The Future of Apps and the Evolution of the Cloud

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

The Future of Apps and the Evolution of the Cloud

09/23/2016

Intro: Web 2.0, Innovation, Trend, Collaboration, Software, Metadata… 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 176 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Dennis Kennedy in St. Louis.

Tom Mighell: And I am Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode we took our annual look at the results of the two major Legal Tech Surveys that come out every summer and tried — and we also try to make a gentle introduction for lawyers to the Blockchain. Some parts of the two surveys prompted us to want to take a look back to the future.

Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report we will be revisiting one of our oldest and I guess most favorite areas of interest, the cloud, and how the cloud looks to us today.

In our second segment we will wonder whether anyone is downloading apps anymore. And as usual we will finish up with our Parting Shots, that one tip, website, or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over.

But first we want to revisit and take a look back at or take a look now at the cloud, so famous in myth, so famous in story. I went back to the podcast vault, at least as far back as we have been posting them on our Show Notes website, which was Episode 45, December of 2010, and in that episode we named cloud computing one of the top legal topics of the year.

I am sure we were probably talking about it even sooner than that, but Dennis, what brings us back to the topic of the cloud? Hasn’t there been everything, we said all there is to say, is there nothing more to say on the topic?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, there is part of me that thinks that, because we have sort of had this topic in hand for a long time and never quite decided to make it a main topic, but then when I got the ABA Survey results and I started to think how relatively small percentage of lawyers actually use the cloud, or think they use the cloud versus how many it looks like actually use the cloud, I think there is a big confusion out there and it just really surprises me, so I thought maybe we should talk about it.

Because I think the cloud has become so important across everything that’s happening in technology and it seems like, for lawyers at least, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the cloud. And I am not sure why that is, because I think you are right, Tom. You said 2010 that we were talking about on the podcast, I know I was writing about it much before then, and I know that in the sort of — if we go back to the early days of what’s now cloud computing or one type of cloud computing, used to be known to companies as Application Service Providers, and as a lawyer I was reviewing, negotiating the ASP contracts back in the late 90s.

So the cloud has been around a long time, but when you look at the numbers and the level of understanding that lawyers seem to have in those surveys, the more I thought about it, the more it surprised me.

So I don’t know that’s — Tom, I guess we — behind-the-scenes of the podcast we are always trying to figure out ways to get the other of us to do the definition section of the show. So I am going to flip it to you and say, Tom, do you have other comments or do you want to give us a definition of the cloud for people who are listening?

Tom Mighell: Well, I will do both. I think that in terms of comments, I mentioned the December 2010 podcast; I also went back because I was curious to look at our Collaboration book, the book that we published in 2008. I remember a time Dennis when you and I were giving presentations saying that there were two things that made collaboration possible, and it was the Internet and the cloud. And what was interesting is we mentioned the cloud not once in our Collaboration book.

So 2008 we weren’t talking about it in terms of what it meant, but by 2010 it was the most important — one of the most important technologies for lawyers to talk about. So I think that the fact that it came on that fast and that we have been talking about it ever since I think is an important thing.

In terms of definitions, I am going to take a radical approach to this. I know Dennis in the notes for the — in our little show script and our show notes that we have — you talk about the different types of clouds and we talk about Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service and different types of clouds, I am going to take what I am going to call a radical approach and let you push back on me with this and say, I think that lawyers don’t need to understand what the cloud is, they just need to understand what it does. And they don’t need to understand the technology part of it.

(00:05:07)

All you need to know about the cloud is that you are storing your files on someone else’s computer, located somewhere else. There are benefits to it; we are going to talk about those benefits, but there is a lot more to it, but for the purposes of the discussion, do we really need to know more about the details. We want to talk about due diligence and making sure that you select the right cloud provider and all of that, but in terms of technology I really don’t think lawyers need to know more than it’s a service where you are storing your files someplace else.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. I mean, I was looking at the definition that I use, I am actually going to agree with you wholeheartedly on that.

Tom Mighell: I can’t believe it.

Dennis Kennedy: Because I was looking at the definition that I used in this Tech Report I did for LTRC, looking at the survey, and I said, you can understand cloud computing practically as software or services that can be accessed and used over the Internet, using a browser, or more commonly now on mobile app, where the software itself is not installed locally on the computer being used by the lawyer accessing the service.

So the notion of hosted software, hosted services, those things all make sense. So it is that notion that you are going to the Internet and more and more it’s not just storage, it’s actual processing. And there’s zillion examples of cloud services; it’s hard to describe how many different cloud services there are. And that’s the striking thing in the survey is that people said they didn’t use the cloud, but then they gave examples of Dropbox and Evernote and Gmail and Google Docs and all these other cloud services. So I think that that simple explanation is really important for lawyers and then things build from that.

So it is kind of interesting though Tom, because to me, in my role at MasterCard, when I think of cloud the big issue I always think about is scalability, which is that the cloud allows you to — as transactions grow, traffic grows, you kind of make more service available so you can scale really quickly, and there are other benefits that we talk about, but when I talk to lawyers I feel like I have to keep it really simple.

So I did put that list. So, there are sort of these three categories of cloud; public, private and hybrid. So I think for most lawyers we are looking at the public clouds; the Dropboxs, the other things like that.

Possibly you might do private with the sort of remote access to your site.

Hybrid, I would say is really unusual in the legal setting.

And then there are these sort of layers of it. So Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which means that you are — basically at the server level or infrastructure or hardware is being hosted elsewhere.

Platform-as-a-Service goes to the basic operating systems and platforms available, again, over the Internet of a service, and I think most commonly for lawyers to understand is the Software-as-a-Service.

So whether it’s Office 365, Google Docs, Dropbox, that that software is made available to you as a service, and if you start to — it’s almost like that as a service is the tip off these days to there is something cloud-like going on.

Tom Mighell: Right. And I will come back to my argument that about half of what you just said lawyers don’t absolutely need to know. I would argue that what lawyers need to know is where is my stuff located.

If people think that their Gmail is actually sitting there on their computer, then they need to know that that’s not the case. They need to know that it’s someplace else. They also need to know if their computer breaks down and they haven’t lost their Gmail.

But I think it’s also important to know the difference between the public cloud and the private cloud, because when it comes to security, when it comes to making sure that your stuff is secure, you want to know that you have options on how you store that in a cloud, and so I think that’s important.

We talked about this on the last podcast. It’s very clear from the ABA Survey that there is still a great disparity between people thinking they know what the cloud is and what they do when they use the cloud. I think 52% of lawyers we said say they have never used cloud computing or Software-as-a-Service, but 57% say that they use Dropbox, which clearly shows that that there is a misunderstanding about exactly what constitutes a cloud service.

I guess you would think people would say I don’t know rather than know if they really don’t know what it is, so I don’t know what the real meaning of those answers are.

(00:10:04)

So I think that there is that need to know it, but I would question whether, I don’t really need to know if it’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service or how that works; I just need to know my stuff is someplace else and I need to — I need to understand how to protect that information on behalf of my clients and my practice.

Dennis Kennedy: And I also think the other thing is that your stuff is somewhere else, which you think of as being on the Internet, but as a practical matter is in a big data center somewhere, it may be in several data centers. But I always think of it as in this big, elaborate, well-protected data center, and that’s I think the most helpful way to think about the cloud.

So I think the cloud, how it has become interesting to people is not just sort of the products that now people are thinking about the Clios, the Rocket Matters that have become more popular in the legal market, but I think people are starting to understand the benefits of this approach.

And so for me it’s scalability on a big scale, but I think — so if I started a small firm and I have — I am using Clio or Rocket Matter, for example, or Office 365, and I had a couple of attorneys, I don’t have to do anything really on site and bring somebody in to do something on my network server, I just give them accounts on my existing cloud service for those things. So that makes it really easy to scale, because it’s on the Internet, there is the backup, there is the security, because it’s in a big data center.

One of the benefits of cloud is that instead of me installing all my updates and remembering to do that, that’s all happening on servers in the data center, and then of course the big cloud thing is available anywhere, anytime.

So I think there are a lot of positives, and we have always felt this way Tom, but I will leave it to you to be the downer here, but there are a few downsides, but I think they are becoming in some ways less significant, but you might point out a few of the downsides.

Tom Mighell: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I think that there are one or two downsides that we need to cover, but I am going to come back real quick and say that I agree that some of the benefits you mentioned are important benefits, but I would argue — again, I will come back to it and say, do lawyers care whether it’s scalable, I think that they realize the benefits that cloud computing is scalable, but they really don’t pay attention.

If you look at the ABA Survey the number one benefit of cloud services for them is, it’s that anywhere access and anytime access. It’s 24/7. You can get it — from it anywhere. Right behind those answers are the fact that there is a low barrier to entry there. You can get in and you don’t have to set up a lot of software, you don’t have to have a lot of knowledge about what’s going on. We have passed. We are in a post-software age where we don’t have to install software all the time anymore, it just kind of works and we just kind of use it. And I think those tend to be the main benefits that lawyers are finding with cloud services.

In terms of downsides or concerns, I think that confidentiality and security tends to be the concern, but I kind of hesitate when I hear that. That is the concern of the lawyer, but does that really translate to reality in practice. And I know that there have been times in the past where we have heard stories about Dropbox and people hacking into that, but to be honest, I haven’t heard that any other cloud services like Box or any of the others have been hacked. Never say never and people are always trying to get into stuff like that.

So I think that it’s probably a well-founded concern that, not only is privacy and confidentiality and security a concern, but the fact that, oh no, it’s a loss of control. You are keeping my stuff on someone else’s computer, I don’t have control over it anymore, and I think that frankly is, if not a bigger concern, it’s definitely right up there in terms of the downsides is, you just don’t have the same confidence that you can control it, like you would if you kept it on a server on your desk.

Arguably, it’s being taken better care of, it’s arguably more secure, but it’s that mental block, it’s hard to get rid of.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. And I would put it a little bit differently. So I think the downsides are what I would call business risk. So what if I go to a cloud service and the company goes out of business or they get hacked, then what happens? So the answer there I think is, it can be redundancy, where you have backup with another cloud system, but you do have to think that through. And then I think there are going to be questions about what level of confidentiality do you need to encrypt, and there would be some other things like that.

(00:15:08)

But I think that historically lawyers have been super cautious about the cloud, and what I always like to recommend to people, and you can just go on Google and find this, but just look for a video tour of a really first class data center. And I think that Google posts videos of a tour of their own data center, and look at the security that’s going on and what’s happening there, and then go into your own office and look at the security that you are protecting a network server, and I think that’s a big eye-opener on the one side.

And then the other thing I have always found interesting is that, back in the late ‘90s I knew of a firm of four people, then they wanted to get started with new computers and a network server and a software and the services to set that all up, and the ballpark was really $7,000 or $8,000 per lawyer in those days for that kind of setup.

Now you can say, hey, there is three of us, or say Tom and I want to start our own law firm. We already have our own laptops. We would find a couple of cloud services and probably we would be up and running with our capital costs for starting that firm in the, I don’t know, a couple of hundred dollars a month range to get some of these services, but nowhere near the $40,000 or let’s say $20,000, $25,000 that could have been in the past, and then it makes a huge difference, because you can start to be in the black in the first month that you open a law practice, and that’s a pretty amazing thing.

Tom Mighell: And what’s interesting is that probably five or six years ago when we were first starting to talk about this, six or seven years ago, I probably would have said that one of the tradeoffs you are making for that low barrier to entry is that a lot of these tools and services online are not as full-featured, not as strong as we would want them to be. Just the software itself is not reaching the level of quality that you get from a — the CD that I have that I can download the software directly on to my computer, and it’s great, very full-featured rich software.

I think getting to the point now where that’s not the case anymore, where we are seeing a lot of sophisticated programs out there, a lot of sophisticated products that are being delivered as cloud services. I think that the technology has caught up to the expectation that make it really easy to make that decision to say, let’s go for the more cost-efficient way of getting that law firm or business started up.

Dennis Kennedy: So Tom, I want to touch on three things I thought were important in the way that I look at the cloud. So one that I call the post-Katrina moment, because I think that if we went to New Orleans, which we are going to do in a couple of weeks, I have got to think that almost every law firm down there is running primarily on the cloud, because New Orleans got wiped out, and the firms that had some kind of cloud backup were up and going; the other ones were in serious trouble. So I think that there is a big learning there, and so that sort of disaster recovery can be a big thing.

I think the way that we have moved to so mobile and mobile apps and that’s all — all of that is cloud, and then I think anything that we do Tom in collaboration, it’s really difficult to think how we do that without using cloud services of all kinds, from Slack and everything else. So, to me those are sort of three important points.

And then Tom, I think what I want to focus on this segment, and maybe I will let you kick it off is that, that my main learning from the survey was that, I don’t even know that lawyers talk a good game on due diligence and evaluating cloud services, but they certainly don’t walk the walk of whatever it is they are talking, and so the due diligence that lawyers seem to do and report in the surveys is shocking to me.

So I thought maybe it would be useful to kind of think through and give some tips on how people would evaluate cloud services and the types of due diligence they need to do.

Tom Mighell: Well, I think you are right. The ABA Survey, in looking at the different types of due diligence that was listed in the survey, I think that pretty consistently only about 30% of the respondents were using each method, and how many of that really is who were not engaging in what we would consider to be the right kinds of activities to determine whether the cloud storage or the cloud solution is safe.

(00:20:05)

I am going to give a cheat sheet as far as what I think is a good resource for that, and I am going to give a shout out, although it’s probably an — a shout out to an outdated service, because they really haven’t updated their website in almost a year now, but the Legal Cloud Computing Association is a consortium, a group of a number of cloud vendors and others who are interested in the topic. And I thought that their standards are a pretty good list of due diligence standards, and the types of things that lawyers need to pay attention to when they are evaluating a software product.

And they are questions about the physical and environmental measures. We have a service that’s in the cloud, but like you mentioned, it really is a data center and how well is that data center constructed, what is the physical security there, what happens if there is a fire or other type of disaster, how is that protected. We definitely need to look at data integrity issues like encryption. How is my data protected both when it’s sitting in whatever computer it is in a data center or when it’s traveling in between that computer and my computer? Who can access it? What are the access controls that are available?

Privacy, huge issue when it comes to cloud services, make sure that the information stays private. I think that those standards are well-worth a read, and Dennis, I don’t know if you want to dive in any deeper to some of those issues, but I think that that — we will put a link in the show notes, I think that that’s one good, I will call it a cheat sheet to be able to understand kind of what those standards are that you need to be thinking about.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I think you do want a checklist. I think that’s a really good one, and I think as you get experience looking at the cloud services and cloud contracts you will see some other things.

So typically, I consider — for some people it can be very important where the actual physical location of the data is, that has some implications. If it’s outside the US and it’s going to move between countries, that you need to be aware of. So that’s one thing.

Getting your data out, so I said, for me, one of the concerns is there becomes an issue where you either don’t like the service, somebody might go out of business, that sort of thing.

Tom Mighell: You don’t pay your bills, yeah.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, you don’t pay your bills, then how do you get your data out, and that can be really significant obviously, and you want to give some thought to that.

There is a notion that in my work is really important, it’s called SLAs, sort of like the big acronym for me in clouds, which is Service Level Agreements. So what sort of performance am I guaranteed, what happens if they don’t meet that, how do I escalate problems and all those things. You can see that spelled out in a lot of ways and you want to dig in and negotiate those things as they become really important to you, because you may see an uptime percentage and you just need to do the calculation, because something that’s 99% uptime, if you calculate the number of hours in a month, you may find that there is more downtime than you ever expected when you do that.

So I think those are the types of things, and then over time — this is where I think you go to your clients too, because your clients are using these things and they are going to have some experience, they are going to have some recommendations, and then what was telling in the survey to me is that, in this area I feel like if you don’t know much, then you are probably going to do like you do if you are investing in the stock market.

So you are going to go with the blue chip stocks, the safe stocks, the things that have been around, the big names, rely on brand, and don’t really do a lot of experimenting, even if it costs you a little bit more. And so doing that due diligence in the companies themselves is at least as important as your due diligence in the features.

So I think that’s kind of what I had Tom. The one other thing I want to mention as we kind of look back at the cloud where we are now, I think the hesitation in the Ethics Opinions about cloud services, I am not saying it has disappeared, but I think that the guidance is really strong and the emphases on reasonableness and due diligence, which is I think where it always should have been. I don’t think you have the reservations from the state bars that you had maybe five years ago or so, where it wasn’t an open question whether you could use cloud services.

(00:24:51)

Tom Mighell: And coming back real quick, I agree and I want to touch on that in a second, coming back real quick to a couple of other issues of due diligence which I think are things that even the Legal Cloud Computing Association Standards don’t really touch in the way that I would want to see them touched is the things that are important to my line of business.

So what are the record retention policies for the information? What happens if you are involved in litigation, do you have the ability to put that information in that system on a legal hold, or part of that information on a legal hold, being able to understand how long it gets kept and can you delete it according to a retention schedule, which all of you should have, is that something that the system is capable of doing? I think that those are some areas that law firms are just now starting to really find is an important part of what they are dealing with, whether it’s a cloud service or whether it’s something that they have in their own office.

To come back real quick to the Ethics Opinions, what strikes me about that, and I agree with you, I think that we don’t see the alarm or concern being expressed by the state bars that we did before. And the reason for that is, and we are going to put a link in the show notes, Bob Ambrogi has been doing a real good job of keeping us up to date on how many state bar associations or ethics boards have done an opinion on cloud computing. I think that the number we are up to is either 22 or 23 states, which is a great number, but it’s — not even half of the states have weighed in on this issue.

So I would say that we still have ways to go on this. I don’t think that any of these other states are rushing to say, please don’t use it; I think they are just being silent and letting the other states have their say. But I am surprised that it’s as few states as it is that have actually weighed in on it, given that, I think the reasonable standard is pretty much the standard across the board, it just surprised me a little bit.

Dennis Kennedy: And then just to wrap it up Tom, the other thing I have always liked about the cloud tools is the competition in features really benefits us, so that you look at any of the cloud services that we have been part of; Google Docs, Slack recently, those sorts of things, they keep improving them all the time. And so it’s not like you have got to buy the next version, you are paying a monthly subscription and over time the service just keeps getting better and you have more features, and I think that’s a plus.

So especially for the firms that tended to be, God, anywhere from 2 to 8 versions sometimes behind what the actual software version was, the cloud has a real benefit in bringing you the most current features.

Tom Mighell: Yeah, totally agree. All right, before we move on to 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 am Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy. We have seen a number of stories recently complete with all kinds of stats about how literally no one is downloading mobile apps anymore, so that prompted us to check our own app patterns and behaviors.

Tom, what’s happening out there and are you an outlier, are you not downloading anything either?

Tom Mighell: Well, I will say it’s not no one; I mean the survey that I saw recently was that I think 50% of the people surveyed are downloading zero apps per month, and this is actually similar to the ABA Survey, where I think that more than 50% have never downloaded either a legal app or a business app or any kind of app to their phone, which just kind of blows me away.

But I wonder if we are the outliers, but I think it’s because most people have relatively simple needs for their phone. They use the phone itself, although frankly, when we get down to the Millennials and the younger generations, they aren’t using it as a phone; they are using it as a texting device and a Snapchat device, and a video device, but they are sending text messages, they are checking email, they are watching videos, they participate in social media, you can do this in all of six or seven apps. And what else do you need, why would you need anything else on the phone app?

I do consider myself an outlier, but it’s more because I am looking for better or more interesting ways of doing something on a mobile device that I couldn’t do before, and I will give an example. I was going to give this as my parting shot, but I am going to change it around and say, as we are recording is, Google has just rolled out an app called Google Trips, which takes email reservations that it finds on trips that you are taking and it packages up your itinerary, it can tell you here’s how you should plan your day, here’s how long it’s going to take you to go to this museum or this tour or this walking tour or anything like that. And it’s a really interesting way people are looking at it of planning a vacation.

(00:30:15)

And the fact that people are constantly coming up with new and interesting ways to make your life easier in an app I think it’s fascinating, and I like to keep trying apps out. But I will say I did try and experiment, I have been — some podcasts we listen to I have started to count the number of apps that I have and how many I actually use. When I started the experiment I counted about 250 apps on my phone, yup, it’s a lot, it’s a lot of apps, but what’s interesting is how many I wanted to actually keep on my phone, because it kind of falls under that you never know when I might need this, or I could envision myself needing this.

I have only gotten up to the letter D; I have been kind of going through the alphabet, and I have only gotten up to the letter D, and so far I have had — I have counted 51 apps and I was only able to delete eight of them, because I really didn’t use them.

So my app usage tends to be pretty high, so I guess I tend to be an outlier here. Dennis, what about you?

Dennis Kennedy: I feel like I am an outlier, but I really started to think about this. So, on my home screen of my phone, that’s probably the most stable place, but I have added and deleted apps from the home screen. I mean recently we have talked about how I moved Slack to the home screen and that was a big help to me.

The Google Authenticator App is now on my home screen, because of multifactor and it generates the code, so that’s easy, it becomes easier for me to find. But I think that I sort of do the apps in a little bit of a flurry, so if I am traveling say to New Orleans, I just go out and look and see if there are any New Orleans apps, and that may give me the street maps, other things like that.

If I am going to go to a conference, I am always looking for a conference app. So there will be a number of things.

And then I have a number of blogs I follow that suggest apps. So, I do suspect I am an outlier and I know that my wife and I have had this conversation, because she doesn’t have many apps, because she decided, against my advice, but she now is willing to admit that was a mistake that she thought it was better to save $100 by getting the smallest memory iPhone the last time she got a phone, instead of paying an extra $100 to get more memory. Well, with the photos she takes there’s basically no room for her to do apps.

And so I think that sometimes what you have is that the people who have the smaller memory phones will start to put apps on there and they will take pictures and they will get the out of memory thing.

Tom Mighell: That Google Photos commercial was made for your wife.

Dennis Kennedy: Right, yeah, definitely. And so I think that that can be a factor.

But I was like you Tom that I just decided to delete a bunch of apps and then it was surprising to me like how many I just decided to leave on. And I may never use them, but they are really interesting apps and there could be an occasion; I am on a plane, there are some other things that I might want to do. So I was just flipping through, and my daughter is now in Portland State and there is a Portland State App I have on my phone, you know, why not? And MasterCard has some apps, so of course I have those on.

So I think there are a number of things like that where I think, Tom, we are probably outliers and we are more willing to experiment, but I also think we have the space to do that.

Tom Mighell: I will say just in the matter of passing that, you talk about looking at your home screen, one advantage that Android has over iOS is the ability to use any one of a number of Launcher Programs that actually allow you to customize how you view, not only your home screen, but all of the screens that you have. So you don’t have to just have icon, icon, icon, icon, like on an iPhone. There are a number of Launchers that do this, but the one that I have used in the past is actually from Microsoft; it’s called the Arrow Launcher, and what Arrow does is Arrow pays attention to which apps you use the most and it populates your home screen with those apps.

So you don’t have to actually make any decision, it’s deciding for you, here are the apps that you use the most and it puts them front and center where you need to be able to see them, which I think is kind of a neat way to look at it. So if you are an Android user some of those Launcher tools are pretty cool.

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

(00:35:02)

Tom Mighell: So I think that most tech people have agreed over the past couple of years that when it comes to the different search spots that are out there or the search tools that each of the services have had between Cortana and Google Now and Siri, that Siri really has been the one that has been in need of an upgrade and has not been as satisfying as many Apple users would like for her to be.

What’s interesting is this article that I am going to put a link to in the show notes from VentureBeat about how Apple — part of their plan with rolling out their new EarPods, their new wireless ear buds is to actually create the world’s most powerful bot is actually to give Siri all kinds of power, because it will now be pulling into — when you use those EarPods, you basically have to interact with Siri to get things done. If you want to turn the volume up or down, you have to touch the EarPod and talk to Siri to do it; you can’t actually use your phone, which is another problem that I am not really a fan of.

But I think it’s all geared towards making Siri a much more powerful tool. I am very interested to see where this goes. So if you are an Apple user, take a look at those EarPods, they might be helping to make Siri a much more powerful bot.

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, I have two, and part is my continuing quest to get more coverage of the TV shows that we watch on to this podcast. But I want to totally recommend the series ‘Orphan Black’ on BBC America and how the star of the show, Tatiana Maslany, who plays about half a dozen different characters in an amazing way, won an Emmy this year. So we are very — both very excited about that, long overdue.

The second one I have is, there is a podcast called Canvas on the Relay — I think it’s Relay FM Network, so Podcast Number 19, and they are basically talking about different ways to do things on your — it’s an iPhone focused show, but I find that really helpful. But this one is an intro to iOS 10. It’s probably about a hour long podcast, but if you want — if you have downloaded and upgraded to iOS 10, but you are not really sure what you got from that and why the home button is working in a funny way that you didn’t expect, this podcast is a really good overview with a lot of details about what to expect in iOS 10 and what new features are in there, and I think it will really help you start to use iOS 10.

Tom Mighell: Well, and along those lines, if you follow the MacStories website, Federico Viticci routinely posts very long form reviews and guides to things, and his iOS 10 Guide is, I guess we will call epic. It’s huge. It’s massive. So if you want a lot of detail, it has been very widely regarded by most Mac experts out there. So that’s another resource for you.

So that wraps it up for this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode at  HYPERLINK “http://www.tkmreport.com” 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 of all of our previous podcasts.

If you would like to get in touch with us, please email us at  HYPERLINK “mailto:[email protected]” [email protected] or send us a tweet. I am @TomMighell and Dennis is @denniskennedy. So until the next podcast, I am Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy, and you have 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 the podcast.

Outro: 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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