What Lawyers Need to Know About Website Technology with Dave Sobel

Episode Notes

Transcript

Karin Conroy:

This is Counsel Cast part of the Legal Talk Network, and I’m your host, Karin Conroy. When you face a complex case outside your expertise, you bring in a co-counsel for next level results. When you want to engage, expand, and elevate your firm, you bring in a marketing co-counsel. In this podcast, I bring in marketing experts who each answer one big question to help your firm achieve more. Here’s today’s guest.

Dave Sobel:

I’m Dave Sobel. I am the host of the Business of Tech podcast. I was a 10 year veteran of running a managed services provider for small businesses and another 10 years working on the vendor side selling software to those same guys. And now I spend my time helping those people think about what technology changes matter today. And I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Karin Conroy:

Oh, this is going to be good. Dave, thank you for being here. What technology changes matter? I feel like I’m just underlining that a little bit because it is just a whirlwind of technology changes. So to begin, the title for the show is What Lawyers Need to Know About Website Technology. So that’s kind of a broad, that’s a lot. This is not going to be a five hour mini series show about website technology, but there’s a lot of different things that are going on right now that are big changes and things that people are confused and overwhelmed by. So let’s start with the big one in terms of website and just technology in general. Let’s start with AI and let’s talk about what are the main things that everybody needs to know. I mean, everybody’s talking about how to do it, all the problems, all the issues or whatever, but what’s the main, what would you say the top, I don’t know, three things are that people need to know about AI technology and related to websites and marketing and all that good stuff.

Dave Sobel:

It’s incredibly exciting for those of us in technology because it’s very rare that you have these technologies that are explosive, adopted very fast, and we can see the real transformative nature. We can literally sort of draw the lines of, oh, the internet was one. Oh, the iPhone was one. And we’re kind of doing the same thing with AI here. And so I’m going to say there are three big things if you want to break it down. The first is the, oh yeah, this is a thing. This is a thing. You are going to be impacted by it. But the second thing I’m going to say is technology analysts and technology people like me always say it goes faster than it actually does. Oh, interesting. So in a way, I want to tell everybody that be like, yeah, it’ll be okay. Trust me, it will be okay. You have more time than you think you do because we are always wrong about how fast it goes.

Karin Conroy:

Oh, I love that. That is really a unique point to be made that, I mean, I have to say, I read about AI and look at all the tips and that’s a unique one. And I feel like that offers such a breath of fresh air too. Like, okay, everyone take a breath. You have time, you are going to be okay.

Dave Sobel:

And my last thought is that, hey, the basic principles always still work. My father was a woodworker and I talk all the time about the idea of measure twice. Cut once is a foundational principle for a reason. And so if you are thoughtful about it, make thinking about it and then move, you’re going to do okay, particularly based on my second statement that it doesn’t nearly move as fast as we did. And by the way, think about all of these revolutions that we’ve been through the internet for those of us that it came on, I was playing with the internet in 1995, but commercially years later, before we got it all right, like a decade later till we got it all right. And by the way, we’re still feeling the impact of that. The iPhone the same way. Oh, launched super exciting revolutionary device. Yeah, those first few years, remember those apps? Remember the i Beer stupid app and the fart apps and all kinds of silly we’re a lot of time figuring out what it would do. Well, by the way, ai, same thing.

Karin Conroy:

I love that. I love that because everyone has this kind of twisted memory, especially of things like the iPhone where in their memory it is what it is today or it was what it is today. And it wasn’t. I’ll never forget the very first day the iPhone was released. Of course, I was working with someone who was beyond early adopter and they came over to our house and they’re showing us, and at this time I’m working corporate, so I of course had a Blackberry. That was the thing, and that was the status symbol at the time where these blackberries with the little mini keyboard and your thumbs and all that. And I remember I’m standing there with my Blackberry and he’s standing there with his iPhone and I was like, I don’t get it. I don’t see it. I don’t see what that thing can do that this Blackberry can’t. At the time the iPhone had no, the main kind of force and everybody where started kind of rubber hitting the road with the iPhone is once all the apps started getting in there and integrating and interacting with each other. But in the beginning it was like email, not great pictures and maybe a little bit of texting, but even then it wasn’t what it is now. So I love that. This

Dave Sobel:

Is the key point. This is the key point, right? By the way, those of us in technology, we recognize these moments. We often recognize them when they’re happening. And remember, I dig into the financial motivations of technology all the time on my show, and this is where I highlight, remember all the people that are telling you how important AI is, are financially motivated for it to be very important for you?

Karin Conroy:

Yes, yes.

Dave Sobel:

So take a moment. It’s okay. They’re excited because they’ve built something that is going to change everybody and they want you to do it right now.

Karin Conroy:

Give them five bucks, right?

Dave Sobel:

It’s okay. I legitimately believe there are real use cases here. I think there are things that we’re going to do with it, but whether or not you did it today or in the next hour versus let actually be thoughtful about the way that we can leverage it. And by the way, I think people that are moving now are going to have some competitive advantage. They’ll embrace it, they’ll move faster. They’ll see some benefits with that. But by the way, the speed doesn’t have to be at light speed in order to do it. Frankly, most people who are thinking about moving right now are ahead of the majority.

Karin Conroy:

Yes. I love that.

Dave Sobel:

So okay, so it’s okay everybody. Now let’s

Karin Conroy:

Be thoughtful. You haven’t missed the boat.

Dave Sobel:

Trust me, you’ve totally not missed the boat. The boat’s still a dock. We’re still loading people on the dock and we’re getting people on the boat. And by the way, we haven’t quite figured out where we’re going on the boat yet.

Karin Conroy:

Yeah, we’re not even sure if the boat is really floating. We don’t even know if we’ve got the engine for the boat yet. But there’s this idea of a boat and people are hopefully getting on the boat.

Dave Sobel:

So it’s okay everybody. So now let’s be thoughtful about the technology. So one of the things that I’ve been telling both my listeners who are the IT providers helping businesses but also business owners themselves is look, this is a great time to think about your ethics and your guidelines for the way you’re going to use it. So for example, I believe that you need to make sure that everything is vetted by humans before it goes out. Why? Because you are ultimately responsible for that. I’m talking to a group of lawyers. Everybody remember the case where the lawyer didn’t vet it and got rubbed out by the judge? You look at that and you go common sense, buddy, your name was on the material. You should have looked at it. Now that also means that I think there is usefulness here. The ability to interact with a generative AI tool and get data back and research back faster is going to make your life much better. Lawyers, I want you to think about an infinite Paralegal that knows every case that’s ever been done and can give you that reference in real time.

Karin Conroy:

Pretty, yeah. But they’re also very overly eager. So it’s like an infinite Paralegal that’s too eager and you definitely need to check their work because there’s a huge potential for error and just kind of going down the wrong path a hundred

Dave Sobel:

Percent. But by the way, wouldn’t you like to have that person on your staff? Exactly. If they were infinite capacity, right? Exactly. Which they are. They can take as much. It’s an additive thing. Microsoft uses the phrase copilot to brand theirs. And I love it because the idea is it is next to you helping you out, giving you guidance,

Karin Conroy:

Copilot,

Dave Sobel:

Copilot, but you are still holding the reins, you are still flying the plane. And I want you to about it that way so you can give guidance to your people of, look, we are encouraging the experimental use of ai. We want you to do it in ways that make sense. And perhaps you’ll make decisions about are you allowing proprietary data to go into it or are you investing in systems that are confidential about that? You’ll make your determination about your comfort level 100%. But I’m guiding everybody and saying, make sure you’re reviewing its work. You are still responsible for it at the end of the day. So that should be part of your guidance.

Karin Conroy:

Yes, a hundred percent. And then I want to do a follow up here and talk for a minute about these AI checkers. And here’s why. We do a lot of SEO work and we draft a lot of content and we in our agreement say that we use humans and we guarantee that that is our agreement. We do not use ai, however, we do use AI tools to verify the quality of the work. So it gives us a grade and whatever. So we recently had some clients who used this AI checker where it basically scans the work that we sent over and it came back and said, no, this is ai. And so we did this in depth kind of investigation on the checker they used along with a whole bunch of others, did a bunch of research. We’re writing a big blog post about this that should be live by the time that we post this show. And basically they’re totally unreliable. That’s what it comes down to.

Dave Sobel:

They totally, totally don’t work.

Karin Conroy:

They come back with false negatives all the time. And that really matters to us because obviously that impacts our reputation. We’re saying that we’re using humans and we had this whole group of people sit down and a human sitting next to another human draft content, submit it to a checker, and it came back as AI while we were physically checking this. So I just want to talk for a minute about that. Do you have experience with that? And we’re talking about how you have to check this work. You as a human need to check this work. Do not rely on AI to check ai,

Dave Sobel:

Right? It’s just doesn’t work. And there’s no magic solution. Everybody wants a magic technology solution. And I’m here to tell you that that’s not how this works. The AI checkers, they’re garbage. They’re wasted your time. And what’s interesting to me is I really want people to think about the way they use tools and the way they get comfortable with ’em over time. Spell check is essentially an AI tool. Yes, I love that. And by the way, if you’ve ever used a grammar tool, I love Grammarly. I love Grammarly. I use it a lot by the way, it’s an AI tool everybody. It’s

Karin Conroy:

Absolutely.

Dave Sobel:

And so think about the, are you upset by something that’s been spell checked? Are you upset by something that’s been grammar checked? Okay, you’re probably not, but those have been around for a little while. This is new. I get it. It’s different and scary. But this is the next evolution of that. Now you’ve got something that understands language and can help you and make recommendations. I don’t mind saying I leverage AI all the time to produce my work. It does summarization really well. It helps me tighten things. It helps me expand a little bit. It’s not always necessarily a great writer, but by the way, it’s infinite and fast so it can make me work better. I love it. As a co-author, I will put something into a tool and I’ll say, what did I miss? And I’ll come back with five points, three of which I already thought of, but maybe one is something that I legitimately missed and didn’t think of that angle. Love it. And that’s where you can get really useful this, but ultimately I’m responsible for the final material. Exactly. And the organization is responsible for the final material. And if you use it that way, it is the next evolution of spell check, grammar check. Yes. Now it’s a writing check At another level,

Karin Conroy:

I mentioned the fact that we use those SEO tools. We also use Grammarly and spell check. And the reason I mentioned that earlier is because that threw off those AI checkers. So because we were using Grammarly and we had a spell check obviously in there, it came back and that was what threw off the AI checker is because it somehow it could see that Grammarly had touched our work. So I just mentioned that in terms of where things are and are not right now. So don’t use those AI checkers, use the human, really check the work yourself as a human, not some AI checker, but it is a great tool. So there’s a balance there, but it has to include human eyes,

Dave Sobel:

Right? Well, I mean, by the way, good content has always required craftsmanship. And by the way, I think this revolution is going to be really good for all of us that are good at that. Yeah. These are tools that make those of us that are good at writing, creation, thinking. It accelerates our work, it assists our work. We are able to work and produce more, faster, better. And there’s areas where you can use it. It’s great at summarization, it’s really good at providing insights from attend meetings. It’s really good at documenting and transcribing and then giving you a first pass at action items and following up and all of that kind of stuff. It’s really good at that stuff and that freeze up time for us to work on the other things. And in particular, it’s a really great first version of a research assistant. It gives you a lot of really insights. I’ll give you one from outside the law space, but I think it’s really fascinating. They’ve been doing tests in ER rooms in the ER to help emergency medical technicians with first diagnosis. And what they’ve found is that they had actually used generative AI tools to where they put in the symptoms. And in 97% of cases in this particular study, the problem that the patient was facing was in five generated answers 97% of the time.

Karin Conroy:

Amazing. So

Dave Sobel:

You want a tool that gives doctors like, Hey, we’ve done a first pass at it. Check these five things first. That sounds amazing. We’re

Karin Conroy:

Saving time. This is in the er when time is essential here. And we’re not saying prescribe these medications based on this chat, GPT giving me a diagnosis. Hey, check these five things first.

Dave Sobel:

It could be one of these five things. Check these, go through these really quickly. Hey, 97% hit rate that saves lives. And that’s the way I want people to think about it is in terms of this, it’s helping narrow the field. It’s able to do analysis you can’t do, it’s able to provide those insights, but you are still using it. You’re the one making the determination. It’s just narrowing the field or giving you a starting place.

Karin Conroy:

So we’re kind of transitioning from AI into how you can use it practically. And I know that your audience usually is IT service providers. And so we’re going to transition into that world and how that kind of plays out. And also a lot of firms that we work with also have IT service providers. We’re going to talk about that in a second. But first we’re going to take a quick break. We are here with Dave Sobel and we’re talking about IT, technology, websites, marketing, all that good stuff. We spent a good few minutes talking about AI specifically because that’s just what everybody’s talking about right now. But let’s talk about IT. Service providers, we work with a lot of IT service providers at some point in our marketing projects. And let’s talk about how this all plays out and what the big topics are that you guys are talking about right now in the world of technology.

Dave Sobel:

Yeah, I mean there’s a lot of discussion in that world about understanding what works doesn’t, how to run a really good business. There’s a lot of fundamental conversations that happen in there. We’re always looking for the new service opportunities. But the other thing that’s really been happening in that space is a realization that we really are becoming much more important as business partners than just the people that fix the printer. That technology, that a true investment with an IT service provider is one where it’s much more collaborative and where we can actually be measured based on business outcomes. I’ll give you a little bit of insight. I tell my listeners that I have a model I call the good, better, best model of measuring how good a provider is working with their customers. We know technology is important, but we’ve got to link this out back to your profit and loss statement.

We’re all businesses or we got to link it back to business. Good is when I know that you’re managing things in the expense light items. So you’re down in administrative costs, you’re right next to the rent, and you’re right next to keeping the lights on electricity, all of the stuff at the bottom of somebody’s p and l, right? Well, you got to have that stuff, right? Yeah, that’s good, right? You got to do that stuff, it’s good. But if a technology provider can work with you as a customer and can make a difference in your cost of goods sold, that’s better. And we should be able to measure it right against p and l. We should be able to show gains of efficiency savings in the goods are sold directly related to how you bill your customers and make

Karin Conroy:

Money.

Dave Sobel:

And if that’s a better model, and we should always be able to link technology investments back to that. And the best version of it is, is where we can directly tie it back to revenue. If I can show you, for every dollar that you spend in technology, you’re going to buck 25 back. You’ll spend money until you’re blue in the face.

Karin Conroy:

So this is genius, and I feel like this is the missing piece. When I talk to most technology providers, to be honest, they are down there in that bottom goods section and basically they just show up when somebody needs a new email address or when I need some DNS settings on the website. But even the firm, when I talk to them about like, okay, what do these guys do for you and how is this helping out and how can we make this? Because it really should be a conversation this triangle between the technology, the website that and the marketing and the firm, and we should all be working together. So give me an example of how you can be at that best category and implement some kind of systems that really are tied to revenue.

Dave Sobel:

Well, it requires your provider to have insights into your business a hundred percent. They need to be working with you and they need to have, they’re going to have some business speaking people on their staff, business analysts, technologists that understand it, by the way, somebody like me, literally people that understand both the technology and invest in learning your business, and this is my Counsel to anybody on the customer side. You as law firms, the people working with law firms, you’re the customer. And let me observe that. It is, I get it. It’s very hard for you to look at IT services companies, managed services firms, and tell the difference between really good ones that are delivering at the top level and the ones that are just good, just doing the basics. I get it. This is really hard and I want to acknowledge that as somebody on the industry side, we talk about this all the time. I quip constantly to my listeners that the people that cut my hair are more licensed than the people that run the networks.

Karin Conroy:

That’s scary.

Dave Sobel:

It’s scary, right? It’s really scary.

Karin Conroy:

Yes.

Dave Sobel:

But it’s true. You don’t need to have advanced degrees. It’s not like going to law school, it’s not going to medical school. It’s not those, it looks a little bit more like some of the tax trades or service industries. There are certifications you can look for. It’s not perfect, right? But you should be able to ask questions about their certifications, which vendors they work with, what they’re certified with, and you should be able to ask them targeted questions about the way they interact with the customer, how often they review budgets with you, how often they come out and they sit down and do planning with you. You should be able to ask them about your industry and get a sense of what their understanding is

Karin Conroy:

If they’ve worked with other firms.

Dave Sobel:

Yeah, exactly. And this is the things you’re looking for to get a really great partner.

Karin Conroy:

So give me an example of something like a specific type of system or kind of program or whatever the case might be that this best level IT service provider could integrate with a law firm where you instantly can see either money savings or money generating.

Dave Sobel:

So anybody who’s familiar with your case management tools and can actually help you, not only help make sure that it’s running, but understand how can we train your staff? How can we make sure that we’ve onboarded new people to use the case management software correctly and that we get the most efficiently? Can we fine tune the workflows, my gosh, to make sure that it’s managed right? Yes,

Karin Conroy:

This is. But I mean, I can’t tell you the number of firms that say, okay, we have Clio, which is the big legal worlds case management system, but they have lots of things you can plug in to make it more like a whole law firm management system or some other thing like that. And they’re like, but we’re not using it. I don’t get it. I don’t know how to set it up. It seems overwhelming. I’m busy all day just with my cases and doing the daily work and all that stuff. So it’s there and I’m using probably 2% of it,

Dave Sobel:

And that’s the area to care about. That’s the area to, and that’s super advanced because by the way, we can even do things at a more basic level. You might even say you’re running your shop on Microsoft 3, 6, 5, you’ve got your email calendaring teams. We can do basic workflow at that level too, that can make your people more connected, more efficient, sharing information asynchronously. We can make your time a little bit better. All of that, that’s another area that we could spend time on working that generally is universal to most businesses. We’re really great ones. So the ones that are getting into Clio, as you talked about, but by the way, there’s nothing wrong with working on making sure that we’re tying your information systems correctly just at the Microsoft level or say your Google workspace. These are the areas where you can really get some real incredible efficiencies out of it, making sure that information’s available to the right people.

Karin Conroy:

Yes. So recently we, in our agency, we use clickup because it’s really robust and you can tie in a million different things with it. But when I first switched over to Clickup, I realized even as someone who considers themselves very tech savvy, I was in over my head. So I found this amazing group. Not only that, I figured there’s people out there that know this better than I do. Why do I need to waste my time and energy figuring things out when that’s not efficient? That’s not the most effective way of doing things. So I found this amazing group of women in England, and they probably spent more than six months, probably eight months or so, and they went through every system in my entire business from sales to within a project, to internal systems that we have for everything to the follow up to everything.

And they created systems that save so much time. There’s moments in my day where I’m like, what am I forgetting? Because I feel almost worrisome that they’ve saved so much time and it’s 100% tied to a savings of money for sure. But also just for our agency, and this is the same for law firms. When clients get into the middle of a project, oftentimes it’s not something that they’re comfortable or familiar with. And so to have things not running smoothly, really instantly creates issues and concern and worry and stress. And so to have a system in place that supports and reassures your client, gives you a better client experience and in the end, they’re more likely to come back and work with you again. So I can’t underline this enough in terms of having your systems in place and you probably aren’t the right person for that. You need an outside person to take that view and be able to walk you through, okay, I feel like there may be a gap here and have that sounding board.

Dave Sobel:

Well, lemme laugh and go, we’re talking to a group of lawyers. Would you recommend to your clients that they should be their own lawyer?

Karin Conroy:

A hundred percent. Then

Dave Sobel:

Why are you possibly recommending that you should be your own technology support? Take your own advice everybody. You want to do the thing that you are great at, and then you leverage experts around you to be better at the other stuff. And you should have an expectation that the provider that’s working with you is delivering at that level. There are providers that do that at all sizes. They go all the way down to if you’re a small company, mid-size organization, large firm, there is a provider that matches to you. And particularly as we can work now remotely and internationally so easily, you don’t necessarily have to look in just your locale, you can look nationwide or you can look even internationally if you need as well.

Karin Conroy:

So before we get to the book review, I do want to briefly touch on, I think I’m guessing, and you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but I feel like security issues, malware hacking, all of that stuff, is that the first thing people usually talk to you about?

Dave Sobel:

It really is. And I smile and I go, I did not get into technology to defend against criminals. I really didn’t. I just didn’t. And it’s one of those areas where it’s super important to talk about cybersecurity, right? Hundred percent. It is such an incredible threat, and I want listeners to really understand that this is not some kid in the basement messing around. I want you to think Tony soprano with a computer. It is an organized crime syndicate that is funded, funded by governments, foreign governments that is entirely designed to steal your money. Everyone always tells me, oh, I don’t have anything that you could take. Actually, I hear that all the time too. It’s your money. It’s your money. They want your money and they’re really good at it. They’re really good at breaking into your business. We call it ransomware for a reason. They are trying to take you ransom and make you pay them money to get released. It’s

Karin Conroy:

Real, real. Okay, so let’s talk about threats in terms, first of all, let’s back up just real quick. I don’t want to spend a super huge amount of time on this because I feel like in terms of your whole breadth of technology and all of that, security is just one little slice of that pie. And so I want to give it the appropriate amount of time, but let’s talk first about the question that I get all the time is I think my website was hacked. Why are they doing that to my website?

Dave Sobel:

Yeah, you have money and they’d like you to give them some. It’s kind of that. I mean, it really is that simple. They’ve systemized the whole process, right? Because I mean they have built an incredibly robust automated system that targets the entire internet and looks for people that they can get into and they’ve just systemized the whole thing. I want you to think about it in physical terms for a moment. Think about if we and I were burglars, right? We would be scoping houses, we would look for houses and we would figure out the ones that have locks that we can wiggle and that we might be able to get into. Now imagine if we could do, didn’t have to do it one at a time. We could just blanket everything in an automated process and quickly identify the ones, oh, and have little robots just do it for us, right? We’d be really great thieves. We’d be systemized themes. That’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for the basics of lock. If you didn’t lock the doors, they’re going to get in. You’ll have the window open. And this is the idea of patching the software and keeping things up to date and all of the basics. Well,

Karin Conroy:

That was my next question. So what do you usually say when people ask you, what should I do?

Dave Sobel:

Okay, what I tell people do, my advice is actually a little different than most peoples. You probably heard it from the way that I talk about technology. I want you to think about the information in your business as the crown jewels. It is literally the one thing from a technology perspective, I cannot protect. I don’t really care about your computers themselves, the desktops, the phones, that’s all just stuff and a little bit of time and money can replace that. But the one thing that no technology can create for you is the knowledge contained within your business. That’s your data. That is your core, your case management system, the cases themselves, your billing system, the records of your customers. I cannot put that back together. If they get it, it’s over. And I want you to think about how much time you’ve put into building it. Now, take a moment to think maybe just maybe I should take a little effort to protect it.

Karin Conroy:

Yes. And I

Dave Sobel:

Want you every single day, think about your business as the information that is contained within it and what am I going to do to protect it. And by the way, it’s not that hard, by the way, because everyone,

Karin Conroy:

I laugh because it’s so true.

Dave Sobel:

It’s totally true. I want you to have good backups. I don’t want you to guess them, right? Yes. Because by the way, if something happens, what you want to do is be able to tell the criminals F off. I’m not

Karin Conroy:

Paying me. I don’t care

Dave Sobel:

Because I have backups and they’re good and all I had to do, by the way, it might be a little painful. It might take a day or two to put the business back together, but f you, I’m not giving you a penny. That needs to be the way you think about it and you’ve done the bit to protect your data. The second thing is, remember that, by the way, people are a problem. People are just, your employees are going to make a mistake. You have to be perfect a hundred percent of the time. The hackers only have to get in once. Recognize that it will happen, but let’s make it a little harder. Two factor authentication. I get it everybody, you all hate it, but you know what? You also do put locks on your doors of your car and your home. I don’t understand why you would not put a lock on your data. And by the way, this exception for senior managers, they’re the most important people. Seriously. They’re the ones with access to the most data. Why would you exempt them from putting a lock on things? And we laugh about it in it. Literally when a customer comes in and goes, oh, I totally want two factor authentication, but not for VP and above,

Karin Conroy:

Right? Yeah, because Bob, he gets a little rusty, right? It’s like, seriously,

Dave Sobel:

You know what? Let’s not put locks on the really nice cars in the parking lot. Let’s only put locks on the ones that are

Karin Conroy:

Bigger, the ones,

Dave Sobel:

And it’s kind of that. And then by the way, the third little pillar is you’ve got to invest in keeping your software up to date. It just is the piece that goes along with it. It’s a maintenance effort. You take your car in for oil changes. You go in for your yearly checkup, you’ve got to maintain your systems. That’s part of the cost of ownership. And by the way, if you do those three things, you will vastly minimize the impact of any kind of security incident. It’s kind of that simple.

Karin Conroy:

Okay. The last thing underline that I want to reinforce is the way you phrase that last part. If you do those three things, you’ll minimize the impact. So you didn’t say you will never get hacked, you will never have malware. They will never get in and create problems. You kind of implied that basically what we were talking about before we started recording, pretty much everyone’s going to get hacked. And what the question, the very kind of pointed question that I wanted to ask is, is it the fault of anyone in specific if and when you get hacked?

Dave Sobel:

Okay, so this is a love this question. I totally love this question because first off, for those of us that actually spend any moments thinking about security, we always talk about it is a matter of when, not

Karin Conroy:

A hundred percent. In fact,

Dave Sobel:

I have equipped with several of my, one of the really great ways you could manage this is just put aside some money to cover the downtime for when you go down and know you’re ready to go. Literally just that’s a really good technique is I just know this is my rainy day fund. I’m going to get hacked. My job is just sort of make sure I don’t get hacked much. Now, what I want to do is there’s a difference between blatant disregard for security protocols and normal human behavior. I want you to acknowledge that humans are fallible. They’re probably going to click on a link. It might happen. What I want you to do is I want to make sure that you haven’t been turned such a blind eye to it that you didn’t even bother to train them or think about what might be bad or do security awareness or do the basics, by the way of putting locks on doors or two factor authentication. I don’t want there to be an exemption for it. By the way, there is a group, an area that is just blatant disregard, and if you think about it, if you talk to an insurer, they’re not going to cover you because didn’t do your due diligence,

Karin Conroy:

And that’s the case in any kind of insurance, whether you were talking about technology or just car insurance, if you are at fault and they can prove that you are not going to be covered by your insurance provider. That’s how it works.

Dave Sobel:

But I want to acknowledge that, by the way, there are a lot of businesses that if we were to go to get cyber insurance, they would not cover you because you have not even done the basics. I see this all the time, so I want to acknowledge there’s a lot of people that aren’t even covering the basics, that group, that won’t put two factor indication on the VPs. Yeah, you’re not going to get covered. But I also then want to say, yeah, it’s going to happen. Everybody. We’re not looking for blame. What we’re doing is we’re looking for good response. We’re making sure that we’re well prepared for the thing that is going to happen, right? We’re doing our best to minimize it. We’re trying to make sure that it doesn’t happen. We’re trying to minimize our chances, but when it does happen, we know what to do.

We have a plan. We’ve reacted to it. It’s not that necessarily that big a deal. If you are prepared for anything, we just restore from backup. We make sure the backups, we have a little bit of downtime. It is painful. We’re trying to make sure that we’re not getting complete our information. The big worry these days is that they’re getting smarter. They’re getting into extortion versus just ransom. So the risks go up, but we also have to know that we’re prepared. We need to be prepared to tell them, no, we’re not paying you and we are prepared. If you think about an extortion scenario, you’ve thought about it, like you’ve said, we’re prepared to notify our customers. We understand the disclosure possibilities. We’ve only collected the data. That’s minimal. We haven’t collected everything. We’ve made sure that it’s as small as possible. You want to do the smart things to be ready. But no, don’t blame your people. You’ve got to make sure you just know this is going to happen.

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. We support a lot of websites and I mean, they get hacked all the time. It happens all the time. But we do have the systems in place, but regularly, one of the first questions is, why did our support fail? And it’s like, well, that’s not the right place to start. We’re going to assume you’re not special, that you’re going to somehow avoid all of these issues. I mean, if the government and major organizations that have so much more security can be hacked, then I’m afraid your little website can be hacked as well, right?

Dave Sobel:

It’s going to happen. It’s about response. You just described it like, oh, we got you. We cleaned it up. We’ll back up. The downtime was measured. We had a plan for it. We put it all back together. Yeah, that’s called normal response everybody.

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. That’s what

Dave Sobel:

We look for.

Karin Conroy:

Exactly. Exactly. And that’s what to expect. The expectation that you’ll never be hacked is not, that’s not a normal expectation. That’s just unreasonable. Plus, it’s going to put you in this false sense of security place where that’s not a great idea either. Okay, so it is time for the book review. We have a whole library of books curated on our website called The Thought Leaders Library, which is kind of a new title. So we’re excited about that. And so we’re going to talk to Dave about the book that he’s recommending for the library after the break. Alright, it is time for the book review. Dave, what is the book that you have to recommend for the Thought Leaders Library to add to our collection today?

Dave Sobel:

So I’m going to recommend Flash Foresight by Daniel Burris, and it’s one of my favorite business books that talks about doing trend analysis.

Karin Conroy:

Appreciate, oh, this is cool. I love this. Coming full circle. Back to the beginning of the show when we were talking about ai, you can

Dave Sobel:

Appreciate, I’m a guy who spends a lot of time trying to figure out what’s a thing, what’s not a thing, and this book has been one of the most instrumental tools that I use in my thinking for this. Oh, I love it. And I’ll give you a little insight into one of the takeaways for me was the differentiation between hard trends and soft trends. Okay,

Karin Conroy:

So what’s that?

Dave Sobel:

Lemme tell you what that means. So hard trends are those things that we know are going to absolutely happen. My favorite technology ones are things like there will be a faster processor, there will be better battery life. We will improve, things will get smaller. Right? Okay. For example, I can tell you for sure Apple will put out a new iPhone. I know for sure that it will happen. This is a guaranteed hard trend. I also know certain things about it. I know it will be faster, smaller, better battery, better battery, better battery, better battery. There are things that I know for sure in technology and particularly in technology, we’re always talking about like, oh, you don’t know what’s going to happen. No, I totally

Karin Conroy:

Know what’s going to happen. I

Dave Sobel:

Totally know what’s going to happen. There’s a whole bunch of things that I can completely predict are going to happen. Those are called hard trends. Soft trends are the areas where we are unable to do it because it is difficult to do. Consumer sentiment might go up and we cannot control that. Political outcomes, I can’t predict those kinds of things, but if I look for hard trends in my analysis, I can actually know far more than I think you might be able to get into and you can really do very good planning by focusing just on these hard trends.

Karin Conroy:

Oh, interesting. Okay. So are there hard trends that you’re looking at already for ai?

Dave Sobel:

So I’ll give you the fun example. In AI and also in spatial computing. So by the way, we’re talking right around the time Apple has launched their Vision Pro and a lot of us, and I’m one of them, I’m looking going like, okay, is this a thing? Is this a technology trend that I’m interested in? And I look at it and say, okay, I don’t necessarily want to analyze the existing device. I want to analyze where this might go and to those hard trends. I know it will get smaller. I know its battery life will get better. I know that the parts in it will get cheaper and they can miniaturize it. So if I think about that, it’s like, oh, wait a second. There might actually be something here. I can envision a device that is inevitable that would be smaller, cheaper, faster with better battery life. Now do the use cases that they’re talking about make sense to me? And I’m interested in the idea of expanding your workspace. The ideas that really interests me is this idea of can you put on a goggles thing and get infinite desktop space? That might be really useful in limited space, remote work, remote workers. Imagine if you could just have 51 inch monitors all around

Karin Conroy:

You. I was picturing hundreds of Excel spreadsheets going off into the infinite space. There’s

Dave Sobel:

Probably some finance people that would so excited by that. Right.

Karin Conroy:

That just made me a little nauseous.

Dave Sobel:

But imagine if you weren’t limited by the space and it’s like, oh, wait a second. There’s a use case there.

Karin Conroy:

That’s cool.

Dave Sobel:

So ai, same kind of thing. We know the models will get, there will be a smarter one course reduce, it will have more data. It will reduce hallucinations. It will, it

Karin Conroy:

Already is. I mean, just going from Che GPT-3 0.5 to four has been significantly noticeably different and improved.

Dave Sobel:

Hard trend. Hard trend. We know there will be a better version that will be faster. It will be cheaper.

Karin Conroy:

It’s not going to stop at four timeframe,

Dave Sobel:

Right? We’re not going to stop at four. So can we envision a version of that that solves the problems that we’re thinking about? Yes, we can.

Karin Conroy:

A hundred percent.

Dave Sobel:

It’s a hard trend. I can bet on certain portions of that. And that’s how you use this analysis method to make sure that you’re focusing on the hard trends that you can depend on versus the soft ones that you can’t.

Karin Conroy:

Oh, that’s so cool. Okay. We will link to that book. We have the library, but also on the show page we’ll have the link to the book and the summary and the link over to Amazon. That sounds fascinating just because I was going to say in this moment, but it seems like there’s always a moment, whatever the thing is, there’s always something going on. It’s so true. Yeah. Awesome. Alright, so Dave, what’s one thing that works?

Dave Sobel:

That’s such a great question and I’m going to go in a really unexpected way for a technologist. People work, and what I mean by that is small investments in people always pay off

Karin Conroy:

Well, and that comes full once again, full circle back to the AI thing where we just kept hammering this idea that you have to have a human person check it all. Don’t use those AI checkers. Don’t assume that it’s good because you kind of glance through it people, you need a person,

Dave Sobel:

But you get the benefit when you do small investments over long periods of time. Those check-ins with friends and colleagues, those small moments to take the extra time, the extra three minutes at the beginning of a call to ask how they’re doing those small investments, they always work. They always work. And over time it pays off. And so for me, that more than anything is the one thing when you say what always works. Yeah, that always works.

Karin Conroy:

It does. And it’s kind of funny that we’re talking about technology and you’re basically saying you kind of pull apart the curtains of technology and just go human to human.

Dave Sobel:

Well, these are tools. These are all tools to make life better, like broad speaking life better. So the more we think about them as that, the better and more effective we are with them as tools and I think that that is a fundamental, I love it. I’m a gadget guy. I love playing with all this stuff, but I do it because I want, there’s a fun element, which is a human emotion, which is about making me a better person. I’m having a good time doing it. Or it’s by enhancing the outcomes because I want to make people better or businesses better. The more you tie it back to that, it always works.

Karin Conroy:

It does. It’s so true. And I think that’s important that these are tools and this is supporting a better life. This is not meant to be the better life living inside this virtual reality thing. That’s where it kind of crosses the line for me. I’m like, okay, I want the people, but real people, but awesome. Alright, Dave Sobel, thank you so much for being here. This was such a, we covered a lot. There was a lot of good stuff, different kinds of technology, what’s happening in technology, AI hacking malware, but also how to find and work with a great IT service provider. That alone was worth the whole episode sitting in and getting those tips for how to make that tied to your revenue. That is such valuable, helpful information. So thanks so much for being here.

Dave Sobel:

Oh, I appreciate the time. This has been great fun and thanks for having me.

Karin Conroy:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Counsel Cast podcast. Be sure to visit our website at Counsel Cast dot com for the resources mentioned on the episode and to give us your feedback. If you enjoyed this episode, I would appreciate if you could rate and review the podcast on Apple and subscribe to your favorite podcast platform. See you on the next one.

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