get engrossed in a fiction story and I can read that through unless the book isn’t very good and I don’t like it, I won’t be bored. I won’t lose interest or get distracted. I can’t always say the same about nonfiction books because it’s just that it’s a serious subject. Sometimes they don’t tell them like you would a novel, so it gets a little bit easier to be distracted by it. But I find that if I put it on audiobook, it’s like listening to a documentary for me, and that’s easier to take and to swallow. So I would say that most of my audiobook listening is nonfiction because it’s just easier for me. And the other piece of it is is that I find with an audiobook, sometimes it is easier to get distracted. I remember I used to listen to audiobooks on the plane all the time and I would just look around and look at people and think things about them and all of a sudden I missed ten minutes of the book. I find that with a nonfiction book, it’s easier to miss chunks and not worry about it. But let me break back to the eBook format for a second and ask this question. We were talking with some folks at ABA American Bar Association Publishing and they made a very interesting comment which is that they’ve been to conferences where they’ve been told that millennials, that younger generations – not necessarily of just lawyers, but of people in general – are reading more print books than eBooks. They’re actually going back to the print book, and I wanted to see, Dennis, if you have heard that, if you had a thought on that. I think that’s a very interesting development if it’s true, that eBooks are really only for people of a certain generation and that maybe the younger generation is headed back in the direction of the paper books.

 

Dennis Kennedy: Well, my daughter, like her father, have a lot of paper books, and she also reads books on her Kindle. That comment doesn’t surprise me because that’s also the age group that is really interested in vinyl records.

 

Tom Mighell: Also interesting to me.

 

Dennis Kennedy: I think there’s a notion of craft and things being handmade, and I would say that I know the kind of books I could have read when I was young and how small the font was, and I just can’t do that now. And also, I know that in a lot of cases, the paper’s really cheap and things like that. So if you have a really well-crafted book that’s printed on great paper and a really great font, it is a great experience. So I think you might see a little bit of that and I also think that kids can get books at half price and used and all of that. So I think both of those things are part of that. That doesn’t surprise me but I think that, again, the sample set of my daughter, I would say that they do both. You were talking about nonfiction, which I think is an interesting thing because a lot of times I read a lot of business books, and a lot of times the business books – too many business books – feel that they’re a really long, drawn out version of what was a really good article. So I’ve turned to things like getAbstract and summary services. That allows me to read books although I don’t put those books on my list of books read. So getAbstract and there are other services like that. It’s just a five page summary of the main points of business books. There’s another service called Safari Online that makes text books available. I also use podcast interviews with authors, especially on business and tech books to get the main points of books and make a decision of whether I want to read it. I don’t know whether you do any of that, Tom, but that’s a way to speed up your reading and read more things by getting the gist of things without slogging through several hundred pages.

 

Tom Mighell: I usually don’t. I usually decide that I’d rather slog than not, but I don’t read a ton of business books; I read a couple but not very many; but you’re right, that’s the reason why I don’t read very many. But I’ll push back for a second on something like getAbstract, because just in theory to me or the way that it sounds, is it sounds to me like CliffsNotes; cheating for business books is kind of how I view it. So I don’t have time to learn this so just give me the high points and then suddenly I’m an expert. Is it more complicated than that? Is it that the summaries say we don’t expect you to be an expert at the end, we just want you to see the high points of a book?

 

Dennis Kennedy: Well, getAbstract has a five page template with a one paragraph summary. It has some pull quotes, then it goes through and gives you an executive summary of main points and a more detailed summary. I think it’s an effective way of summarizing books and what I use it for is especially on things that are trendy business topics. It gives you an entry point really quickly as to what people are talking about when they talk about X, Y or Z. So for example, Lean Startup. You can read the getAbstract summary, get a handle on it, and in that case that would be something that I would say, “Wow, this is really interesting. I will read Eric Ries’s book, The Lean Startup.” So I use it as a screener and also as a way to get quickly up to speed on topics.

 

Tom Mighell: Fair enough. Probably what I’d do for that is that if I want a screener as rather than read a summary, Kindle allows you to download a sample chapter of any of their books, and that’s what I’ll do typically is download a chapter and see if the writing style and content is something that I’m interested in. Sometimes it’s good enough, not all the time, but that’s generally what I typically use for my screening. Let’s take us out of this segment by talking about the books that we either have read this Summer, planning to read this Summer, either tech or non-tech. Dennis?

 

Dennis Kennedy: On the tech side, actually I mentioned one that I wanted to mention to the audience that I really liked this year is The Lean Startup book. I think that’s a really important book that gets a lot of discussion, a lot of the principles are already out there. I just read the book, Becoming Steve Jobs, and if you’re interested in technology, i think that’s an excellent book. So that’s not the authorized Steve Jobs biography, but it’s the one that all the Apple people like. I just thought it was excellent, so there’s that one. I wanted to learn more about OneNote so I have Ben Schorr’s OneNote in One Hour book. Also on my list of tech books and then a number of things reflecting my interest in genomics and trying to get a little bit of background in some of that. So that’s on the tech side, on the non-tech, I love reading detective novels and spy novels. So I always have a bunch of those and for me it’s the usual suspect. There’s a new Daniel Silva book, The English Spy, which is just out; that’s definitely on my list. Tom, I don’t know whether you’ve read the whole set of works as I have of Louise Penny’s books-

 

Tom Mighell: No, not all of them, but they’re very good.

 

Dennis Kennedy: -Inspector Gamache, I like those. Louise King has written a great series of books about the elderly Sherlock Holmes and his wife that I think are great. So I usually in each year – especially in the Summer – try to find a set of those books where I can read a whole batch of them.

 

Tom Mighell: When it comes to tech books, I must confess that I have not read any nonfiction books about tech, at least that are worth mentioning or worth recommending in a while. So I’ll mention three books – or maybe it’s six books because one is a trilogy. But the trilogy I’ve read, the other two are on my reading list. There’s a trilogy by an author called Ramez Naam called the Nexus trilogy who’s writing in the year 2040 about someone who’s invented a drug, essentially, that you can inhale that creates a neural network inside your brain that essentially becomes a computer in your brain. You can connect with other people, you can talk to other people. He only wants to use it for good but soon the bad people decide they want to use it for war and for bad things and it’s a very interesting way of looking at how computers in the brain might look at some point in the future. Dennis mentioned William Gibson earlier, he’s got a new book out called The Peripheral, I’m interested in looking at that. And then if you’ve never read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, one of the best books I have read in years. Ready Player One is something that came out a couple of years ago. He has a new book called Armada, which is a little bit of a silly book. It’s about a kid who loves to play a videogame called Armada and finds out that the world is being invaded by aliens who happen to look just like the enemies in the video game, so interesting for that. On my list of non tech books, you’ll see I have a theme of I like the whole post-apocalyptic world. I’ve just finished a terrific book called Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel which follows a Shakespearean troupe who is wandering around in the midwest after the world has moved on from a flu. It was a much better book than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in terms of it was the end of the world but with heart and people feeling the right way. I look forward to reading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson’s which also looks at the end of the world after the moon explodes. And then if you are a Stephen King fan, go and read Finders Keepers. It’s not a horror book, it’s a thriller. It’s a detective/thriller book trying to catch a murderer. It’s going to be a series because he just came out with a new one – I’m sorry, the first one was called Mr. Mercedes, but the new one is called Finder’s Keepers. So I’m looking forward to reading Finder’s Keepers because Mr. Mercedes was really great. I’ve got a lot of books on my list but that’s the highpoint of what I’ve got.

 

Dennis Kennedy: I just think that reading is definitely alive and well and it’s another area where I think that to each his own and you want to keep exploring the way that technology can enhance what you’re able to do. I don’t think there’s been a better time when you’ve had easier access to more great books.

 

Tom Mighell: I agree. Before we move onto our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.

 

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

 

Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell. Our good friend, Adriana Linares, has been podcasting away from the Florida Bar’s annual meeting which took place earlier in July. She’s been talking with a bunch of people about some big changes in the Florida Bar’s approach to technology. Dennis, based on what you heard so far, is this the dramatic pivot that it seems to be?

 

Dennis Kennedy: It is a huge pivot and I think both you and I had the chance at TECHSHOW to talk to Greg Coleman, the former president of the Florida Bar and Ray Abadin who’s the new president. Their interest in technology was profound and I think their sense of urgency about doing something about technology in Florida was really impressive. I just remember having a conversation with Ray where I said basically, there’s no state in the United States that has a worse reputation on legal technology than Florida. I also said that if I were a lawyer in Florida, I don’t know that I could do a blog that had a legal subject matter because the rules were so confusing and the state seemed so against the use of technology in so many ways. I said that was weird to me because Florida seemed like the perfect state where technology was meaningful in the practice of law. There’s big geographic distances, you have an aging population, you have at least two languages so there are translation issues. Lots of hot, interesting topics going on there, and it just seemed perfect for technology but a state Bar that seemed opposed to technology in every step. I would’ve said it was impossible for Florida to change its image to make it seem progressive, but they’ve been working really hard and I know that Adriana’s been involved with giving them a lot of suggestions. I don’t know whether a year from now they will accomplish much, but they’re really taking on the technology thing and trying to make some stuff happen in a way that I never expected and I’m actually really encouraged by. Even if it comes to not very much, I really congratulate Greg and Ray for what they put together and their willingness to listen to some of Adriana’s excellent ideas to get people involved. There were some things they were trying, Tom, I think that other states and the ABA and some of the things that we’re working on, I think there are things that we can copy, because they are really good ideas. Like I said, we’ll see how it really goes but I think in taking a first step, this is a giant step that they’re trying to take and I’m really pleased to see it.

 

Tom Mighell: It’s interesting, you say that Florida has the worst reputation for legal technology. That’s because of the crazy positions they took on legal technology. There are many states in the country who do nothing, take no opinions, but also do nothing to support their lawyers with technology that I would argue would be much worse. But simply by the fact that they don’t take a position at all on social media or the Cloud or any of these topics, I think that’s what made Florida stand out, at least in our minds. I agree, I think that if they are successful, they’re going to be doing a lot of things that nobody’s doing. And I think to me the three things that stood out from what I heard, is they’ve created this practice resource institute that all members can use to help their practice. It’s not just technology, but it does contain technology resources. It looks a lot like maybe the early days of the Legal Technology Resource Center. It’s a lot of links to articles and to blog posts and to other things about law practice topics. There’s a practice management advisor who can help answer questions or help with issues that lawyers might be having. They finally got around to offering member benefits related to technology. So Fastcase and The Form Tool and LAWgical and eDiscovery tools and some billing tools are offering member benefits, which I think are a terrific idea. The success of that will obviously depend on the lawyers deciding to take advantage of those themselves. That’s not necessarily something that will be successful because of the work that the Florida Bar does. But to me, what is the most intriguing and the thing that I think has the potential to really do the most good is the goal that they’re going to make technology education a CLE requirement. They’re really going to take to heart the ethics rule that lawyers need to be educated and aware of the risks and benefits associated with using technology on behalf of a client and actually bake that into their CLE requirements. And I think that actually has the biggest chance of long term success in terms of affecting the lawyers in the state and essentially forcing them to learn about technology. So I’m intrigued. I’m excited about it. I hope that they are successful with it, I’ll be interested to see where they go.

 

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

 

Tom Mighell: So I’m going to have a podcast recommendation. I think we’ve talked on the podcast before about Nate Silver’s website. It’s not just Nate Silver, it’s a bunch of people, but he’s the well known statistician who’s been so dead on with the election polling in the past couple of election cycles. But FiveThirtyEight is the blog and the site that does this, and they’ve come out with a couple of different podcasts. The one that just debuted within the last two weeks is called What’s the Point, and what they do is that they say, look, we’ve got a lot of what they call big data. The’re putting big data to work to try and figure out answers to common questions. So the most recent podcast that they had was how many people have tattoos, how many tattoos do they have, how many people regret having tattoos later in life. Not necessarily a topic that everybody’s interested in, but they’re able to leverage big data to try and figure out that information. And so it’s a really interesting podcast where they use information to understand what’s going on in our daily lives. If you read the blog, I really recommend that you go and every day they go and do a blog post called Significant Digits for This Day. And they will give you a rundown of about six to eight numbers of the significant numbers for that day. For me, that’s almost as good as a news rundown for me, because it tells the news in terms of numbers. It’s really, really, interesting and you can find both that podcast and the significant digits at FiveThirtyEight.com. Dennis.

 

Dennis Kennedy: I actually listened to the tattoo podcast episode this morning and it was great. I’m going to try to sneak two in here really fast. So Tom and I have both got the Amazon Echo and we’ll talk about it in an upcoming episode. But those of you who want to do homework and get a little preview of Amazon Echo, take a listen to episode 213, the Home Gadget Geeks podcast. It’s called Hands On with the Amazon Echo, and it’s totally hands on and it’s really great because they’re using the Amazon Echo live; actually, in an interesting way through a speaker as they’re recording it. It’s really impressive and it gives you an idea of what the Amazon Echo can do. And the other one that I wanted to talk about, there’s a friend of mine, one of my childhood friends who I grew up with and went to highschool with; Elaine Schurr, has a blog called the Italian Dish, which is just at TheItalianDishBlog.com. She was always a really good artist and really interesting and her mom was Italian, who was also our substitute teacher in elementary school. So she kind of distilled some of the knowledge that her mom imparted to her about Italian cooking and stuff with this blog that looks really good, has great pictures. And the most recent post was on this eggplant tomato and burrata with anchovy bread appetizer, and I just recommend the blog because Elaine is a friend of mine and she’s doing some really cool stuff.

 

Tom Mighell: 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 where you can find archives to all of our previous podcasts. If you’d like to get in touch with us, please email us at [email protected] or send us a tweet. I’m @TomMighell and Dennis is @DennisKennedy. So until the next podcast, 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.
Advertiser: Thanks for listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together. From ABA Books or Amazon. And join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.

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