Microsoft Teams: Tips for Law Firms from Karuana Gatimu

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

Microsoft Teams Tips for Law Firms from Karuana Gatimu

October 23, 2020

 

[Music]

 

Intro:  Got the world turning as fast as it can? Here 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 LegalTalkNetwork.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  And welcome to episode 272 of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

 

Tom Mighell:  And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas. Before we get started, we’d like to thank our sponsors. First of all we’d like to thank Colonial Surety Company Bonds and Insurance for bringing you this podcast. Whatever court bonds you need get a quote and purchase online at colonialsurety.com/podcast.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  And we’d also like to thank ServeNow, a Nationwide Network of trusted pre-screened process servers. Work with the most professional process servers who have experience with high volume serves, embrace technology and understand the litigation process. Visit servenow.com to learn more.

 

Tom Mighell:  And we want to remind you that the second edition of our book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies’ is available on Amazon. Everyone agrees that collaboration is essential in today’s world but now more than ever before knowing the right tools will make all the difference.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  Here’s I’d like to say at the start of all our 2020 podcast. What a difference another week or two makes and the unexpected just keeps rolling on. In our last episode, we talked about demand side selling and jobs to be done theory in what we now call the Dennis buys a new blender show. In this episode, we’re excited to be interviewing another special guest as part of our goal of talk with more of the major collaboration platforms. Tom, what’s on our agenda for this episode?

 

Tom Mighell:  Well, Dennis in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report we are thrilled to have as our guest, Karuana Gatimu, principal PM manager of the customer advocacy group for Microsoft Teams which means as you might expect that we are going to be discussing one of my favorite topics, that’s Microsoft Teams and we’ll finish up as usual 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 up, we are so pleased to welcome Karuana Gatimu. I have made no secret on this podcast of my favoritism for Microsoft Teams. Dennis and I used teams to plan the podcast and to generally do all the schemes and machinations that we do ourselves so I was incredibly excited to have such an amazing team’s rock star on our show. Karuana welcome to the Kennedy-Mighell report.

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Well, wasn’t that a lovely introduction. Thank you very much. I am thrilled to be here.

 

Tom Mighell:  So Karuana let’s start with some introductions because I think like it or not they’re going to be some people in our audience who aren’t familiar with Microsoft Teams. So to get started, can you give explanation of what Microsoft Teams is and then maybe by extension what does your team the customer advocacy group or teams do to support it?

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Absolutely. So Microsoft Teams, we think of it as the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365. It is a Cloud-based service that provides collaboration, communication tools, it’s really a very extensible platform to deliver the kind of value that we need especially in this work from home world that we’re living in right now. I had the privilege of sitting inside product engineering. My customer advocacy group is really focused on helping people get the most out of the product but not just the product, right. I mean I think right now we’re seeing that getting the most out of remote work. Having it be secure and stable and meaningful to organizations and customers is a challenge and we’ve gone through a lot of transformation. And so my team works on all the tools and training and things like that that you need to really get to value as quickly as possible. It is frankly my dream job. I love it.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  That’s cool. What I’ve noticed is that some people see teams as a slack competitors, some see it as a video conferencing tools, some see it as a frontend to SharePoint and some see it as I think is even other things. So when someone asks you to describe teams, what do you like to tell them so they appreciate the many different ways they can use teams?

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Well you did a great job as that. Just the way you did it right there. You know, I never think about what we’re competing against or this that and the other. Yes it’s true. We do — we are built including things like SharePoint and OneDrive. You can do videoconferences and meetings and even large-scale virtual events. Part of my job is to structure large-scale virtual events for customers and Microsoft employees. But really the important thing is, what does your company need to accomplish by collaborating inside your company —

 

(00:05:00)

 

— inside your practice or potentially with clients or other firms so you may not know this but I hail from the legal technology space that was one of my first jobs in this business working for a system integrator who did technology projects for law firms and the thing I remember about that most was it’s very important that collaboration be secure and clear and you can find what you need and Microsoft Teams is very good at that.

 

Tom Mighell:  So I think and I’ve said here now. I’ve said it on multiple podcasts I’m going to admit. I come to this discussion as a biased fan and so even though you don’t like to talk about competitors I’m not going to mention competitors. I think what makes teams superior to other products is that it has its own ecosystem of Microsoft 365 components to integrate with it. So you don’t have to go and find a word processing tool to connect. You don’t have to find a form tool to connect or a workflow tool to connect. Can you expand on that I think I heard you say somewhere you don’t just want to talk about teams, you want to talk about all of Microsoft 365 and I see I think that that’s one of the things that make teams successful. Can you can kind of expand on what I’m saying about why that may be true?

 

Karuana Gatimu:  So one of the most challenging things whether you’re an IT technologist in this day and age or practice leader whatever you may be doing is navigating the waters of all the technology that’s available. One of the advantages with Microsoft Teams is we do that for you in the sense that Microsoft Teams provides that ability to integrate common applications like things from Office, Word, PowerPoint, Excel but also some of these very powerful tools in Microsoft 365. And you mentioned it power automate right? Commonly referred to as flow, power apps, these abilities to bring in different systems. Even a simple web page, you can bring that right into the team environment and people can find that information because oftentimes when I talk about teams I ask people how many browser windows do you have to have open to get your job done? Right and teams brings those things together.

 

I spend a lot less time clicking around in various applications to be able to access the information I need whether that’s in my case my CRM system that allows me to access all the customer information I’m working on, different project management tools, different development tools. I’m bringing those things together and legal technology that might be case and matter management right? That might be records and information. That could be research sites that you’re using right to under the law.

 

So if I can spend more time actually doing the work I’m supposed to be doing rather than trying to figure out how to find what I want to work with, my life is automatically better. The last thing I’m going to say about that is one of the things we have to really be mindful about in this current world that we’re living in is the context switching really causes even more mental fatigue. Many people are under a great deal of stress for a variety of reasons before they ever sit down at their now home office to accomplish something. And whatever we can do as a company and as a product to really invest in people’s wellness and minimize that change fatigue that comes from context switching and comes from just the frustration that can happen in front of your computer some days is what we really want to accomplish.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  So you’ve kind of teed up my question, the big questions I had for you. So I know that having been at Mastercard where I was for many years that that we all have in these objectives corporate and personal. So I’m just curious whether you’ve actually gotten a chance to look back at January 2020, revisit your original objectives for teams and the roadmap and seeing how much the pandemic changed all that and then also what’s it been like to be at one of the epicenters of the change that had to happen for us all to move to remote work?

 

Karuana Gatimu:  I have to tell you that these last months have been different than anything I’ve ever experienced in my 30 years in this business. You know, I feel like the Microsoft ecosystem as a whole but specifically our product really went through such an unbelievable transformation because businesses onboarded to us immediately. Years of digital transformation happened in weeks and happened overnight in some cases. And I had the pleasure of leading one of the pods of the coronavirus response teams, four teams and you know I will also say that it really showed our culture as a company, you know Satya talks a lot about us transforming our own culture so that we can build better products. And I know that some people outside the company might think that that’s a marketing scheme but that’s not true. We really did work across company borders and lines inside the organization.

 

(00:09:59)

 

We really did come together and I’ve never seen people work in that way before and we appreciate the growth, we didn’t do everything right? We know that. And we have a lot really that we’ve learned from people being able to digitally transform so quickly.

 

Now I’ll say that we kind of know you could do it pretty fast. Usually the blockers come from some little bit of fearing anxiety but also I find customers sometimes before the pandemic tended to focus on the wrong thing. They were focused overly on one individual knob lever feature. When they should have been focusing on the business value they could be getting, the employee experience they could be improving and the flow, the function that they could be having because in Microsoft 365, I have awesome governance tools. Governance is very important right, security and management. These things are very important but they’re not more important than your employees being able to get work done.

 

So I feel like the pandemic what I learned from it was A, our culture and action does amazing work. B, give customers confidence as much as possible and as quickly as possible so they can actually learn because you can see that when people are under tremendous amount of stress and pressure I can tell you how to upload a file into teams all day long. You’re not going to remember. Your brain literally is wired in particular way and if you’re under too much anxiety, you’re not going to be able to retain new information and I think people underestimate that a lot, right? And also people learn in different ways. So you really have to accommodate employees no matter where they are in a firm learning in different ways. So visually through auditory means, reading, hands-on and do it in shorter segments, right? People’s attention span is pretty short.

 

Frankly, it always was. I don’t think we realized that because I used to give these you know, I create these one hour classes or 45-minute classes nobody’s coming to that. They actually do that’s not fair. They do come to my online training at AK (00:12:11) teams live training, right? You can sign up for a 30-minute course and we’ve actually collapsed it and changed it so you get even more value out of it but look, at the end of the day, I’m really proud to have been part of that digital first response team helping the actual first responders and the people you know, really matter in the situation. You know to be effective but I learned that humans are the most important thing in any equation. They can be your greatest advantage and they can be your greatest blocker and it all depends on how invested are you in working with them to get rid of their fear and tailor you don’t be in love with your own tool like I love teams, right? But I’m in love with people’s objectives. That’s really part of my job but I’ve always been this way when I was a legal technologist before or whatever it matters what they want to do. So be in love with that and scope teams which is a very large product to the things they need to do. Maybe you only want to onboard the teams for online meetings, chat and file collaboration. You’re not going to you know, you’re not going to do an integration to your matter management tool this time because you can’t just think about it, that’s okay but let’s think about it for later. You know, break your projects up into phases because one day I’m going to get all those things integrated into teams.

 

Tom Mighell:  So, what’s funny is that your answer to that question just like teed up my — for some reason are questions are aligning perfectly because I want to talk about several things that you mentioned there. I think I saw the statistic at the end of April I don’t know how it’s changed. The statistics was the team’s adoption was up 70% just at the end of April. I’m sure it’s much higher than it was then but what I see and what we didn’t talk about earlier is my day job is in information governance. And what we’re seeing right now is a little bit of a repeat of what we saw maybe I don’t know 10 years ago with SharePoint where IT departments would go and say hey we’ve got this great new free tool, use it and just go crazy with it and have a good time with it and they’re not doing the right things to make sure that the right governance is applied to it and so we’re having questions now from some of our clients that come in and say well, is it correct that all of our employees are recording every single one of their meetings in the stream, I’m like I don’t know if you want just a status meeting recorded in stream. I mean, they’re recording every single thing and how long do we keep all that information from an information governance standpoint. So for firms, let’s bring it to law firms but for firms thinking about rolling out teams to the lawyers you talk about, you mention here maybe rolling out specific use cases to them but maybe are there other issues in terms of governance that they need to think about to make sure that people are using it in the right way.

 

(00:15:01)

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Absolutely. You touched on one of my favorite subjects. I love governance unlike some IT people or customers I happen to love that topic. So some very specific things, first, anyone rolling out teams should be visiting successwithteams.com. This is our IT product documentation that really details all the capabilities and the settings and can give context. The thing also to remember is that Microsoft Teams is built on top of Office 365 Groups. So when you talk about governance, you’re really governing the Office 365 Groups infrastructure. It’s basically like a membership service for all those great applications I was talking about earlier in the Microsoft ecosystem and many people never did their Office 365 Groups governance properly to begin with actually and so they — you put it very nicely. I call it SharePoint Sprawl that was the thing that we dealt with back in the SharePoint days I’m an old-school SharePoint person myself and I want people to know that you can manage and govern Microsoft Teams in a way that doesn’t add too much friction to the collaboration process because this is the place where they also did you know we, I was an IT professional at that time we did some bad things in the SharePoint days where we put too much friction and for people to get a simple site for them to share documents. And so they went outside, we created shadow IT by putting too many fields on that form we wanted them to fill out to get their little SharePoint site. So it encourages us to not repeat those mistakes.

 

The third thing I’ll tell you about is the team’s advisor. So we’ve built a tool that actually uses teams to plan teams and this is my favorite thing because IT pros need to understand the tool to properly manage it and it was new for lots of people. So it’s called the team’s advisor. The information is in our documentation. You can go right into the admin center for Microsoft 365, what will happen is, it will deploy a team for you to bring all the right people together to deploy manage and drive adoption of teams and it will create the plan for you in planner with all of the various steps you need to do and all of the links to the documentation I’m talking about. Never before in the history of all of my working in the Microsoft ecosystem have I had something like this and I did yes have a hand in building it with my friend Brandon and it’s really exciting because you know, part of the issue is all this documentation changes.

 

And the last link for anybody who’s already done the deployment as many people have, you can go back and use teams advisor and look at that plan and use it as a checklist to make sure that the rapid deployment you did previously, right is actually safe and secure and properly configured but there’s also location called teamwork governance and that is a topic you’re going to find on my website adoption.microsoft.com and it really goes through all the steps you need to for governing Microsoft Teams, Office 365 Groups and by extension, SharePoint sites and the things you love. So you know, some people want to create their own custom form still to manage the provisioning of a team that’s not you know a horrible idea. It’s probably not my favorite idea but it’s not a horrible idea and it’s very common. I just asked people please don’t put more than five fields on that form and have it auto provision information for users. If they have to wait to get their team to collaborate, they will not do it. They will go elsewhere and then what happens is, people store everything in their OneDrive and it’s not associated with the matter or project or issue that it needs to be. This is why I love OneDrive for the storing of my own personal documents you know, documents I’m doing just with one person but when you’re actually working on an actual project or a matter in your firm, data should be associated with that. So it shouldn’t be in people’s random OneDrives, right? I really want people to store the information in the team that’s associated with that just like we would in a SharePoint site. Because that’s what you’re doing, you’re using SharePoint under the covers, right?

 

And so you know, I feel like having that good data hygiene also can lead you to have the good policies about retention, about auditing, about reporting and usage that’s all built into Microsoft 365. Do I think you should save every status meeting and teams forever, no. I don’t record every meeting I’m in for sure and there’s definitely issues about that on adoption.microsoft.com you can also get to the story telling that Microsoft IT does about how we do it at Microsoft governance, retention, all those policies that we have for a company of our size with various sort of security and legal people and various sort of people like me on the user experience side.

 

(00:20:01)

 

It’s about, you know, splitting that difference. But, you know, there’s lots of ways to be able to appropriately address these things and ensure we don’t repeat the past, which is what I’m passionate about.

 

Tom Mighell:  And I’m equally passionate because that’s — we usually get brought in once there’s been no governance and they’ve said, “Help us.” And —

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Yes. It’s a mess, right?

 

Tom Mighell:  It’s a mess. So, let’s get it right the first time. All right.

 

Karuana Gatimu:  That’s great.

 

Tom Mighell:  So, before we move on, let’s take a quick break for some words from our sponsors and then we will be back with Karuana.

 

[Music]

 

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

 

Dennis Kennedy:  And I’m Dennis Kennedy and we are joined by our special guest, Karuana Gatimu, Principal PM Manager of the Customer Advocacy Group for Microsoft Teams. Karuana, let’s turn and look at the legal profession. And it’s fascinating that you had some strong experience there before going to work on Teams. So, what are you seeing these days or hearing about that law firms and I guess especially the courts are — in the ways they’re starting to use Teams that have been especially effective.

 

Tom Mighell:  Let’s break it down into law firms and then courts because I have kind of a specific question around courts that I want to ask, so maybe law firms first and then courts.

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Okay, that’s great. Well, you know, every industry has been transformed by the global pandemic and law firms are certainly no exception. And what I find, you know, law firms are not historically on the bleeding edge of technology. Usually, it takes some time for it to make through the various committees that exist and for to also get into the DNA of people in that business. You know, law firms, the law, when you think about it, at least when I think about it, I don’t think about the online search to, I think about the legal library. And I think that because people think that way that industry it takes some time, but actually in this situation, maybe moving very quickly. Law firms obviously closed all across the country and they have actually already been supporting people digitally. You know, some law firms had already understood that the workforce of the future included this ability to be secure but mobile and with Microsoft Teams being available on every type of device, Windows, Macintosh, iPads, iPhones, androids, Linux, right? You know, wherever you are, you can stay connected with Teams. And time is everything in the legal industry. So, matter management, collaboration on documents, document review, leveraging the power of, of course, office and review tools and really doing these video meetings is very important so as our prior topic of governance because of course things can be recorded in Teams. You can turn that capability off from a tenant perspective if in fact you wanted to and you can also turn it off for a particular segment of your user base. So, we’ve seen people doing that. Being more nuanced about the governance and policy decisions that they’re making around Microsoft 365, one of the reasons that I usually come in to a customer is because, you know, they really need to drive adoption more quickly and oftentimes what I find is that they’ve used policy management and feature controls like big sledgehammers, right? And so, they’ve either turned everything off or turned everything on, that’s not the approach I would recommend, right? Understand the needs of different users and associate has a different need than a partner that has a different need than a paralegal than a client, right? So, when your client needs to collaborate with their counsel, you know, this is a great environment to be able to bring things together. This is very, very powerful and allows also that lawyer to not just hear that person’s voice which is very powerful but also turn that video on, right? Supporting video conference and client consultation is very, very important because also, I believe being a lawyer is also about instilling confidence in your client, that you’re going to be able to manage their affairs on their behalf, solve their problem, you know, be their agent and that is a human activity, right?

 

(00:25:11)

 

And so, being able to leverage these tools and people have found a lot of power in that, frankly overnight. You know, law firms were reviewing and using our technology but overnight, they had to understand remote work, client consultation, system integration and also deal with as many people are right now, the limitations of bandwidth in their own homes. And bandwidth is a thing if you have kids as well right now that are still for instance on Zoom, or they are, you know, doing education at home, you got multiple collaboration software happening in your domain all eating up that bandwidth. So, you know, bandwidth is precious and we’re very mindful frankly of that in our architecture. There’s a lot that we’ve done even recently over time for performance, for network efficiency, you know, the work that we do in Teams is not just about the bright shiny features that you see in together mode or the other things that we announced like breakout rooms, it’s really under the covers about security performance, optimization, for this type of world and this scale. So, it’s been really pretty amazing to see how fast lawyers could transform. I don’t think I would have thought that maybe previously, maybe not. I love the law. I do. I almost became a lawyer but speedy adaption’s probably not what I would have thought of.

 

Tom Mighell:  No, you’re right. We frequently discussed on this podcast about, you know, don’t know if you know that they’re — they recently required a couple of years ago, the duty of technological competence as part of a lawyer’s requirements.

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Really?  I did not know that. Wow, I should’ve celebrated on that day.

 

Tom Mighell:  Well I’ll tell you though, getting to that point is, you know, easier said than done and that’s where we’re I’m hoping that stuff like this can help out with that. But let’s extend that out because I think that law firms working from home is one thing the courts which really have traditionally relied on in-person, being there in person in front of a judge or a jury and being able to see people’s face has really gone through some jarring changes. And I think that there are — I’ve started to see online hearings, online trials. I’ve seen the use of other tools that in my opinion one of the things that I think would make more sense for Teams as a platform for online proceedings is that it has the capability to store documents and evidence which are a huge part of the hearing or trial experience. Are there any either innovative uses that you’ve seen about courts that are using or other organizations are using that might make use or might make sense for courts moving forward?

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Oh absolutely. I’ve been working — personally, I run our virtual event studio that helps customers think about Teams as a tool for either to the delivery of an event, in this case trials, or you know, internal events for trainings and pre-trial motions and other things. So, this is definitely something that we’re seeing in Teams that is happening. And I want to paint a picture because you have these people who are central council representing both sides, the judge is there, you have a stenographer. You have these people that are involved in the process of a trial or motion or some sort of hearing. And everyone has a role. Well, that’s something that is very easy to author and manage within Microsoft Teams and of course, yes you mentioned that office is integrated and that ability to store documents that are specific

to a particular instance or hearing it is certainly supported. But more than that, we can also control the meeting experience in such a way that you have a lobby. So, you can control when somebody actually comes and joins the meeting.

 

So, pretend that you have three or four witnesses you don’t want them really to talking with each other and you don’t want them in the virtual room before you are ready for them. You can have someone who is managing that experience. We have those controls. They can be set up very easily either by the meeting manager or at a tenant-wide level. And so, we’ve really seen people embracing this both here and around the world. So obviously, Microsoft Teams is a global product, right? And so, you know, we can we can do this and frankly in some other countries, it has been adopted more quickly in these scenarios. So, it does introduce a new role however, right? The technology manager that’s in that room becomes as important as the stenographer, right?

 

(00:30:02)

 

Because you have to have someone who has the technical acumen and the focus to manage what is happening in the virtual court environment, right? And so, that’s what I’m really working on is what is the training guide for that person? What are the skills that they need to have? So, I’m the author of the service adoption specialist course for Microsoft. And so, I basically teach people what you need to know to drive adoption of Microsoft services. And so, this is a specialty area just like driving adoption of Microsoft Teams and I think we need to recognize the technical talent but also the familiarity with that environment you’re going to have to have to know how to work the technology in the best way for the virtual court environment. Frankly, you know, it was always my feeling that every judge’s courtroom has its own personality, every judge has their own way of wanting to do things and so you can’t just apply some standardized method. I can give you best practices and I can give you technical acumen. But you as a courtroom technologist, I’m going make that term right now, you know, you as the courtroom technologist have to be mindful of the people you’re working with and the courtroom you are serving and structure that knowledge in a way that’s going to serve them. So, it’s absolutely doable. Adoption.microsoft.com is a place where you’re going to be able to find that guidance about being a courtroom technologist when we release it, it will not come out probably until January. We’re gathering some additional data and we’re releasing some additional features that I want to include in that kit. And so, you know, this is this is the thing that I hope people understand. Applying technology in this day and age is an absolute talent. And I hope that people who are listening to this have someone in their environment, in their firm that they trust to navigate these waters. Of course, at Microsoft, we can help you. But you should have someone in your environment whether it is a partner or some — I mean, a partner firm like a technology, legal technology firm or actually your own staff who can help you implement these tools in an appropriate way.

 

And I think, I really hope that people who are running county courthouses and different districts are also having to, you know, upgrade their skills because frankly, that’s been a little bit of a challenge, right? Staff and some of the or, you know, the institutions who need to deliver these services have not been up to date. It’s not their fault. But we can’t be like that anymore. You know, people need to understand how to log into Office 365 and save a document. They need to take my free online courses. They need to take accountability for whether or not they understand the technology around them because it’s kind of not optional now. And I realize it’s stressful. And so, I’ve built it in such a way that they can onboard in bite-sized chunks. But at the end of the day especially if you’re serving a courthouse, if you want to be that courtroom technologist or if you’re at a firm that does a lot of litigation there, you have to understand what’s available to you. So that you can best serve your client.

 

At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about and that you’re serving the law, and you’re serving your client, so how you’re going to do that? You’re going to have to understand the technology around you.

 

Tom Mighell:  Well, I have to say I probably have two or three hours more of questions to ask for you and but we’re running out of time. So, before we go and say thank you Karuana for being a guest, what’s the best way for people to either get in touch with you or keep up with you if they wanted to do that?

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Oh absolutely. Well, you can certainly find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. I advise you to follow me on LinkedIn and that’s usually — that’s where I post all of the new information that’s coming out from an adoption space around Microsoft Teams and I have a blog on aka.ms drive adoption that’s on the Microsoft technical community so you can certainly sign up there and you will see all the different material that is coming out. Yeah, thank you. I really love this topic, you can probably tell I could talk about it for a really long time. I feel like I have been talking about legal technology for a really long time. I do want to give a brief shout out to an old school friend of mine Judy Flournoy. She’s out at Kelley, Drye & Warren. And you know, she and I were in the same company many, many years ago legacist when she was studying to be a network engineer and we came up at the same time and her work

is amazing. I don’t hardly ever get to see her but I follow her work on LinkedIn and so, I just want to give a shout out to because she’s a brilliant example of somebody who understands what technology can do for a firm and I just, you know, women in this business, we have to stick together.

 

Tom Mighell:  Judy’s great. I’ve followed her through ILTA for quite some time.

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Yeah.

 

(00:35:00)

 

Dennis Kennedy:  So, thank you so much, Karuana.  Now, it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Karuana, do you want to give us your parting shot?

 

Karuana Gatimu:  Absolutely. visit adoption.microsoft.com. We’re going to tell you the story of how to use Microsoft Teams and we’re also going to show you that investing in your own health and wellness is the most important thing. Right now, you know, the wellness and health of the people in your firm including yourself probably needs some attention and some TLC. So, come visit our website, sign up for some of our fun stuff and learn about Microsoft Teams.

 

Tom Mighell:  Okay, my tips are all Teams related because I want it to stay in theme. The first one is actually not really a not really a tip but just something that we actually didn’t mention during the podcast that we should which is there might be a lot of law firms out there who don’t realize or lawyers out there who don’t realize that Teams is part of Microsoft 365. You’ve got it, it’s already there, it’s not something you have to go out and find and purchase or download or anything. You’ve already got it as part of it. So, you can take advantage of it, we encourage you to do that. I happen to fall into that group of people who see announcements of upcoming features and really hate the fact that you announced them like five months in advance because I’m waiting for them to happen and I can’t wait. There are two specific features that I’m really looking forward to and that one of them is called custom layout I think and it’s going to make it more interesting to present to presentations where you can kind of do it as a news broadcast type thing where the screen is behind you and you’re right in front of it but it allows you to customize your screen so that the attendees are seeing what you want them to see which I am very intrigued with and then also for those of you who rely on and use presenter view within PowerPpoint, presenter view is coming now to Teams so you can access presenter view if you want to show something within Teams that will be available. Again, not as soon as I wanted to but I’m excited for those two things to come. Dennis.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  So, I actually have two things, one, I just added during the podcast. And I think there’s a brand-new legal career category that — especially law students and maybe new graduates but maybe other people who, you know, have lost jobs or looking to leave the actual practice. And I think that this notion of the technical support on Teams for courts because I do believe that courts, based on everything I’ve heard are going to look really hard at Teams as they go into the next phase of things and into the future, so could be an amazing category for people who have legal training but also have technology interests and would like to work the course. But the tip I started with though is called how to protect your organization against password dictionary attacks, it’s on a site called cloudsavvyit.com. And a lot of people don’t understand strong passwords or how they can be attacked. And the dictionary attack is an incredibly popular and widely used way and this article is great at explaining how that works, how insecure or unsecure your passwords might be, and the ways you can in some simple ways protect yourself against these really powerful dictionary attacks.

 

Tom Mighell:  All right then, 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 on the Legal Talk Network’s page for the podcast. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site where you can find archives of all of our previous shows as well as transcripts. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you know how to find us on LinkedIn or Twitter. You can also leave us a voicemail. Remember, we like to get questions on our voicemail for our B segment. That number is (720) 441-6820. So, until the next podcast, I’m 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. If you like what you heard today, please rate us in Apple Podcast and we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy-Mighell report on the Legal Talk Network.

 

[Music]

 

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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