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: | September 11, 2015 |
Podcast: | Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Category: | Legal Technology |
From Fitbits and Apple Watches to robotic exoskeletons, we have entered the age of wearable technology. While this development has definite implications for a lawyer’s ethical duty of technology competence, it will also change how lawyers use technology in their practices. Having a health app can improve standard of living, but does your Apple Watch actually assist in practicing law?
In this episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell discuss the increase in development of wearable technologies, the benefits for early adopters, and how the nature of legal practice will change. Tom mentions cases in which Fitbit data was used as evidence and notes that ignoring wearable device data could negatively impact your practice. He also dives into a history of wearable technology dating back to a wrist calculator in the 1970s and the creation of bluetooth in 2000. Dennis discusses the health apps and dictation uses on his own Apple Watch and how it benefits his personal life, but maybe not his law practice. Looking into the future, he speculates about necklaces, the return of Google Glass, and even tattoo or piercing technologies to come. While Dennis and Tom differ on how wearable technologies can benefit lawyers, both agree that the age of wearable technology is here, bringing with it ethical considerations and practical uses.
In the second part of the podcast, Dennis and Tom revisit their 2015 resolutions, made in January. They discuss automation, organizing technology, blogging more, Tom’s Microsoft Pro 3, Dennis’ Apple Watch, and their progress in these goals. As always, stay tuned for Parting Shots, that one tip, website, or observation you can use the second the podcast ends.
Special thanks to our sponsor, ServeNow.
Kennedy-Mighell Report: Wild About Wearables: Fitbits, Apple Watches, and Your Legal Practice – 9/15/2015
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 158 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 our Summer technology reading lists and how reading technologies themselves have changed the way that we read. In this episode, we’re jumping into the world of wearables bigtime, and the implication of FitBits, Apple Watches, and much, much more. A year or so ago, some of what we will discuss would have seemed like science fiction, but definitely not anymore. 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 wearable technologies and whether they mean anything for lawyers and whether lawyers should care about them in the first place. In our second segment, we’ll compare notes on how we’re doing so far on our 2015 technology resolutions. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip, website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first, let’s talk about wearable technology. It seems like nearly every week now, we are treated to see some manufacturer release a new device that you can wear to track something that you do. Your steps, your heartbeat, whether you’re standing up, how well you sleep. The number of things that are capable of being tracked are endless and the manufacturers are showing that. I think these new gadgets are cool, I think they can be lots of fun, they can provide lots of information. But when we start to think of them as lawyers, the conversation starts to get more serious, I think. Dennis, aren’t here two ways that lawyers need to think about the topic of wearable technology?
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I think there really are two ways that I always like to think about. So one is how do they impact what we do as lawyers in terms of the law, and I think that both means ethics and the actual substance of what we do. And then I think the second thing is how we use these devices to assist us in the practice of law to be better at what we do, to make our lives a little easier. So I think there are those two pieces that are always, always there. And I think that wearables really kind of pull these things out. There’s a notion that’s developed I would say in the last year or so, especially in connection with the wearables called the Quantified Self. So as you say, people are using these devices to measure all sorts of things they do. The number of steps they take in the day, your pulse, how many times you stand, all sorts of different things. And all that information is tracked and I think that’s the one piece I find really interesting in the way that it’s going to impact lawyers. And I think that goes to both – as I said – the substance and the ethics. And that Quantified Self notion, to the extent, you don’t understand that as a lawyer I think is going to become really difficult to know how to represent your clients and to know the types of evidence that’s out there. So there’s that aspect and then I think that duty of competence that comes up more and more often these days, Tom.
Tom Mighell: You’re absolutely right, I think we’re already seeing that. There have been at least two cases that I’m aware of, if not more, where wearable evidence has actually become an issue and I think it’s actually been a FitBit in both cases. There was a civil lawsuit in Canada where a woman’s lawyer is actually using her FitBit information to prove how after an accident, she was less active. I think that’s kind of an interesting way to use that. There was another criminal case where a woman claimed that she had been raped and as they were investigating the story they examined her FitBit and that part of her story did not hold up when she said that she was sleeping. Her FitBit activity actually showed that she was up and awake and walking around. So they winded up either dismissing the charges or not filing charges or finding that she had actually fabricated a lot of her stories. So these devices are turning out to be very powerful witnesses, one way or the other in certain kinds of cases. And I think that when you talk about the duty of competence, I think that’s a real issue and I know a lot of our friends had spoken on this topic before. But I think that it’s very important for lawyers, if nothing else on the one half of this issue, understanding that you now have a completely new source of information that not only is going to impact your client, and you have to be able to advise your client about the information that’s being kept on them. But you also have to look and think about that in discovery for the other side too, to understand whether or not the party that you may be across the table from also might have that kind of information and whether you are doing your client a service. If for some reason you don’t think about that as a source of discovery and you just don’t request it. So I think from a technological duty of competence, I think we’re going to see a whole new realm of discovery that’s going to start soon about that. And I think that’s really very interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with that. Some of the cases that have come out so far I think have been very interesting. But I guess we’re not really here to talk about the legal issues or anything like that, that’s not what this podcast is about, surely not Dennis.
Dennis Kennedy: I think it’s important to note that there’s tremendously significant new sources of data that lawyers have to consider. I think that there are issues of confidentiality and privacy that lawyers need to ideally get ahead of as the wearables come into play. But I think as you say Tom, be as it may, we want to talk about practical issues and whether these things actually make sense for lawyers. I think that it’s, in a way, they’re really here and so it’s a matter of saying how do we use them better and how do we enter into the world of wearables. I think you can make the argument right now that the major wearable we all have is the smartphone. I was telling you, Tom, I dropped my iPhone and shattered the screen and I had to get that replaced. And the idea that I would go some period of time – even if it was an hour – without having access to that phone was very troubling to me. I know that I’ve done things where I’ve started to drive to work and realized I left my phone at home and I turned around and came back. I think that having that phone in the pocket has almost become the premier wearable and it starts from there. But I think that there have been things that start with exercise monitors, now I think the smartwatch era. Other devices, Google Glass, and you can just start to think of what’s going to happen, what can come out, what can they do, where can they be worn on the body. And I think the whole notion of wearables is going to expand based on what we do. And it goes from headphones to those Bluetooth microphone headset things to you could see something like a necklace could make sense for certain types of wearables. So a lot has happened even in the last two years, Tom. Wearables have just become part of what it is that we do.
Tom Mighell: I think two years is where the explosion has happened and where things have really taken off. When I was preparing for the podcast I did a little trip down memory lane and was looking at the history of wearables and it was interesting to find out some things I didn’t know that wearables actually date back to the 60’s and 70’s. There were people designing – believe it or not – they were designing wearables that would help you cheat at gambling that you could bring in with you and help you get away with things at gambling, which I think is kind of an interesting first use case for a wearable. The first calculator wristwatch debuted in 1975, believe it or not, and then when you talk about Bluetooth headsets, I think it’s interesting that the Bluetooth headset’s been around for 15 years now. The first one came out I think sometime around 2000 which I wouldn’t have thought that it would have been out for so long, but it seems like it was. But I guess I would challenge your notion of what a wearable is. You talk about the smartphone as being the ultimate wearable. But technically, if we’re being particular, a smartphone isn’t necessarily something you wear. I will notice that my own personal anecdote, a smartphone fails as a wearable device when you are trying to measure steps and you don’t carry your phone with you while you’re taking all those steps. For example, when I’m at the gym, I bring my phone with me, but I set my phone on the stand when I work out and it’s measuring my steps. I’m still taking steps but my phone doesn’t measure it and it has no idea that I’m doing anything as far as my phone is concerned; I am sedate. So I think there are places where a phone fails as a wearable where other devices are better off. But then I’ll take it to the other extreme and ask, what about virtual reality goggles like Oculus Rift, or the HoloLens that Microsoft is coming out with? They’re designed to be worn but they’re not designed to be where you walk around on the street with them. They’re not something that you can just take with you. So I think that what defines a wearable is going through a little bit of a, I don’t know. I think it’s not been completely settled at this point as far as I’m concerned.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. I think we’re just starting to experiment and I think the people involved in psychology and usability have really started to look at these things and there’s some fascinating discussion of what can go on out there. I was listening to somebody talking the other day about the wrist as being a location for a wearable and you have two wrists and maybe you do different things with each wrist. And that becomes valuable real estate. I always thought that the headphone would become like a really significant wearable where you see more and more functionality built into that. You had the Google Glass, you had the virtual reality lenses. I think the HoloLens is more interesting in a way because like Google Glass, it’s an augmentation of reality. So you can still see what’s going on outside but it may be giving you information about things that you’re walking by and the notifications that you’re getting. So a lot going on there as you start to think about, wow, could I have a smartwatch on one wrist and some other device on another wrist. Is there something that the iGlasses make sense for a camera. Like I said something worn around your neck makes sense for something else. There may be something else you would wear that would measure some other information and it all comes back to what it is you want to learn about yourself and your environment and how you want to take action on that. Tom, what you said about the step tracking, is that with my Apple Watch I just started a class in kettlebells and the way those things work, I would not want to wear my Apple Watch while I was doing that, I would think that it would get in the way. So the way that my watch would measure exercise time just wouldn’t happen because I wouldn’t have the watch on while I was doing that exercise. So you start to see the individual use case starts to change, and we’re in such early days. And I know that you’ve used the smartwatches for a while on the Android side of things, but I also feel like we’re at the beginning of time on apps. We just have no idea what apps are going to bring to these types of wearables.
Tom Mighell: I think that’s right and I agree with whoever it was that said the wrists are a primary real estate. But what’s interesting to me about that is that some people – and I’m going to call Google out here – didn’t want to think of the wrists at first. And I think it took Apple bringing the Apple Watch in and Google going to Android to really do that. But I think if I’m thinking of innovative wearables, I really think Google Glass is one of the more innovative wearables to come around in a long time. It has some great applications, you can take photos or videos when your hands are full, or when you don’t want to be in cumbert with a camera you can see texts or other messages pop up on your screen. I think you can see a map or direction of things when you don’t know where you’re going. The applications for Google Glass are really fairly tremendous. And being able to fit in your glasses I think is even better but I think it was early for its time. People may know that people who had Google Glass early on were called Glasstronauts or they call themselves Glasstronauts. But people out in public were actually more likely to call them Glassholes, if you pardon my modified French. They just didn’t have a good reputation and Google – if you recall, we talked about this on a previous podcast – they postponed development of Google Glass a while back. And many people – and I will include myself in that – thought that there was a good chance that Google Glass was dead. That’s probably not turning out to be the case. We’ve seen in the last week or so that Google is starting to roll out a Glass program for companies so that employees can use them. And what I really think happened is that people were not ready for a wearable that was on the head and that the wrist as real estate makes a whole lot more sense. It’s something that people can accept. They started with the FitBit. The FitBit’s been around now for eight years, it’s been around since 2007. And people accept things on the wrist because they’ve been wearing watches forever and now that they’ve conquered the wrist with the watch, then maybe it’s time to start going to other areas and to look at that. I personally can not envision a world where I look on one wrist and it’s measuring my steps and then on my other wrist is something that’s measuring my oxygen level. And maybe I’ve got an anklet down there that’s measuring my blood flow to my foot. That just kind of bothers me that I’d have so many things. If I had some health problems that specifically needed monitoring, that’s one thing, but I don’t know if I’d want my entire body being quantified that much. I don’t know about you, Dennis, but that’s a little too much for me.
Dennis Kennedy: I always think back to William Gibson’s science fiction novel, Neuromancer, and the notions of enhancement and augmentation. In that book there were people who had this stuff that’s amazingly constructed. They had implants that allowed you to see in different ways and some of that research is really close to happening now, so you do see all of that. And also I take our approach to all these things are different. I told you, Tom, I was in a mall today, which I typically go to. And you go, “Oh my god, the tattoos, the piercings,” that you see, and you say, “If I’m doing all these piercings, why can’t those be smart wearables?” And people have jokingly said that if you do a tattoo, you put chips inside yourself, or whatever. So it’s not like a big stretch and it could be that there are some generational aspects where I didn’t wear a watch for a long time. And now that I wear this Apple Watch, I really have a hard time going without using it and I pay attention to the need. It has a great thing where if you’ve been sitting too long it tells you to stand, it tracks your calories, and all sorts of things. I just find it really useful, learning more and more things about it. That’s the big picture. I just want to sort of focus in. Based on what we’ve seen already, where do you think wearables actually make sense for a lawyer in his or her practice these days and maybe in the next year or two?
Tom Mighell: This is going to be another episode of Tom as the negative technology person because I really think that to a certain extent, wearables tend to be more of a personal type of technology. I think that unless you’re talking about something like Google Glass, something that can record things or take pictures or provide information to the lawyer when they need it. Right now, thinking of the use case, unless you want to provide wearables to your clients, if it makes sense in a personal injury case to provide a wearable to a client to get a day in the life instead of doing a video. You’ve got a wearable that tells people how I spend my days and here’s how I am. That could be very powerful. So I see some use cases for it. I’m still not convinced that it has been beyond that personal injury, health monitoring type use based on at least what I’ve seen so far in terms of what kind of wearables are coming out there at this point in time. What about you, Dennis?
Dennis Kennedy: I do see a lot of application, actually. I hesitate a little bit because I think there are apps to come for wearables that we haven’t seen some of this yet. But I think I was texting my daughter the other day over my watch. My phone was actually in another room. And I was just dictating what I wanted to text to her and it was just grabbing it perfectly and sending the text to her and it was amazing. She was amazed that I was actually doing that. I think there’s a lot of small things that these wearables can do and I think you start to look and say where is this actually going to be helpful to you. And I think it’s those two notions of notification and glances. So if I’m able to get notified of something and just be able to take a quick look at a watch and then be able to act on that to either decide I need to pay attention to this or not, that can help a lawyer who can say, “I don’t have to pick up the phone, I don’t have to do this, I can see what’s going on, I can deal with that in another way.” So I think that can make you a bit more efficient in your day and help you with priority. I also think you can glance at information that could be helpful to you and I think the speech recognition is a really cool thing to help you dictate notes, ideas, maybe even entries as well. So I think that little functionality can be really useful. And I think the personal aspect, Tom, is actually an interesting part of how it can help the practicing lawyer. So my wife was a health coach for a big law firm in St. Louis for a while, and the one thing she noticed is that lawyers are chained to their desk. They never get up, they never do anything. And the fact that you can say that you’ve been sitting too long, you need to get up and get around; you have goals for steps and stuff. I think that will help lawyers deal with stress and the health issues that you have. I think we’re in the early stage but I think there’s interesting ways that makes sense for lawyers to explore both in purely practice ideas. I think your idea of the notion of giving a client some type of wearable to help with their case is really an interesting one. But I think just as a lawyer to help manage their work and their personal life and their health, that’s where the wearables really come into play.
Tom Mighell: I agree with you. I think that from a notification standpoint, I think that wearables like a watch are tremendous and we’ve talked about this several times on the podcast already that I hardly look at my phone anymore because I’m always getting notified on my watch and I think that that provides some benefits. I guess I’ll only say that I don’t think that lawyers have monopoly on being chained to their desk. I think yeah, lawyers should look at that from a health perspective, but I think everybody should look at that from a health perspective. One of the things that’s very interesting to me in this whole dialogue is that suddenly, it took Apple to tell people that they’re not healthy. FitBit’s been trying to do this forever, but suddenly, we have people having their eyes wide open because Apple is telling them that they need to stand up or do something. I don’t think that’s necessarily unique to lawyers. I think that applies to just about everybody, but that’s no reason for lawyers not to pay attention to it. I think lawyers need to be aware of it for all of the reasons we talked about and health just being one of those many important reasons. I will say that I don’t know that I see a time where I find wearables making a big play in the courtroom unless they are being used for evidentiary purposes. I don’t see Google Glass being used in the courtroom any time soon. There are so many prohibitions against certain kinds of technologies. I would imagine that a device that has the potential to let me take pictures of the people that I’m looking at and have that beamed back to somebody so they can see that and they can comment and send me messages on how to frame my questions would be very concerning to a judge. So I’m not thinking that there’s going to be anything in the courtroom along those lines. I do think we’re seeing more and more use of wearable evidence being used and it’s only going to increase as time goes on.
Dennis Kennedy: I actually thought there’s some interesting potential in the courtroom and maybe other places as well, because it gives you a way to contact other people with short text information. Say you forgot to mention something and somebody can look down at their watch and see that and then they incorporate that into what they’re doing or saying. And then I think in the courts where they have the ban on the smartphones, it’s probably going to take another year or two before those courts realize that you can get the information you would have got off the smartphone off your watch, so maybe it’ll be another year or two where the watches get banned. So you certainly have a window of taking opportunity or taking advantage of some opportunity.
Tom Mighell: Here’s the thing though, which is if the phone is banned in the courtroom, then the watch isn’t going to work. How does the watch work if you can’t turn on the phone? The watch communicates to the phone.
Dennis Kennedy: Well, you’ve just got to be close enough to it. But let’s wrap it up, Tom. I see I have a note here. I’m not good on popular culture as you know, but I have a note here of the Tony Stark lawyer. I hope that’s the right thing.
Tom Mighell: It is.
Dennis Kennedy: But this notion of saying what if you combined different classes of wearables? So as a lawyer, you say on one wrist I’m getting notifications of things that are happening and somewhere else like my headset, I’m getting research and the glasses, I’m able to look at transcripts and my glasses are a teleprompter for what I’m presenting or for my opening statement. And you say maybe there’s a whole set of devices that will turn you into this sort of enhanced, augmented super lawyer. It’s – in a certain sense – kind of a comic book idea. But I think there’s a lot of potential out there and like I said, we’re just so early in the app era, we had no idea in the beginning of the smartphones and how far apps were going to take us. There’s definitely that possibility in wearables as well now today.
Tom Mighell: I’ll just say to wrap this up that nobody ever has a problem with Tony Stark’s multitasking abilities. And I think that when you start to add all that stuff together that Tony Stark’s able to do and you apply it to those non superheroes, even though lawyers tend to be great individuals. I think we’re a ways off to that. I will say though, I am looking forward to an age where our clothes become more smart. I like the idea of clothes that may be for people who have health problems, they can monitor your skin temperature or your breathing or your heart rate or your blood pressure and be able to monitor that on a regular basis. I’m sort of intrigued by that as a future and I think we’re a ways down the road from that too. But stuff like that’s coming and I think it’s going to be really interesting. Before we move onto our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.
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Dennis Kennedy: And now let’s get back to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy.
Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell. Dennis had this crazy idea of revisiting our 2015 technology resolutions to check in on how we are doing. Or at least in his case, to check in on what his memory of what those resolutions were which is probably an easier target for both of us, I think. I will invite you to check out our podcast for details. I’ll post it in the show notes so you can go back and listen to it. Or see specifically what our resolutions were although I suspect we’re going to talk about that right now. Dennis, why do you think it’s a good idea to check our progress and why do you want to expose our shortcomings in public?
Dennis Kennedy: Two reasons. I think we tend to do these resolutions in January and make these big plans and then we never go back and check on how we’re doing or whether they made sense in the first place. That’s one aspect of it and I think it’s good to check in on it in general. I also attended a webinar that Georgetown University’s career services or alumni group put on for Georgetown alumni. It was about checking in on your goals and your plans for the year and it sort of took a midyear review approach to that. I also had a midyear review at work, so all of these things came together and I said, I do need to go back and look at some of those things. Because on some things, I think I’ve made good progress, and in other areas I’m not really sure. So I think it’s good to surface though. I think it would be interesting for our audience to see how well we walk the walk in addition to talking the talk and it could be instructed to do that. So as you mentioned, Tom, I don’t like to be tied down by actually going back and looking at what I said on the podcast so I’d rather go with my memory which may be the easier standard. But I do know that one of my goals was to try the Apple Watch at an early stage and I also wanted to take the slow approach to adapting it that I’ve taken. I’ve just been really happy and worked my way into Apple Pay and paying with my watch, which I love the dictating of text, which is great. There was something that I really wanted to do in the area of automation and I think both of us wanted to do that. That’s where I haven’t made progress, but I think that’s good if you check in. Then I say that’s what I can do in the rest of the year because there are a good number of months left in the year. I know I wanted to do more with OmniFocus, which I’ve done. I wanted to do more with Evernote, which I really used a lot in connection with our vacation trip to Europe and that gave me some ideas for taking it to the next level. But that remains 20 to 30% done on. So I think that for me, you see things that you like to do and there’s still this organization that I’ve struggled with in my technology and kind of pruning my technology. But I think I’m going to address some of that in the cowardly way by getting a new computer with a bigger hard drive rather than doing the pruning.
Tom Mighell: That is not pruning, Dennis.
Dennis Kennedy: But I’ve convinced myself that that will actually help my prune because it gives me more room to work with. I think when I look back at what I wanted to do, it’s sort of not bad in what I’ve done. I think there are some things where I’m really pleased with what I’ve done with technology and some areas I need to work. When you go back and systematically touch base with those things, you can give yourself credit for things you’ve accomplished and then you can also say that it’s not that I failed in these other areas. Now I can focus a little bit more and see if they still make sense or now I have a better understanding of why they didn’t work and what actually I could do in those areas to go forward. So I think in automation, some of the things I would really have liked to do I think involve me learning more about scripting than would probably make sense to do. But it still gives me the opening to say I could try to do some things with this and that. And that may be an easier thing to do and not exactly what I had in mind at the beginning of the year but may accomplish some interesting things for me for the rest of the year. I’m giving myself a solid B, at least so far this year. Tom, I don’t know how you rate yourself, you’re usually a little bit harder on yourself than I am.
Tom Mighell: I am and I would probably rate myself a little bit less. I went back and I had four resolutions myself and I did not rely on my memory because I don’t think I could have told you what it was. I went back to the website and the blog post and I found I had four. I would say for grading ourselves, I’m an F because I’ve got about 50% of what I’ve done. But I would probably grade myself at a B- or a C+. My first resolution was to learn more about how to use Access, how to use Excel and get to be a power user, how to use Microsoft Project, to really take advantage of the videos on Linda.com – which was bought by LinkedIn this year – and to learn more about how to take a deep dive in and become a better user of those tools. I’ve done that for Access, I’ve done that for Microsoft Project, so I am pleased that I am making use of that. I wil say that Linda.com is a fantastic resource that you should all take advantage of if you can. Making more use of automation, I stole or I appropriated one of yours and I said that I also need to do that. And that’s an area in which I also have not really done a whole lot that was out there. I really wanted to do more to automate on my phone and Android Lollipop is actually taking care of a lot more automation that I was expecting to do with other apps like If This Then That. And so I’ve been pleasantly surprised that I don’t have to learn that. But I’m noticing that If This Then That is adding channels all the time for things that I use, so I’m intrigued by that. I’m going to try to get to that and I hope that the rest of the year will allow me to do that. I said I would write more content on inter alia on my blog, and shut down my iPad blog, and I have sadly done neither of those things. I’ve just not had the time to write what I wanted to, and that really is my true regret from my resolutions and my hope is that I’m getting ready to go on a long vacation. When I get back through the end of the year I plan on trying to bang out a lot of writing and really get back to the writing form that I had been in in the past with a lot of web content. My last one is something completely new, like you Dennis and your Apple Watch. I purchased my Windows Surface, we’ve talked about it several times on the podcast. I completely love it. In fact, last week, I downloaded Windows 10 onto my Surface. I love Windows 10 as a matter of fact, so I have two completely new things this year and I would say that that resolution has been completed to my satisfaction. Because I really think that the Surface tablet is a transformative device. I really like how I’ve been able to use it in both my work and as a personal device as well. I’m probably close to where you are Dennis but I would grade myself a little bit lower.
Dennis Kennedy: I really want to encourage the listeners to take a look at what they decided to do at the beginning of the year and both reconsider now and give yourself a plan for going through the rest of the year. But now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip, website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.
Tom Mighell: I have an article for people to read and it is a blunt article, but it is something that I believe is the truth and the article is titled, It’s Your Fault Email is Broken. I completely believe this, it has nothing to do with the tool, it has nothing to do with any technology. It has to do with how people have become used to email as their filing cabinet and have developed certain expectations of what it should be and those expectations are not always correct. I think this is a good start to people understanding what the problem is. It doesn’t necessarily offer any solutions, but it actually says don’t blame email for the problem, blame yourself first. I know that’s a hard thing to take, but I believe it’s the truth or at least a large part of the truth. Dennis.
Dennis Kennedy: Amen. So Allison Shields and I have started to work on a new version of our LinkedIn in One Hour book and so I’ve been doing a little research on LinkedIn. So on Tom Croom, on the Small Business Trends blog wrote a post called The Science of the Perfect LinkedIn photo, which is full of great tips on how to put a photograph into LinkedIn. I’m just surprised by the number of people – and especially lawyers – who don’t have any photo at all, which is truly bizarre when you get an invitation to connect from somebody who doesn’t have a photo or they have a really outdated one or something that’s just not really appropriate. This article goes through what you need to do, how you crop pictures, what works well, whether you need to look happy or not, those sorts of things. And so I just found it a really handy, useful article that will enhance your LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn presence.
Tom Mighell: 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 TKMReport.com. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site where you can find archives to all of our previous podcasts. If you’d like to get in touch with us, please email us at [email protected] or send us a tweet. I’m @TomMighell and Dennis is @DennisKennedy. So until the next podcast, I am 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 this 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.