Dennis Kennedy is an award-winning leader in applying the Internet and technology to law practice. A published...
Tom Mighell has been at the front lines of technology development since joining Cowles & Thompson, P.C....
Published: | May 8, 2020 |
Podcast: | Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Category: | COVID-19 , Practice Management |
The longer you work from home, the more you may realize your existing audio/video setup may not reflect your greatness. While there may be ways you can get better results with your current tech, it is more likely that you need to upgrade your equipment. To help you get where you need to be, Dennis and Tom share their tips for building out your audio and video capabilities. They talk about the setups they use for different circumstances and offer product recommendations for microphones, headsets, cameras, lighting, and more. In their second segment, they discuss the recent surge in podcasts and videos and offer their thoughts on whether now is really the right time to launch a new show.
As always, stay tuned for the parting shots, that one tip, website, or observation you can use the second the podcast ends.
Have a technology question for Dennis and Tom? Call their Tech Question Hotline at 720-441-6820 for answers to your most burning tech questions.
Special thanks to our sponsors, ServeNow and Colonial Surety Company.
A Segment: Setting Up Your At-Home Recording Studio
B Segment: Is Now the Right Time to Start a Podcast or Video Show?
Parting Shots:
The Kennedy-Mighell Report
Video & Audio Quality Matter – Make Your Remote Work More Professional
05/08/2020
[Music]
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.
[Music]
Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to Episode 260 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.
Tom Mighell: And I am Tom Mighell in Dallas. Before we get started we would like to thank our sponsors.
This podcast is brought to you by Colonial Surety Company Bonds & Insurance. Whatever court bond you need get a quote and purchase online at colonialsurety.com/podcast.
Dennis Kennedy: And we would also like to thank ServeNow, a nationwide network of trusted, prescreened process servers, work with the most professional process servers who have experience with high-volume serves, embrace technology and understand the litigation process. Visit serve-now.com to learn more.
Tom Mighell: And finally, we do want to mention that the second edition of our book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies’ is available on Amazon. Everybody agrees that collaboration is essential in today’s world, but now more than ever knowing the right tools will make all the difference.
Dennis Kennedy: As I like to say at the start of each of our recent podcasts, what a difference another week or two makes. In our last episode we talked about wellness tech and shared ways to use technology to help you maintain your health and wellness in these pandemic times.
In this episode we wanted to look into the urge so many people have these days to improve their audio and video presence for those video conference calls and to even create their own production studio setting.
Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?
Tom Mighell: Well Dennis, in this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report we will indeed be discussing how to improve your audio and video presence and create a well equipped space to produce audio and video content.
In our second segment we will discuss whether this actually is the time to create your new podcast or your video channel or other content outlet, and as usual we will finish up with our parting shots, that one tip, website, or observation you can start to use the second that this podcast is over.
But first up, will the right tools make you an audio or video star or just improve your audio and video presence on Zoom or Teams or other platforms that you might be using?
The more that we continue to work from home, the more it becomes apparent that most of us weren’t really ready to do that, at least from an audio or video standpoint and depending how long all of this lasts or even if what we have been going through prompts you to start hosting more meetings from your home office or remotely or I guess even do more video calls at the real office, we thought it might be a good idea to talk through how to build out your audio and video capabilities.
Dennis, tell me, is it just the poor quality audio and video that we have been seeing and hearing on Zoom calls and mainstream media that prompted this topic or something more than that?
Dennis Kennedy: Well, to be honest, it’s not really what I am seeing on Zoom and video calls, it’s actually the poor quality of what I see on mainstream media. I mean I wonder if they cut all their budgets for decent webcams and microphones and I don’t understand — the big thing I don’t understand is that all these reporters using the old wired iPhone earbuds to do their segments.
Tom Mighell: Well, I frankly don’t want to see anybody using any earbuds to do their segments, whether they are AirPods or whatever and we will get into that in a little bit about my thoughts about that.
But I tend to agree. I mean I don’t know if it has to do with the fact that news outlets have lower budgets are suffering because of all of this going on. By contrast you and I were talking before we started recording that there are some professional entertainment shows that are starting to record from home and the quality there really is quite good. They are using — there is a clear difference in the kinds of equipment that they happen to be using.
But I would say that the news kind of is taking more of a rugged approach to say hey, we are roughing it and just kind of making it more naturalistic. I think it’s along the lines of people saying well, show up, we want to see your face no matter what you look like at home, no matter what your home looks like, because it’s good to see everybody. And we are all kind of going through this together, so there is a certain aspect to the rough look, but it’s also kind of surprising that folks who are so — place such emphasis on looking good in a studio aren’t looking the same way when they get home.
(00:05:00)
Dennis Kennedy: Or sounding that good. I mean clearly a lot of the news people you see on TV have put tons more time and effort into what’s on the bookshelves behind them than they have into the actual production quality of what it is that they are doing.
So I guess in this episode we will be talking in terms of a home setup, but same principles will apply if you decide that you are ever going to go back into your old office. You may have more limitations obviously in the work setting in terms of what equipment you can choose or the choices that you have.
And I guess Tom as always it comes down to just the fundamental question of can we just make do with what we have and the old question of let’s just take a look at what we have and see whether that works.
I tend to think this is one of those cases where you are probably going to find you can’t make do with what you have. What do you think?
Tom Mighell: Well, so I think we take a step back first and say what are we trying to accomplish here? If you are just saying I am at home now and for the time being whatever I have got is whatever I need and that when I get out of here I am going back to the old way of doing things, maybe what you have got is going to work, maybe that’s all you have, and I would say that’s a shame. I am hoping that we learn things coming from this about how we are going to communicate with people and taking advantage of these technologies to do it. So I am hoping that things evolve beyond the status quo and what it was before we all went home.
So what do you want? Do you want a professional setup for talking to clients or colleagues? Do you want a more polished setup to record videos for YouTube or other services? I think the purpose that you have is going to determine the kind of setup that you have got. And I tend to agree with you, if you want something that’s more professional, more polished, if you tend to want to make more of what you are going to be doing with this, what you have likely is not going to work.
If you want the status quo and you say well, once I get back to the office, I never have to worry about this again, then yeah, I say go ahead and use the crappy camera on your laptop and use the microphone that you have got on the laptop right there, it’s going to do you just fine.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. So I think we start with the laptop, so we have typically people’s desktops don’t have — either don’t have a webcam or have something that’s fairly primitive, especially if you have older equipment.
I suspect that people aren’t making as much use out of the smartphone video setup as they might, so that’s something that you could consider, the tripod plus smartphone. Although even your issue there is going to be sound quality and I think that one of the big discoveries is that microphones really matter in this. So you are thinking that — you are thinking video, but the thing that makes you more professional is having great audio.
So I don’t know Tom, do you want — should we just start saying what we are currently using and why we use them and maybe when we use different setups?
Tom Mighell: Sure. But let me come back and say, I think a laptop will do an adequate job at both audio and video, but not a great job. I will say that taking a tip from a client who was doing this, I decided to use my iPad to attend a Microsoft Teams meeting and the quality difference in the camera was a 1,000% better on the iPad.
And so one of the things that I am going to be talking about a lot is the standard webcam on any desktop or laptop is just not good quality. You are going to want to have something different. As we will talk about, most webcams that are a better quality right now are very hard to find on the market; they are not impossible to find, but they are hard to find, but I will say that having the right camera and the right audio will make a difference.
And I agree with you, microphones really matter. I have been on multiple calls where people are using the microphone on their laptop and it sounds like a speakerphone. It sounds like they are just using a speakerphone, the quality is not good, it’s not particularly professional.
And when we talk about microphones I think we should probably go into the difference between having a standalone mic, such as we are using right now to record this podcast, or having a microphone that’s part of a headset, because frankly I think that for a call or some type of meeting that you are having online, I think that having just a headset is going to be just fine, because I can get a very good quality telephone sound, audio sound out of a headset that I am using for those calls, wouldn’t be what I would use if I was going to record a video, if I was going to make something for YouTube, I would want to have a more professional microphone, but I think we probably need to start talking about that headset versus standalone mic.
Do you tend to agree or would you use it in a different circumstance?
(00:10:12)
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I think this is a case of you need to think what you are using it for. So I think if you are — when we do a podcast we have these really nice Shure 58 microphones, which is what I would want to use any time I am doing something professionally. So if I am doing a webcast or something where the focus is on me or it could even be if I just wanted to sound great for some other kind of presentation, I would use what I call the podcast setup with the Shure mic plus the stand.
Then I have kind of come around to the point of view where I think that you really want to have a headset that when you are on the conference calls and stuff, because it keeps your sound good because the microphone isn’t moving and you don’t have to worry about your technique.
Now, there are headsets and there are headsets and some of them really do sound terrible.
Another option you could do is a Lav Mic, Lavalier, which then again allows you not to have great microphone technique, but will still pick up and will sound great. So I actually found this $30 MPOW it’s called, MPOW headset, and I just got it because I wanted a headset, it had good reviews on Amazon and I have had a couple of people compliment me on how good it sounds. So as a $30 option I like that, it’s wired, and I would lean in that direction because Bluetooth can be a little tricky in certain situations. I would have said the AirPods as an option, but Tom hates the way I sound over the AirPods, so I have crossed it out.
Tom Mighell: It almost sounds like you are — it’s not a speakerphone, it just sounds like you are on a cell phone. It’s just they are not the same quality. I think that they are good to use to hear things, but I just don’t think they are good for speaking into.
Now, for headset I go toward — the headset that I use right now for work is a Plantronics Voyager Focus UC is what it’s called. It is a Bluetooth headset so I can connect automatically to my phone and it also has a little dongle that connects to the laptop so I can connect on Zoom Meetings or Teams Meetings or things like that.
I prefer if you are going to get a headset, there are lots of headsets out there that are more like the headsets that you would see like a receptionist at a law firm or that someone would have that only has one ear pad and not the other one. I prefer having two over the ears, I want them to cover my ears because I want to be able to hear what’s going on on the call and I find that when I only have one ear covered I can’t hear everything.
So I would really recommend whatever you go with go with something that covers both ears. Plantronics, a little more expensive than Dennis’ MPOW headset; they are somewhere in I think $150, $170 range.
I will tell you that I am extremely interested because I am kind of — maybe I am evolving from getting speakers to getting different kinds of headsets. Jabra has a new set of Evolve2 headsets out that are — I think there are three different versions at different price points and they are all optimized for Microsoft Teams. You just press a button and you can join a Teams Meeting from that headset. I am really intrigued. I am going to probably look at those despite my credit card’s protestations to that. But there is a bunch of different options out there, but I agree having a headset with a microphone is really a difference, especially on calls that you want to make.
Dennis Kennedy: And I also agree, you want both ears covered and this is probably the place, especially if you are going to be on a headset all day long, like from Zoom call to Zoom calls some days it feels like that that’s the place where I probably would be most likely to go up to scale on pricing, but I would look at things like comfort and some other things like that.
On the Shure setup, so some people are looking into — because we will talk about partly doing a studio, but that if I were doing a home studio that had audio, especially if I had the idea during a podcast and you are using the Shure microphone, then you want something like a mixer or a preamp. We use the Scarlett Preamp Mixer from Focusrite and I just really liked it. We had something before; we have even used like the Shure Preamp with this microphone and I have just totally enjoyed this Focusrite. I think it’s about $100, maybe $150.
(00:15:04)
You can go cheaper on the mixers, but that allows you to do a couple microphones to monitor what you are doing and gives you some amplification, that’s great.
The other cheap thing that you need to do and I think this makes sense — could make sense if you are bad on the plosives, so your p’s and t’s is to invest in some kind of MPOW filter and that’s just probably under $10. So that would be part of the audio setup, if you are doing a studio and that’s going to get you in a pretty good place.
Tom Mighell: The only other thing that I will add to that is if you want to actually record something that’s professional, this is probably way outside the bounds of what most of you would want to do, but I see a lot of people, especially YouTube creators and things like that, who begin to put the noise canceling foam on their walls and put them in — they don’t really coat the entire room, but they put it into an area where it will kill all the sound that’s around them and it will make it much better and a much more hospitable recording environment.
And so if you want to get that true recording sound, then you might want to consider that you are — the room that you have got, you might want to buy some of that — some of the foam for the walls that you can put. The ones I have seen have been very minor, but they do make a difference as to the quality of the audio recording.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. So if you have hardwood floors, you are in an echoey kind of room, then you want to look at some things that will deaden the sound and it can be just anything from blankets to rugs or foam, there are a number of other things out there.
And then if you are doing recording and mixing, so say you want to do a podcast, then I still think the way to go these days is the free route. And so there is an open source program called Audacity, it works on all the platforms except there is an issue with the newest macOS, and that’s free, that’s what we use for our recording, and then you can export it into the MP3 or WAV or whatever file you need.
In your Mac world, there is GarageBand which is another option, but that part of it is actually the cheapest thing, because it’s pretty much all free these days.
Tom Mighell: The only thing that I would say is the other option that would be — potentially to be lower cost is if you really do want to record like meetings on Zoom or Teams or things like that, they all have recording features so you can record the meetings there. Obviously if you start recording too much then there becomes a storage issue that you have got to deal with and it might not be in the right format. So that’s another option; obviously there are more professional audio editing and other types of software products that are out there, but we do tend to recommend the ones that are easy to use and obviously feels better.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. And I guess the other thing Tom is that it’s worth mentioning that the double-ender as they call it in the podcasting world, which is that Tom and I, although we are talking to each other as we do this on Zoom, we are actually recording each side of the conversation locally and then it gets mixed. So that’s another thing you can do. So if you are using the built-in tools like in Zoom and stuff, you are kind of subject to anything that happens in the Internet connection or other people’s sound, so that’s something to consider.
So Tom, so that’s the audio piece of it, video to me moves things to a whole new level of complexity, but something that you can kind of work your way through. So you want to get us started there.
Tom Mighell: So my recommendations on video are going to be pretty straightforward. One, only use the camera on your laptop or desktop if you don’t care about quality, because you are not going to get very good quality. I think that your tablet, maybe even your smartphone camera is a step up from those and do a pretty good job. I think that getting — if you can find one, finding a dedicated high-resolution webcam. The one that gets a lot of good reviews is the Logitech C930; I think it’s starting to become available in different places these days. It was originally $75 before all this happened, it’s now at about $120, $130, so getting a little bit of pandemic upsurge there.
(00:19:41)
But frankly, I am now looking at what tends to be the best advice for video, this may turn out to be the most expensive advice, but where I am seeing that DSLR cameras, the digital cameras actually tend to have the best video. It’s going to be the most expensive option that you have but just taking, if you’ve got a Canon camera or a camera that can shoot video, they are starting to sell USB kits with those cameras that you can hook up and tend to provide much better video than any of the other options that I’ve mentioned so far.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. I agree with that, that if you do have — like you have a nice digital camera, that you have and you just haven’t used for a long time. I would explore that. There are going to be some software and hardware issues of getting the video from the camera onto your computer but they’re going to be tools to that. So there’s going to be a research project, in all of these things, the separate microphone really is a necessity because wherever your web camera is, it’s going to be far away from you, it could even be across the room. So that’s going to make a big difference. So the lab mics are great in that context. So I have good things there.
I guess, Tom, I don’t know, the nicer webcams, one of the things that I’ve noticed is in addition to the quality, you get this auto-focus and this easy way to do zooming, and that could be a difference, it’s where you can go from close to far away.
You can also combine a couple of these approaches. So you could have a webcam and you could use your smartphone and then you could have a straight-on shot and like a side shot of you, and then in the editing process you could put that together and it could be make it look even more professional.
We talked about lightings and backgrounds in the last episode, Tom, so I don’t think much has changed. We just recommend that people listen to that, so any other advice about your setup and surroundings for video?
Tom Mighell: Not really. I mean, I think — again it comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you going to be the trusted adviser, in that case your setup needs to reflect that, your surroundings need to reflect that? Are you just a regular person working from home? You probably don’t have to do a lot, and you can get away with that.
If you are a professional video-star, if you want to be an influencer and start having professional videos then you’re going to really have to up your game and do some significant things in terms of both lighting and background, and audio and video. There’s a lot more work in that, but obviously there’s a benefit to that if you can start gaining followings on any of the video platforms that are out there.
Dennis, what about you?
Dennis Kennedy: Well, I would say that I think that people getting a little bit bored already because it’s been a whole couple of weeks with the virtual backgrounds on Zoom, but there are some people who are kind of up in the game and so our friend Craig Ball is I think super-interesting in using green screens in a very creative ways. Like he even went on to a Zoom call, as the Invisible Man by strategically wearing green and having green in the background and then working on that. But I suspect he put a little bit more time into that effort and than most of us would be willing to do.
But the standard Zoom things, people seen it, been there, done that, and so — but I think if you can do something that’s kind of interesting as your virtual background, that’s still good. So I think that’s surroundings and then with video you could do editing today and there are a number of tools out there.
So in the Macworld there’s iMovie. You can do screen captures with a program like Camtasia. Actually some open source video streaming, and editing tools, and other editing tools out there. I don’t know if you have to go to — the Movie Maker Final Cut world, but that’s — Final Cut itself is not all that expensive, a product these days, but $250 last time I priced it, but probably a significant learning curve.
So that’s the editing piece. Probably for — and that would be if you’re actually starting to do videos and put them out there, and then in those cases you might want to look at somebody even a student who does some video editing work to do that for you because they may not cost very much and then in most cases you’re typically going to upload your video to YouTube, another video service would be Vimeo and that would — with luck and a little bit of audience will turn you into a video star.
(00:24:55)
Tom Mighell: The only other thing that I would recommend is if you plan to do video and you’re going to look at a camera and say something, having a good teleprompter is I think a good idea.
Ideally there are several apps that are available both for Android or iOS. I’d recommend getting your iPad or another tablet set up on a tripod so that you can watch it and there are some of these apps that are out there that will actually move in response to your talking, it’s not that they’ll just be on a regular rhythm but it will actually pause and stop as you stop and as you pause, so look for those that can actually hear what you’re saying and as you’re saying it and that they move in pace with the way that you’re going rather than at a solid pace that you have to keep up with. I think that having those is a really good idea.
Dennis Kennedy: A teleprompter really does work better than the classic scotch tape, scraped up to on the wall in front of you. But part of it is, you’ll need to kind of look at yourself and what other people do about how you need to look into the camera or not look into the camera, where you need to sit in the screen? Do you want to be right in the middle of it; do you want to be to the side of it? So some of us is just looking at how people do things on TV, in interview shows and stuff?
And then you do have to give some thought to what it is that you’re wearing, depending on the impression that you want to create. There’s some stripes and checks and things that will create weird optical effects, so you need to be aware of that and then there is the green danger because as Queen Elizabeth showed a few weeks ago that if you wear a green dress and you show up on video or in photos that there are people out there who love to use that as a background to put all kinds of stuff on there because you can do that really easily. So I would not wear a green shirt because not that you are famous enough that people would like to superimpose a Metallica t-shirt on Queen Elizabeth but it can cause problems if you’re doing virtual backgrounds.
Tom Mighell: All right, last tips. My last tip here really is, you are in a good place right now to start trying things out. I mean we’re — many of us staying at home, things are starting to open up slightly but I imagine a lot of us are still going to be working from home. It’s a good time to start testing things out and I think take some of the advice that we’ve talked about and dip your toes in the water. I mean that’s as simple advice as I can, is just start giving it a try and see what works because you might not have so much time later on when and/or if things start to get more back to a semblance of normal.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and I would say, kind of keep things simple, try a few new things but it’s sort of one thing at a time, and then the thing I have always felt like is that people are more forgiving in some ways on video than they are on audio, and so if you have really high quality audio that carries things and if you have — you think your video is good and your audio is bad, it’s not going to come across very well. So audio tends to be the hardest thing to do and that basically means some kind of investing into microphones.
Tom Mighell: All right, before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a break for a message from our sponsors.
[Music]
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[Music]
Tom Mighell: And now let’s get back to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Tom Mighell.
Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy. So if I had a dollar for every new podcast, webcast, video chat or video channel, I’ve seen people announced in the last month, I’d be so rich.
So Tom and I have been doing this podcast for more than 15 years. So we actually feel like we might be qualified to make a comment or two about whether now is the best time to start a podcast and what your odds of success actually will be.
(00:30:02)
So Tom, is there no time like the present or how many of these new programs will still be around in a year?
Tom Mighell: Well, I don’t know that I am going to make a prediction about that. I think what I am going to talk about and say that to a certain extent this is a great time to start a podcast or video channel, or something similar in terms of time. Like I mentioned in the previous segment, when will you ever have this much free time to get something launched.
So my first thought is, if you have got an idea to do something, do as much as you can before things get back to what they were beforehand because you may not have that time again. This is the time to experiment and to try things out. But that said, don’t decide to start doing a podcast because you are bored or because you have time or because you have now listened to a bazillion podcast and you thinking you can do a better one. What’s your motivation for starting a podcast? We have talked about this many times about starting.
When we talked about starting a blog in the past, I recently restarted my blog, and to be honest, I am a little surprised, but I guess not totally surprised that it’s going to take a while to get back to the level of leadership I use to have. I am not starting from ground zero and I am still kind of amazed that the lack of engagement there is, because people haven’t known about me for a while, because you and likely thousands of others are thinking about this at the same time ask yourself what will set your offering apart from the others? It’s the same as we talked about when deciding whether to blog for the same reason that we don’t recommend you publish a general blog about the law.
We will same thing about a podcast. Choose a niche topic that will get people’s attention. For example, don’t start a COVID-19 updates podcast. There are so many of those out there, but maybe bankruptcy issues for companies affected by COVID-19 might be an interesting topic to talk about. The rules here I don’t think should be any different from what we talked about with blogging for years, find a differentiator and stick with it and give it a try, but don’t expect miracles from it because you are right when we all get back into the normal world, when and if that happens you may find, but you don’t have the time or the interest to keep it up.
Dennis, what about you?
Dennis Kennedy: To me it all comes down to, do you have a show? Do you have a show that there is an audience for, and can you execute it in a way that that audience will both find you and stick with you? And that is really hard.
So I think the equipment, the tools, all those things make it easier than ever, and I think you have this idea, oh, I can do this show and we are really fond — like I have this friend and we can sit around and talk for a while and everybody will find that interesting or maybe it’s just me, I will just sit around and talk or I will talk about Force Majeure Clauses because everybody is going to be super-interested in that.
No, it’s like all these people are doing podcasts now and you are competing with actual entertainers and people are doing high quality productions and all those people tend to do very long podcasts, so how are you going to break into that.
And so, I think this stuff is super-difficult to sustain especially as you kind of get back into this to swing of — if you go back to work, if you are still working from home what you’re probably going to discover is that if you take the commute out of your day, you will free up a significant amount of time that you could put into an outlet, but I think it’s hard to know whether you are a writer, you are a podcaster, you are a video person, and then how you can do it, and we are lucky being part of Legal Talk Network is that we can just be talent and we can do our show and it gets produced for us and gets distributed for us, and that’s awesome. If you are trying to do all that yourself it’s going to be difficult and you think you are going to do it once a week and it’s going to be once every two weeks and once a month, and then once every six months, and nobody wants to be the person who launches the new podcast, and then it has one episode which people have done, believe me.
So I think there is no time like the present in some ways, but you’ve got to be realistic about it, and the fact is that if you haven’t started a podcast by now you want to think about why that’s the case. So I think we are going to see a lot of podcast.
Tom, let’s start it out with a lot of energy right now in a year from now, they are not really going to be active anymore. So — but the people who can carry it off, it’s going to be great.
So now it’s time for the parting shots, that one-tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.
(00:34:50)
Tom Mighell: So the site that I am talking about in this episode is called the Work From Home Stack, and stack basically means stack of apps and tools, that’s kind of what we are seeing on the web now. Lots of websites that say what’s your stack, what are the set of tools that you use to do, certain things that you need to do.
This is — I hope that this site gets built out more. We may come back to this in a month or two and find that it’s really just set up for what it is and it won’t get built out more. Right now it’s got about a 126 different tools that you can use in different areas of your work life to work from home.
So there are lots of collaborative categories; collaborative design, collaborative software, employee engagement, messaging and team chat, productivity, project management, videoconferencing, virtual offices, lots of different options that you may not be aware of. You have got some of the standard ones that you would know about, Slack, Microsoft Teams, things like that, things that you’ve probably seen before, but there are other apps on there that you may not know about, and so, if you are looking for a specific tool to make working from home easier to connect with members of your firm or your company that you are not doing right now maybe there might be something in the Stack that will give you some inspiration about maybe perhaps using a different tool. Work From Home Stack, that’s wfhstack.co.
Dennis Kennedy: So Tom, I have something that ticks both the boxes of entertaining and educational, it’s called Room Rater, which is actually a Twitter account, and it’s @ratemyskyperoom, and what happens on this account is that all of — especially news people, people doing interviews, they will grab screen captures, and they actually rate the people’s rooms and how they decorate and stage their rooms for the video segments they do, and they do it on a 1 to 10 scale with some pithy comments, sometimes very funny comments, but it’s great because you realize that some of the things that you were seeing when people did interviews, that kind of bothers you and you weren’t really sure why. They have really identified them and when you see new things you realize that it’s a common sort of thing and you can look for things like the people who have all 14 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary between them or the Encyclopedia Britannica or there are books arranged by colors and you sort of see there are certain themes in all of these things.
So it’s called Room Rater, it’s one way to find it on Twitter or @ratemyskyperoom, and that will get you into it.
Tom Mighell: I will tell you when I read the script and I saw that I went to go look at the account and 15 minutes later I was still looking at rooms. It’s very addictive. So have a good time with that.
And 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 on Legal Talk Network’s page for this podcast.
If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site where you can find achieves of all of our previous podcasts with transcripts.
If you like to get in touch with us, you can always find us on LinkedIn or leave us a voicemail, we’ve got a voicemail that we are going to be using in an upcoming episode. We are very excited about it and we like to get more messages. So please give us a call at (720)441-6820. 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. If you like what you heard today please rate us in Apple Podcasts, and we will see you next time for another episode of The Kennedy Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.
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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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Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell talk the latest technology to improve services, client interactions, and workflow.