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: | January 16, 2015 |
Podcast: | Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Category: | Legal Technology |
Lawyers, even solos, are constantly working with experts, opposing counsel, court officials, and colleagues. Dennis and Tom like to keep an eye on new developments and the current state of collaboration tools and technologies, which they consider one of the most important, yet under-appreciated, areas of legal technology. In 2008, they wrote a book together called The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, which gives suggestions about the bigger collaboration platforms and smaller discrete tools that lawyers can use to work together. In the last seven years, many collaboration tools have changed but a lot of systems have stayed the same. What’s happening in 2015 and what developments do you need to know about and incorporate into your work?
In this episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell survey the current landscape for collaboration tools, trends and best practices, and what lawyers should be doing to make better use of these tools. They begin by examining their book and the collaboration tools that have disappeared or morphed into different programs. Kennedy mentions that Sharepoint, Wikis, Instant Messaging, Adobe Acrobat, and Microsoft Office Suite can all be used by attorneys and staff to work together, although Mighell is skeptical that many law firms actually use any of these. Both hosts maintain that lawyers almost exclusively use email for collaboration, although they believe future generations of lawyers will introduce a new perspective on technology use. They finish the first section by mentioning social media and listing other underutilized tools for lawyers who work with others on many cases.
In the second portion of the show, Kennedy and Mighell discuss the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The CES revealed the latest consumer technologies to expect throughout the year. They discuss the best and worst of drones, wearables, or new selfie technologies. As always, stay tuned for Parting Shots, that one tip, website, or observation that you can use the second the podcast ends.
Special thanks to our sponsor, ServeNow.
Kennedy-Mighell Report: The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies – 1/19/2015
Advertiser: Got the world turning as fast as it can? Hear how technology can help – legally speaking. With two of the top legal technology experts, authors, and lawyers: Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to the Kennedy-Mighell report, here on the Legal Talk Network.
Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to episode 144 of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in St. Louis.
Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.
Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode we talked about 2015 New Years technology resolutions. How are you doing on yours so far? Ever since we wrote our book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools & Technologies, we occasionally like to take a look at the current state of collaboration tools. And that’s what this podcast will be about. Tom, what’s on our agenda for this episode?
Tom Mighell: Well Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, we’ll be discussing, as you say, collaboration tools and technologies for lawyers. In our second segment we’ll give our thoughts on reports from this year’s big consumer electronic show. And as usual we’ll finish up with our parting shots that one tip website or observation that you could start using the second this podcast is over. But first let’s get started on our first segment and that’s collaboration tools and technologies. Dennis, can you believe that it has actually been 7 years since our book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools & Technologies came out? I’m amazed that it’s been that long, it doesn’t seem that it’s been that long. What’s interesting to me is that in the last 7 years, a lot of things have changed while a lot of things I think have remained the same. So we thought we’d take a look at what collaboration for lawyers looks like in 2015. Let’s start with the basics. Dennis, do you want to start out with what do we mean when we say collaboration tools?
Dennis Kennedy: Well Tom, according to Wikipedia, collaboration tools means – I’m just kidding of course – in a small way, Wikipedia, probably in those 7 years, has remained probably the premier collaboration platform. And the Wikipedia tool itself and how it’s put together is a great example of collaboration and I think it illustrates some things that happened overtime. Because Wikis were really big 7 years ago when we wrote the book, and I thought that maybe they’d be even bigger now even in law, but I don’t think they’ve really taken off and I think that Wikipedia remains the most successful example of that type of collaboration platform. So when we talk about collaboration tools, Tom, we mean this both sort of bigger collaboration platforms and also the smaller of sometimes discreet tools that allow people to work together. And as we’ve said in the book, the legal profession is by its very nature, collaborative. So lawyers even solos are working with different people all the time, either on the same side or on the opposite side, experts, other people, court personnel, so you’re always working with people. So by collaboration tools I generally mean those tools that we use when we’re working together on projects with people so they can be either bigger or smaller types of tools. How’s that for a definition, Tom?
Tom Mighell: I think that’s a good definition and it kind of leads into the question of how that has changed since we wrote the book or whether that has changed and I was just taking a look back at what is different now as opposed to what is in the book; and frankly, there are a lot of tools that have changed tremendously. As part of the book we’ve created a collaboration tools directory that’s sort of fallen into disrepair. And I wager that 60-70% of the tools we mentioned in the book and in the directory either no longer exist or they have morphed into other types of services. I know that a lot of the tools have evolved into more commercial collaboration platforms which is good for collaboration but maybe not so good for individuals who want to try out somebody’s tools. But one of the things that I think is not changing much – and this is maybe my perception, and I want you, Dennis and our listeners, to push back and tell me if I’m wrong – is that in the 7 years since the book came out, I just don’t get the sense that lawyers are using many of the tools we talk about and we’ve talked about in the book for collaboration. I may be wrong here; like I said, I’m going to encourage listeners to send me a message that we put in the show notes, we put it at the end of this podcast; tell me how wrong I am but I just don’t think that collaboration tools are being used as often as they could or should be. Do you get that sense or am I way off base here?
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah I think that when you go to the bigger world called collaboration platforms or collaboration suites, I don’t think there’s been the pickup that we really expected. So SharePoint obviously is huge in the legal profession among bigger firms, although a lot of people point to a lot of failed SharePoint projects. So I think that that’s out there and so you see things like that. Like I said, the Wikis – those types of platforms – or collaboration suite that’s called collaboration-something, you don’t see much of that. What I think you see is -the big change – that collaboration is built into standard tools. For example, in Adobe Acrobat, there are ways to collaborate. Some of the collaboration tools – in the work that I do – I would say of redlining. It’s a huge collaboration tool that is built into Microsoft Office Suite. So I think there are some things like that for pulling things into existing tools. And then I think that there are a few things that maybe we didn’t expect that would become more important in collaboration and I think we’ll talk about both of these things too, Tom. But I think instant messaging has become really big in collaboration – at least for me – and then the whole notion of apps. Very specific apps in your mobile phones, tablets, and also on the computer have become really important in collaboration.
Tom Mighell: So I’m going to push back on one of the things that you’ve said talking about how how there are collaboration features built into tools that we already used. Which to a certain extent was around 7 years ago when we wrote the book. But I’m going to say that, again, I don’t think that lawyers tend to be using these tools. And the prime example I’ll give of collaboration tools built into the products that we already use is the track changes and commenting feature in Microsoft Word. You and I, Dennis, belong to a group where we have to review manuscripts on a regular basis, and we may have 3 or 4 people reviewing those manuscripts. And it is very challenging to get people to actually open up that document in Word and turn on track changes and make those changes. They would rather print out an entire 150 page manuscript and write on it and then scan it back and send it in, which is a form of collaboration, but when you consider that I could then take 4 track changes in Word and combine them within literally 30 seconds so that we have a fully-commented document that the author could then take and look at. It really is amazing to me how little things have changed. I think that to the extent that lawyers are embracing collaboration tools, the trends that I see tend to be more along types of communication like instant messaging or having conversations; whether it be instant messaging, whether it’s video chat, whether it’s text messaging, those seem to be the collaboration areas that are most popular. And I guess to the extent that you can call file-sharing collaboration. Certainly the use of Dropbox, the use of Cloud tools, and different types of file-sharing tools, I think has exploded tremendously. But I view that as a different kind of collaboration than some of the things that I know you and I talk about when we think about actually working on documents, working on projects, working on things together.
Dennis Kennedy: Well I think people do use – and Dropbox is a good example, file-sharing is a good example, calendaring, you know, shared calendaring – all of these are examples of collaboration and people use them but I think you’re right; not in a disciplined way, not in a universal way, and certainly not as part of a platform. I guess probably my biggest surprise overtime is that there is no question that email remains the primary tool of collaboration for lawyers. And although last year I kept talking about the death or decline of the email, it’s pretty much tongue-in-cheek because email is with us. It’s the main tool – no question about it – for all its flaws and everybody understands the flaws. And also I would say – to echo what you were saying, Tom, – is I don’t think lawyers work especially hard at getting better at using Outlook or other email tools to help with collaboration, from the simplest to the most complex. They don’t use rules, they don’t use good subject lines, they attach documents with no sense of version, no consistency in naming things. And then the other thing I’ve found that really surprises me overtime is how email blocks all the other collaboration tools and no matter what you do to set things up, as soon as somebody sends an email to somebody else or replies to all on something that gets outside of the collaboration system, basically that system breaks down.
Tom Mighell: Well it comes down to what are we comfortable using. What I think is going to be interesting over the coming years – and I can’t remember if we’ve had this conversation before in the podcast – is that I think over the next ten years or so, as younger generations – as the people who are in high school and college now start to enter the workplace – I think that the importance of email as a communication and maybe as a collaboration tool is going to decrease. I can’t tell you a teenager who likes to use email. They prefer to send text messages or instant messages or a snapchat or something very basic or a tweet. I think as email decreases in popularity, if they don’t like that as a collaboration tool, they’re going to – of necessity – need to look to other platforms or collaboration tools to replicate the kind of collaboration that today’s lawyers find comfortable using email. So I’m really interested to see how that changes but I agree with you right now I still think that it’s hard to break that email habit. And as a result, like I said, I just don’t think that collaboration tools are being used as much as they should be.
Dennis Kennedy: And to follow up a little bit, the people who have grown up outside of email – so younger people – when they come into the workplace, they find that all the things that they take for granted – instant messaging, all the things you named, the social media tools – aren’t being used. And so they feel they have to learn how to use email for all its flaws. And it could be a real struggle for them but they feel that that’s the way you have to work – at least in a lot of settings.
Tom Mighell: I want to disagree to the extent that so far, what I see about millennials coming into the workplace, is that they won’t accept the standard traditional norms of how companies go about business. And I’d like to see -and you may be right for the short-term and the current time – but I’d like to see them come in and start demanding these tools. The same way that people are demanding that a company provides support for an iPhone or an Android phone or an iPad. I think that coming in and saying “Here’s how I can work smarter and better,” makes a lot of sense and I’m hoping that that starts to catch on as time goes on.
Dennis Kennedy: So let’s switch gears and talk about what’s out there in the world of collaboration. So to me I think that there’s the notion that a lot of people have that there should be this big collaboration platform – maybe that’s Sharepoint, maybe that’s something else – that people can work together on projects and you could do everything. So you can upload files, you can work with those files, you can manage workflow, you can do the whole life cycle of contracts, or documents, or litigation matters. But everything sort of happens in one place and I think that even when we wrote the book, we considered it to be the holy grail that still wasn’t out there. So on one side you have that, clear on the other side – plus what I think is really interesting, Tom – is mobile apps that allow you to collaborate in very specific ways – and that could be messaging, that could be calendaring, that could be some other things – that handle specific problems. And then maybe in between you have some certain types of focus collaboration tools. A lot of it is Cloud, I think. So that could be conferencing of all types of video, audio, all those sorts of things. Document-sharing and then platforms that you would do specific types of work on where multiple people could edit documents. So I think you have that, and then also as we alluded to before, Tom, I think there’s this sort of collaboration built into the existing software that we use on a regular basis. I guess that I don’t know about the whole platform thing, so I think that that’s ever going to work probably over the next 5-10 years. Because you just can’t capture things very well and contain things. So I think the other areas are more interesting. And maybe most interesting of all, Tom, for me is the mobile apps as part of collaboration, because that really didn’t even exist when we wrote the book.
Tom Mighell: Well frankly I think that collaboration platforms make sense when you have a firm or a team that can invest in a common platform. If you’re just a solo lawyer or you’ve just got a few lawyers, it may not make sense to invest in an expensive platforms. I see corporations, larger law firms investing in it. You mentioned Sharepoint as being a tool that people use. Well frankly, that’s partially because Sharepoint’s free. I.T. departments in the past have thrown Sharepoint at the workers saying, “Here’s a great collaboration tool, use it,” with very little education or change management on how to use it. But that’s where I see the collaboration platforms taking hold. I think that those focus tools are going to be more interesting but are more common for lawyers who have that specific job to do. I want to work on documents with my clients, I want to brainstorm with other lawyers for a strategy for an upcoming case. And I still think that’s where the room for interesting things to happen can, but like I said – I guess maybe now is as good a time to bring up one example – which is collaborating on documents and working on documents which is probably one of the most important and common things that lawyers do with other lawyers. And in the book we mentioned Google Docs. When we wrote the book we compared Google Docs to Word Pad. Since that time, though, I think it has improved considerably. I still think Microsoft Word is the best word processor out there in terms of features. But Google has really taken advantage of some third party add-ons to include some really nice functionality compared to 7 years ago. Microsoft has come along with Microsoft Office Online which provides a very similar experience to Google Docs, it works really well. But this is I think another area where I may be wrong. I’m just not convinced that lawyers are using these tools. unless you’re running a Google-based office and you run Google Apps automatically, my bet is that very few of you who are listening are using Google Docs, Office Online, or any other sharing tool on a regular basis. I’m going to try this for one of the podcasts before, and we didn’t get a lot of responses but I’m going to try it again. I’m going to put in the show notes a survey asking people who uses what tool. And if you use Google Docs or Microsoft Office Online or some other tool, let us know; tell me how wrong I am. So be sure to click through to the show notes, answer the survey, or send me a message about how you collaborate with other people on documents. But that’s just the sense I get – I just get the sense that it’s not being used as much as it could.
Dennis Kennedy: So, Tom, I think about the book and where we focused then as opposed to now. I remember back in 2008 we made a conscience decision not to put a chapter in on social media because we thought it was too new and we had an idea of where social media might be going. We thought it was too new and too esoteric for lawyers at the time. So I know that a new version of the book would definitely cover social media, but I was thinking about the other things that changed over time that might go into a new edition of the book. I’m fascinated by instant messaging and these other really simple – what I call facilitating – technologies that just allow people to know that somebody’s around, ask if somebody’s available for a phone call. Those sorts of things where your status is available to people so they know they can reach out to you. I think that’s really important and really fascinating. I think video and video conferencing, webinars, Google Hangouts; all those sorts of things have matured way beyond what we expected at the time and those are a lot more common. I think that we now have enough time that cultural things have started to happen so I know that we would do much more in the way of talking of what I call collaboration etiquette – all the things you need to know about being on different calls, dealing with people in different cultures, different time zones, all those sorts of things we’ve learned more about. And I also think that the whole Dropbox phenomenon – especially among lawyers – but document-sharing, transfer of big files; that area has also really matured. What are your thoughts along those lines, Tom?
Tom Mighell: I think those are the big areas, frankly, that people have been taking advantage of collaboration tools; but there’s a whole extra area and there are several other groups of collaboration tools that we haven’t even mentioned and I just don’t think they get the same type of use at least in the legal market as they might in other markets. We haven’t really talked about collaborative meeting scheduling which I think is incredibly helpful. We’ve left mind-mapping out of the discussion so far right now. Whiteboarding, project-management, task-management, we’ve talked about some of those on prior podcasts. Remote access tools are similar to screen-sharing and presentation tools that are becoming more popular; but there are so many different areas out there that I think present some great opportunities for lawyers that I think are just so far going untapped and are not realized as well as I think they could be.
Dennis Kennedy: Also I want to add any sort of touch on this too, but the workflow of management, assignment, delegation, version-control, just keeping track of repositories of what’s done, who’s done what; all that sort of tracking. And then automation of some of that so I can say, “Hey I finished my part,” so that kicks it on to the next person. That’s sort of workflow tracking but there’s also automation of that. And then I don’t know whether we called it the Cloud in the book, but absolutely the Cloud has played a huge part in it so there’s a lot of collaboration that’s happening and it’s facilitated by the different Cloud services that sometimes we start to take for granted. And Tom I want to tap into what you’re seeing in your expertise, but to say how do these collaboration platforms have an impact on electronic discovery, records managements, and the issues involved with those things.
Tom Mighell: That’s the interesting part is if we’re talking about some of these standalone tools and we’re talking about Cloud tools and some of the commercial products like Dropbox and those; the companies that I work with and a lot of the law firms that are out there don’t really permit access to those types of tools. They view them as additional sources of information, which they would be. They would be places where information could very easily be stored, and for very good reason they usually would enact some type of policy that says you can’t use these Cloud tools to do that. Now that doesn’t stop some people because they will usually try to find the most convenient way to get their job done and sometimes that’s how it happens. But frankly, the issues that you find with collaboration tools are really the same with anything else in the Cloud. They are new sources of electronically stored information. They can be relevant in legal matters, if you are keeping records in these collaboration – either individual tools or even if you have a platform that you’ve got internally or externally – the records that are in there are the same as records you would have anywhere else and would need to be managed the same way. So there’s not a lot of difference, but from an electronic, discoverability standpoint I think that they’re an area that a lot of people really don’t think about when they start to use tools like these.
Dennis Kennedy: And I think some of the other things that we see out there; I just think that the proliferation of the possibility of these collaboration tools are going to raise all kinds of issues. So to me, being a really good lawyer demands that you keep up with technology so you can represent your client well and understanding where all this information is. Even more so in some ways than just finding the best technology for yourself. I think we’ve also learned a lot more about the security issues. I think you alluded to also the types of policies that law firms and others would want to have in dealing with these things. And then I think the huge change we have for anywhere at any time that’s facilitated by smart phones, tablets, and always being able to have access to the internet, and the demands that that puts on people and the considerations that you have to take into account when you’re working with somebody knowing that they might be on a smaller screen or have some other limitations.
Tom Mighell: I think those are all definitely areas that have changed, that we are probably thinking a lot more about today than we were thinking about 7 years ago and things that anybody who wants to use a collaboration tool is probably going to have to think about either before or while they’re using it. In this last few minutes of this segment, I thought maybe we’d provide what our best advice or tips are for people in terms of using collaboration tools – and I’m going to go old-school and very simple with mine – and say take the example of our last podcast and make one of your tech resolutions this year to try out a new collaboration tool. Find something that you do with your clients, or with the people in your office, or with other attorneys or with the court, and see if there’s a collaboration tool that can make it easier for you. I’m going to link to a more recent collaboration tools directory by a guy named Robin Good who follows these things. Go find a tool that interests you from that standpoint, try it out for the year, and then report back to us – we’d love to hear about it – on how it worked out for you so that we could talk about it more on the podcast. Dennis, anything from you to close out the session?
Dennis Kennedy: Well, I keep going back to Google Wave, frankly, because I wish Google wouldn’t have killed that because there are a lot of times when I’m thinking of collaboration I think that that tool, as it evolved, really would have done a lot. But I suggest – in a way what you’re saying, try a tool and get good at it – going back to the basics. And why I think that a lot of what we wrote in the book is still good, is not the actual tools that exist – because we knew that would become obsolete as things change – but the collaboration audits. The way to think about things, the checklist that we gave people to say, “Let’s look at the ways that we actually do collaborate with people and are there ways to improve those,” and what are we doing where basically the technology we use is getting in the way of how we want to work together with things. Then I think, to go back to those basics, then that will also help you decide which tool you want to focus on.
Tom Mighell: Before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.
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Tom Mighell: And now let’s get back to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Tom Mighell.
Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy. Neither of us attended the huge Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year – although I understand about a hundred and eighty thousand other people did – but we read and heard enough to feel like we had. CES reveals the latest consumer technologies we should be expecting during the year. Tom, what got your attention from CES this year?
Tom Mighell: Well I have to say I was not all that wowed by what came out of CES this year. It’s really never about technologies that lawyers must use in your practice, but rather technologies that might help you get certain tasks done and then there’s a whole lot of stuff there that doesn’t apply to your practice in any way shape or form. Dennis, I know you’re planning to go little bit broad in your comments and your analysis so I’m going to go a little bit more specific and give a rapid-fire list of some of the few things that interested me from CES. There was a lot of talk about smart-car technology, getting us closer to the self-driving car which I think may have some implications for lawyers but maybe not in the way that you expect. Areas of new business for lawyers down the road, so to speak. Drones, again, very popular, which could be significant for lawyers from a privacy perspective so maybe not necessarily in use of technology, but in how you deal with it. Wearables, again, are huge but I think everybody is kind of waiting, holding their breath until Apple comes in and trumps everything with its Apple Watch which I think is rumored now for March of this year. Curved screens are huge; phones and TV’s, lots of curving and bending we’re seeing. One of the more interesting services that came out this year really doesn’t have a lot to do with the law but I think it represents a shift in how things have been done. There have been calls for many, many years to have cable companies and satellite companies to offer a la carte services for their channels and they’ve never done that. And we started to see people call cord cutters who are using individual services like Netflix and HBO Go and Hulu and some other tools. But one of the things that has held it back is the fact that sports has always been something that’s been only on cable. DISH Network has offered something called Sling TV, which is an internet-only television service and it’s the first one that offers sports, which really to-date has been the main reason that people are sticking with basic cable and I think that it could represent a new trend. To finish out, two crazy things that I saw from CES was that Sony introduced – believe it or not – a new version of the Walkman. A little pricy, $1100, so I’m not sure who’s going to buy it, but apparently it got a lot of buzz at CES. And then the worst product – I can’t not mention the worst product that I saw – was called the Belfie. If you’re familiar with the selfie stick, the selfie stick is a scoping rod that you can attach your phone to and it can take a selfie from far off where you hold the stick far away so that your not so close to your face. Well the belfie takes that concept one step further and it offers a camera stick for taking pictures of what’s behind you and of your rear end. I’ll just leave it at that. I’ll put some links in the show notes to some sites that had nice wrap ups from CES but those were the things that I found most interesting. Dennis, what about you?
Dennis Kennedy: What I found interesting is how little I am interested these days in big expensive TVs with more and more resolution. I’m not really sure what we’re gaining from from all of that and then the pricing on some of these things also tells us a little bit – expands the definition of “consumer” beyond anything we can recognize is as well. But I wanted to mention a couple of things. One is that I always recommend that people subscribe to a few blogs that really don’t have a lot to do with what your primary interest is, just that they’re interesting. So I subscribe to a blog called Learning by Shipping, and they had their report from CES and talked about the importance of CES was the ingredients, not just the products. So I think that gave me a really interesting take on CES because a lot of what they’re talking about is censors, the whole notion of wearables, and how we take the technology and put them into products that people use. So a lot of the discussion about wearables is are they going to be stylish enough and usable enough to people who would actually want to use them. So I think some of the things along those lines that came out of CES at the discussion around that were pretty interesting. And then the big thing that I got is the Internet of Things being huge and talk that Samsung was saying that they expected in five years that every device that they made would be an Internet of Things device, which means that it would be attached to the internet in some way. So the notion of censors, the expansion of Internet of Things to be all these things in the home, in the cars, and everywhere else, and I think that’s going to have a big impact on all of us lawyers and otherwise over the next five years or so. So interesting previous of what’s out there, always worth taking a look at, though I don’t know if I need to see it in quite as high a level of resolution as other people seem to like on their TV’s. So now it’s time for our parting chats at one-tip website or observation you could use this second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.
Tom Mighell: Well, we have a common theme for our parting chats. This episode I’m going to talk about this something that Mark Zuckerberg did this past week on Facebook. De decided he wanted to create a book club and by creating that book club he basically made an author very popular. It’s a little bit like the Oprah Book Club phenomenon, but he has created a page on Facebook called A Year of Books. The goal is to read a new book every two weeks and discuss it. The books are going to emphasize learning about new cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies. The first book that he’s at but he’s recommending is called The End of Power. It either sold out or went to the top ten in Amazon literally a day after he mentioned it. But I’m intrigued by book clubs and I think a way to get lots of people involved in a book club is to have a very famous person who has lots of followers on a social network start to recommend things. So I’m going to be paying attention for a while and seeing what it looks like. A Year of Books on Facebook
Dennis Kennedy: You know, I always felt, Tom, and I know you’ll remember this, I thought that you and I should form a book club about technology books as they relate to law and do it on Google Wave a few years ago. I still like the book club idea, it’s just that I don’t know quite the right venue for it; maybe it’s a Google Hangout thing, something that I’ve always wanted to explore. My variation on that is something called 52 books in 52 weeks challenge; and I don’t know who started this, this was a blogging thing. Sometimes you see people who say they want to read 12 books in a year or something like that. But the idea is that people don’t really read enough and so you challenge yourself. So the big one that’s out there, and actually if you do “hashtag 52 books,” you’ll find people talking about what they’re reading and stuff. So I do this, I’ve done this for a good number of years, I put it up on my blog and track the books that I read. Although Tom’s 52 books in 52 weeks challenge to me is to take it over to Goodreads so he can better keep up with what I’m reading. So I may do that, but I put it up on my blog and then I just have a goal to try to read essentially a book a week over the year to keep me more up to date and well-rounded.
Tom Mighell: Well like Dennis mentions, and I’ll put in a plug for the Goodreads. I really love Goodreads because it’s a social network for books. They have a reading challenge each year where you can just say, “Here’s how many books I plan to read.” I pledged 50 books this year although I read something like 63 books last year. So I went way over my goal, but right now there are about 600,000 participants on Goodreads pledging to read about 31 million books that are out there and it’s a fun way to keep up with what your friends are reading, what they like, them recommending good books, you recommending good books to them. So I really recommend Goodreads for those of you who aren’t using it. So that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report; thanks for joining us on the podcast. Information on how to get in touch with us, as well as links to all the topics we discussed today is available on our show notes blog at TKM Report.com. I encourage you to go there to take the survey about how you collaborate on documents. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site. You can get to the archives of all of our previous podcasts there as well in both places. If you have a question you want answered, a topic for an upcoming podcast, or you just want to talk to us, please email at [email protected] or send us a tweet. I’m @TomMighell, and Dennis is @DennisKennedy. 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. Help us out by telling a couple of your friends and colleagues about the podcast.
Advertiser: Thanks for listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together. From ABA Books or Amazon. And join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.
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Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell talk the latest technology to improve services, client interactions, and workflow.