And The Legal Technology Surveys Say…

Episode Notes

Transcript

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 159 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 dove into the world of wearables. In this episode, we look at the big picture in legal technology, the recently published results from the ILTA Inside Legal Tech Survey, and the ABA’s annual tech survey and try to make some sense of this year’s result. Tom, what’s on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, we’ll be taking a close look at new surveys on how lawyers use technology in their practices. In our second segment, we’ll talk about our own experiences with the Amazon Echo and what it might show us about the personal digital assistant. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip, website or observation that you could start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first let’s talk about recent Tech Survey results. The International Legal Technology Association Conference just took place in Las Vegas, I was there for a day or two. And with that comes the annual ILTA Inside Legal Technology Survey of law firm and law department IT staff and executives. We also got the 2015 version of the ABA’s Legal Technology Survey Report, which features responses primarily from lawyers and how they use technology together. These surveys give what I would think is a pretty good view of the state of legal technology use both from an IT perspective and from a legal perspective. Dennis, after reviewing these surveys, we kind of looked at them a little bit. Do they give you any hope at all that we’re seeing any important changes in the way that lawyers are using technology?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, we were talking before the podcast, Tom. I was looking at a bunch of charts and especially in the ABA survey; there were charts from four years, 2012 to 2015 and still, the bars were exactly the same height. I look at these surveys and hope there’s going to be some things that leap out at me and say, “Wow, here’s some big changes happening.” But I guess my reaction was I’m not really sure there’s a lot of big change happening, and maybe that’s the real story of these surveys.

Tom Mighell: I agree, and I think I noticed that from both surveys, but really more from the ABA survey. I’ve noticed it more in the past couple of years that there haven’t been any trends. There haven’t been any steady increase or steady decrease or even marginal increase or decrease in the way that lawyers are doing things. And I’m always intrigued about why that may be. I want to believe that it has to do with the people who are responding. I was convinced that last year there were more solo lawyers responding and so that kind of tended to skew the results in one way. But I’m not sure after looking at the way the results are this year. It seems like since the recession in 2008, there was a clear drop off then, there was less spending. There was clearly a trend downward around the recession; but since that time, and in the past maybe three to four years, I’ve really noticed that things have kind of levelled off and they are still kind of chugging along. If you can say that one thing has changed for the better, it would be, I think, that technology budgets are either loosening up or at least not tightening up. I think we’re seeing that more firms are spending money on technology for their lawyers. And to me, that was one of the significant findings that I saw both in the ABA and ILTA survey. I thought that the numbers were exactly the same. 41% of firms plan to spend more this year on technology than in past years.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I think these surveys are useful for that – there’s the consistent numbers, I can give you some benchmarkings. So the 2 to 4% total firm revenue on average, I would say, almost looks like it’s across the board. Spending on technology looked like there’s around $17,000 spend on technology per attorney that was surprisingly across the board. That was sort of the middle range before listeners panic and wonder where their 17 grand is. So I think you see some of those things and a little bit of movement here and there. But I think the benchmarking part of it is very useful and I also think that the innovation is probably happening among outliers and I would say that if I’m a firm looking to invest in technology and to go make technology a differentiation with other firms, I think these numbers would actually be very encouraging to say, “Hey, maybe even now even though we haven’t done anything for a few years, we could actually make a jump in technology over some of our competitors.” That way is sort of interesting. I always like to differentiate what’s different between these two surveys and then also remind people that the american lawyer media comes out with its own set of the AmLaw 200 Technology Survey. I think that usually comes out later in the Fall. Typically, I think that attracts ILTA a little bit more. But there are differences between the two surveys that you hit on and maybe it’s worth going into that in just a little more detail.

Tom Mighell: Sure, so the ILTA survey is primarily law firm and to a certain extent corporate law department but to a lesser extent IT. You’re getting lots of CIOs answering, you’re getting lots of managers in IT. This is primarily from an IT standpoint about what they’re seeing for the firms that they support in terms of technology. My understanding is very few lawyers are actually responding to that. So you’re getting a very specific look on how IT views legal technology in law firms. Turn all that around and go to the ABA survey and you have almost exclusively lawyers on that end. What I think is interesting and what actually I think skews the results slightly is the number of solo and small firm lawyers who answer the survey. Because I think this year, the total number of lawyers who were either solo or up two firms with nine lawyers with 60% of the respondents. And then when you get up to the top, over 100 lawyers in a firm, you’re getting probably only about 15 or 17%, some small number were responding to that. So the ABA survey I think is valuable, but I also think you have to take it understanding that the people who are talking about it may be speaking more from a small firm perspective than a big firm s perspective and I think that has a difference on how the results come out.

Dennis Kennedy: So I thought we’d look at the ILTA survey first. I wanted to go over the LexisNexis Business of Law Blog; it actually had a really good article about what they thought were the four big takeaways from the ILTA survey. But Tom, we’re never limited by somebody else’s-

Tom Mighell: Of course not.

Dennis Kennedy: So I thought it’d be best to go with the things that interested us. I thought there were a number of things that jumped out, and what surprises me is that we see the increase in emphasis on security, that I would expect. But we dig into some of the survey results, I can’t believe that people put down some of the answers that they do without hiding their heads in shame. There’s something like 15% of firms have had a security breach. There are firms that list that they still don’t have mandatory passwords on account. It is really shocking that even the best and most common security methods aren’t even close to 100% in use. So that was striking to me. I’m really interested in how a standard it is that lawyers who use LinkedIn from a minimum 88% to 90% you see usage of LinkedIn among social media. I found that interesting. I know Tom, you’ll probably talk in more detail about records management, but there’s finally a shift away from email management being the number one priority among lawyers. I was also intrigued by the one thing that did appear to me to be an interesting trend was the movement towards Microsoft Office 365, which ILTA treated as a new category and 13% of the firms surveyed had purchased Microsoft Office 265. I think that qualified as a trend. What did you notice, Tom?

Tom Mighell: What’s really hilarious about this Dennis is that you and I put together our lists separately. And of the things that I have on my list, I have Office 365, security replacing email as a concern, information governance is a challenge that people are recognizing, and that’s kind of a little bit where we differ. But I’m seeing the same things and I think the same things are important to me. I think, frankly, that that 13% of Office 365 is huge. Because typically, what we see with Office products is that there’s a lag, that they are slow to adapt. I know that there’s a lot of companies that are still on Office 2010. But I think that with Office 365, that’s not surprising. I am in the corporate world seeing more and more companies jump immediately into Office 365. It has a lot to do with management of email in the Cloud, it has a lot to do with combining services with SharePoint. So that number really doesn’t surprise me very much. I’m happy to see that information governance is number three on the list of the biggest challenges. I agree completely that a lot of law firms don’t really get information governance. I’m also pleased to see that they included technology competence as a category asking, “What are you doing to make sure that lawyers are competent in the technology that they use?” I’m not sure that it really addresses the problem completely, because what it does is they say, “What are you doing?” Firms are saying, “We’re offering courses, we’re hiring external vendors to come in and do training.” I think that offering courses is one thing, but are lawyers taking the courses? I know a lot of companies offer additional training on technology tools, but they’re just wide open; they’re open for you to take them if you want to, they’re not mandatory. And I’d be interested to know, are these trainings mandatory? What’s the percentage of lawyers that are actually doing this? And what’s interesting there is when you look at the ABA survey, you’ve got a lot of lawyers – I think 23% – saying that training on technology isn’t important at all and only about 38% say it’s very important. So given the opportunity, I think lawyers probably aren’t going to get a lot of training. Two other very quick things, it’s amazing to me that 26% of firms are still purchasing BlackBerries for their firms. We’ll talk about the LTRC survey and the ABA survey in just a second, it really doesn’t jive with what we’re seeing over there. And it’s also very interesting and heartening to me to see Windows tablet use. The Windows Surface tablet is up to 29% among law firms, which is only about 18% behind the iPad; a little more surprising than I suspected, but really does show that the Surface is a viable tablet for lawyers’ use. I think those are my big takeaways from this particular survey.

Dennis Kennedy: Let’s go to Business of Law Blog. It had four big takeaways and we can talk about these. So increase spending on technology, which we talked about. The emphasis on security, as you mentioned. Training and technology proficiency, which I think aligns with the technology being part of ethical competence. And then the focus on the Cloud. I think that we’re pulling away from the recessionary period. You’re seeing the spending on hardware. I’m a little bit surprised that it’s a little bit less on laptops than I would expect, because it just seems to me that lawyers are pretty laptop-oriented. I think the Windows Surface that we talked about in a couple of episodes ago I think has a very interesting option in there and I would be curious to see how that grows over the next year. So that’s what I noticed in spending, but then spending totally seemed to be bread and butter, not innovation. So desktops, laptops, printers, scanners, that sort of thing, servers. Security, I think we talked about. There is that big, growing emphasis, but lawyers talk and talk but the numbers show they aren’t walking the walk on very standard security precautions. The training technology competence, again, is another place where I think the people realize the need but as the survey results show, they don’t want to spend their time on it. That’s surprisingly a bigger adaption of the Cloud reflecting what’s going on with the rest of the world.

Tom Mighell: If I compare, and maybe this is a way to transition to talking more about the ABA survey, I really don’t find that as many lawyers embracing new or cutting edge technologies as maybe we’ve seen in the past. I think we’re seeing bigger firms, they’re talking a lot more about stuff like big data, about data analytics. Those are more cutting edge issues, more things that are kind of on the forefront of what law firms and other industries are doing about technology. But I think that lawyers in general, this survey still reflects there is still a lot of slowness to adapt some technologies. I do think the ILTA survey reflects more current thinking about where technology is headed. I just think it’s going a little bit slower than it might be in other industries. This is not a survey by lawyers and they tend to be the ones who don’t use the technology, so maybe it’s a good time to talk about the ABA survey. Dennis, do you want to talk a little bit more about that?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I do, but one more quick last thing on the ILTA survey. There’s a section called, “What’s the most exciting technology or trend you’ve seen,” and that was actually one of the more interesting things for me. So a lot of it is the stuff you would expect from the IT director’s perspective: security, virtualization, Cloud, mobility. But people talked about AI, Apple watch, a little bit about big data, Amazon Echo – that we’ll talk about in the next segment. And my favorite response on that – and I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this, Tom – but the interest in drone technology for personal and professional use. So there are definitely some people out there with some interesting ideas, I’ll say that. So I guess, Tom, we always like to give our standard disclaimer that we are involved through the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center. In fact, I’ll be the chair this year, I am the chair this year, you were vice chair. So we’ll give a little bit of disclaimer of our involvement in there. But I think it’s a great effort that’s been made consistently over the years so you can see tends and get the lawyers’ responses. And even this year, we’ll be tweaking the questions, so any of our listeners who have ideas for that survey are welcome to give us some input on that. And then each of us wrote a summary section that’s going to be available for free. So I covered the Cloud side of things so that’s probably where I’ll focus my comments. I think this survey, again, shows a general willingness to experiment in small ways with Cloud computing. I think that it shows a basic misunderstanding in some cases of what Cloud computing is because I think there are some people who say they don’t use Cloud computing but they’ll say they use DropBox, GMail, those sorts of things, which are obviously classic Cloud computing examples. So there’s still some education out there, then I’m also really surprised at the lack of due diligence that people do on Cloud computing. So again, it’s sort of like talk is one thing and walking the walk is another thing that really shows up in these survey results. So a lot of people say, “Here’s our concern about Cloud computing, it’s security and getting the right vendor,” and then when you look to see what it is that they do in terms of due diligence, even asking other people or checking in to the history of the vendors is not something that even 50% of firms are doing. So some interesting things there, Tom. I think you had your own section and maybe some ideas about the survey in general as well.

Tom Mighell: Well, sure. Like Dennis had Cloud, I covered the mobile technology piece I’m writing, the Mobile Technology Tech Report. My favorite findings from the mobile part – and when I say favorite, it doesn’t necessarily mean good but it’s not necessarily surprising either. 29% do nothing to secure their mobile devices when they are on the internet. Still 29% are not using any type of security when they use public Wi-Fi. That just still amazes me. Password protection on smart devices, on smartphones, on tablets; passwords are still the most popular, 97% of people using passwords. What’s interesting is only 19% are using encryption, still fewer are using biometric authentication. Now that we hae Apple Touch ID, fingerprint passwords are the norm that I see now on most phones that we have these days. I’m amazed that so few lawyers are using biometric authentication – usually fingerprints instead – instead of passwords or other security. BlackBerry continues its downward march as far as lawyers are concerned. It used to be I think 45% four or five years ago. It’s now at an all time low in a survey of 5%. What’s amazing to me is that in the ILTA survey, ILTA reports that 26% of the respondents are actually buying BlackBerries for their lawyers. It doesn’t really jog with the 5% of lawyers who are using it, so I’m interested to know how that correlates and what the reason is for something like that. Some of the other things from the survey that we learned that I thought was really interesting: on the ILTA survey, IT reports that security is it’s top challenge. From the ABA survey, that doesn’t surprise me because only 50% report that encryption software is available at their firm. Only 30% actually use the software that’s available to them, and then only 65% of people actually report enforced passwords. So 35% of the firms don’t have any type of password policy that’s enforced. I think, no wonder, it’s a challenge for IT. 15% of the respondents reported some type of security breach, which makes blame why, so if you find security an important issue. Still, only, like you mentioned, a relatively fewer number of people are using the Cloud. Only 30% of lawyers are using the Cloud with very few of the others planning to move to the Cloud any time soon. I thought that was really interesting that there were very few. The people who are using the Cloud seem to have settled on it and the others don’t seem to have any plans to move to it. I’m still amazed that 38% of the respondents received no requests for edicscovery, period. Now granted, maybe the respondents are not litigators, maybe they’re not answering discovery and that’s the reason. But in this day and age to have someone who receives no requests for electronic documents really is sort of mind boggling to me. It’s good to see that 85% of lawyers have websites. But as Bob Ambrogi mentioned on a blog post awhile back, the number of lawyer blogs has remained pretty stagnant. Only about 26% of lawyers have their own blogs, which I also find interesting considering what a great way it is for lawyers to be able to get their message out and talk about the things that are important to them. I’ve kind of gone through them really quickly, but those are the things that are of interest to me most in this edition of the LTRC survey.

Dennis Kennedy: So what I found looking at both surveys is that it is really fun to look through these numbers. And I think that you will be rewarded for spending some time sort of pouring through these. Like Tom was saying, that we both have written reports from the ABA survey that will be available for free at some point in the very near future. And the ILTA, Inside Legal summary is available for free as a PDF download, just go to the Inside Legal page on our website to get that. And I think that if you are really interested in technology and trying to figure out what you need to do next and what your competitors might be doing and what you can do to out compete them, I think there’s a lot of stuff to think about here. And I think you can really start to experiment and slice and dice the data that’s available. And I think the key to these things is how do I turn this data and what I see that’s most interesting to me into action. There’s some really fascinating numbers here about how much lawyers drive technology decisions versus what the IT department drives. There’s an incredibly small number in the result that says clients drive technology change. I think those are areas that the firms that want to differentiate themselves and lawyers who want to differentiate themselves through technology can really get some insights and maybe put together a plan to really do the differentiation and to come off in some ways that they can move ahead. Because I think when technology stays as constant as it seems, then it really becomes possible to leapfrog into new areas. So I’m actually kind of positive about the results for the right lawyers and the right firms, but I think that it does feel really static out there otherwise, Tom.

Tom Mighell: Well I think I tend to take the more pessimistic view. I think with the right frame of mind, we want lawyers looking at this survey. We want them to become more competitive, getting a leg up on the competition. And certainly, looking at the survey can help them do this. I fear, on the other hand, that lawyers are going to look at this and say, “Well, only 15% of law firms had a security breach last year, so I’m safe. I’m in the majority so I’m in good shape.” I hope that level of complacency doesn’t set in that lawyers really will actually take this survey in a constructive way. Find new ways to improve the ways that they use technology in their practice.

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, I had lunch the other day with a guy in St. Louis who’s put together some really cool estate planning software. Sweet, in a way, that if I were still doing estate planning, I would buy this in a second. And the conversation I was having with him, Tom it’s the same one we’ve heard over the years where you’re saying it is so hard to get lawyers to buy technology. And I’ve got to tell you, this software made so much sense to me. If I was doing that, it allows you to do some things and to be really creative and to take back the lead role that lawyers once had with estate planning clients. It’s still striking when he’s telling me how difficult it is to sell lawyers on it and how he’s thinking about repositioning to say this is a great tool for secretaries and admins and using that as the way in to lawyers. I know in the script, we end up with this question, are we hopeful, and I originally was very hopeful for the lawyers who are driving forward. But actually, after hearing your comments on how you were kind of negative, I turned a little more negative in the last two minutes.

Tom Mighell: Well, I’m glad I was able to persuade you so easily. I just see several years of results in the ABA survey where things haven’t changed. And I hate to say it, it just turns me a little bit negative. But I do remain hopeful that as time goes on, more and more lawyers are going to hopefully start to see and do the things that we think they ought to be doing. So I’m looking forward to next year’s survey as a result. Before we move onto 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. We both recently bought the Amazon Echo, which to me is a new form of digital assistant that works with speech input to do a number of really useful, small tasks. Now Tom has put a lot more effort than I have, as usual, because he’s much more of the early, early adopter than I am. So he’s ahead of me on this so he’s going to start off this segment. So, Tom, how are you liking your Echo?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, I am loving my Echo. I really, really like it. I think it’s a great device. I should start by describing it for anyone out there who hasn’t seen it before. It’s a black cylindrical device, it’s a cylinder, it’s about ten inches tall, and it is designed as a listening device. It’s always in listen mode for when you have a command for it. It has some really great speakers too when it wants to give something back to you. But it has omnidirectional microphones so that wherever you happen to be in a room, and you can be all the way across the room when you talk to it, it will point the microphone at where you are and it has extremely good recall. It can really pick up what you’re saying – I won’t say no matter how gargled – but it really does have very good recall of the words that you happen to be saying to it. The way that you use it is like Cortana or Siri. Amazon’s Echo is Alexa, so you start out using the word Alexa and you ask things. Play music by Bruce Springsteen. Play holiday music. It will automatically go into Amazon Prime and begin to play those things. I am a big MPR fan so I will say, “Play the top news from MPR,” and it will go out and go to TuneIn Radio and it will play the top of the hour headlines from MPR. It has a lot of power to play things from different radio or music places through Amazon Prime and through other sites. You can use your Pandora account, you can use TuneIn radio. You now can get sports scores and figure out where different teams are in terms of the game. There are ways to figure out how long your commute is to work. My very favorite feature of the Echo is because it is an Amazon product and it ties into your Amazon Prime account, you can easily say, “Alexa, reorder,” and then something that’s on your list, something that you’ve ordered in the past – they won’t order new products, but if you need to reorder something, you can just ask it to reorder that immediately and it will be reordered and it will be delivered to you and you never have to see a computer. I think that’s really awesome. I use it in the kitchen. I’m in the kitchen with cooking things, and when I run out of something, it is just a very simple exercise to say, “Alexa, add salt to the shopping list.” And it’s added to my shopping list which gets sent to an app on my phone. Really, really helpful. As much as I love it, though, I don’t see – at least right now – a ton of application for lawyers. They’re starting to integrate smart home features so that you can tell Alexa to turn the thermostat up or turn off the lights in the bathroom or something like that. So if you have a smartphone, and some of these are actually pretty useful. Where I really think this is going and I where think it’s really kind of cool is for something like document assembly. So imagine a day when you go up to Alexa and say, “Hey, Alexa, please prepare a divorce petition for Jane Doe and John Doe,” And it will go ahead and put that information in and it will create a document for you. That’s really simplistic. It may not make sense to do something like that, but I think it’s really interesting to be able to speak the thing that you want and have technology take care of the task for you. And that really, to me, is what Alexa represents and what I think makes it really, really interesting me. Dennis, I’ve been blabbing a whole lot so far and I’ll shut up for a second and say what do you think about your Amazon Echo so far?

Dennis Kennedy: I’m just really impressed, too. I’ve used it less than probably for smaller things. But a couple of things have really just amazed me. When I first showed it to my wife, I just had her speak to it and it responded to her voice as well as mine in just the same way. That, to me, was really amazing. I’m also really impressed with how fast it is. So let me try to do the demo, I don’t know whether this is going to be loud enough to really pick up, but I’ll try it. Alexa, what’s tomorrow’s weather?

Alexa: Tomorrow, in St. Louis, you’ll see thunderstorms and can expect a high of 82 and a low of 64.

Dennis Kennedy: So it’s super fast, and instead of going to weather.com or trying to figure out what’s something on the TV to get the weather, I just ask Alexa for today or tomorrow. And I’m discovering what it’s good at and these are things that will make sense to you. So if I ask it if it’s a full moon, it will tell me when the next full moon is. There was a phenomenon a couple of weeks ago that my wife was called the double moon, which I guess was Saturn and actually going in transit across the moon. Well, that was something where it said it didn’t understand the answer to, and I could see that. So I like to try things to give me a sense of what it might be good for and what it isn’t. The other night I was reading a new book on – not exactly a biography – but it was about Billie Holiday. And when they would mention a song in the book, then I could actually say to Alexa – and I hope I don’t turn her on just by saying that – that I would just say play All of Me by Billie Holiday, and the song would just start playing immediately. That was just a cool thing. Like I said, Tom, the speakers are great and it will do a number of things, news, weather. There’s a whole bunch of things it could do well, but I see what it is now, which I think is cool, but as a potential platform in a year or two along with Siri or Google Now – like you said, the Microsoft tool as well. It’s surprising to me how voice may become the way we start to navigate things. So just for $150 for those of you looking for a present, might be something to put on your list. So now it’s time for those parting shots, that one tip, website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: So my parting shot, I was in Europe for two weeks a couple of weeks ago. I had a fabulous vacation and I like to go on lots of tours and I was using my phone as my tour guide. So I had my Google Maps going. I had my book up so I could read about where I was or where I was going, and my phone’s battery life was not very good and I needed a battery connection during the day. I had my little daypack, and I wound up using the Anker. We’ve talked about Anker tools on here before. They have a new one out, the Anker Power Cord 20100. It will basically keep your phone charged all day long and then some. The amount of power in this little brick is just amazing. It’s a little bit heavy, but it’s not too heavy. It’s just good enough to where you can carry it in a bag or something and I just basically kept my phone connected to it when the battery started getting low. And it kept my phone going all day long when I was in, it required very little topping off of the battery at night. It’s a very strong battery. I recommend just about anything that the Anker folks do in terms of their chargers. But this power cord was great for being able to get through not only the phone problem, but when I’m on the plane and I wanted to make sure my iPad didn’t go out on long plane rides from Europe back to the United States, I was able to plug it in and it was able to keep it going. So Anker Power Cord 20100. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: So I’m going to go with an actual tip for a change instead of a point to a url or a podcast or something. So a lot of times, people like to talk about how they like to use keyboard shortcuts. And my thing is there’s a lot of them, it’s hard to remember them, and you usually just have a few that you use and you know well. So if you have that list of a few, I have another one to add. So trainers and the experts of Microsoft Word always say that if you want to really know how to use Microsoft Word, you need to know how to use styles. And that’s really true, but it ignores the fact that basically everybody you work with does not know how to use styles. So especially if you go through a draft and go through a couple of rounds and track changes and stuff, it is mayhem inside that document. And so when you or the lawyer who gets stuck with doing the last version of it in accepting changes, you’re going to get all this weird formatting. So very recently, I was down to that last, finalizing piece, and there was actually a word, one word that had a box around it. And so I tried everything, right clicks, all this sort of stuff to figure out what the heck was drawing that box around this one word. I had been asked to fix it on the punch list of document changes. So I remembered – and I can’t remember where this is from but I think I heard it on a podcast – of this shortcut called CTRL + space, which basically takes out all the formatting in the text that you select. And so I selected the word that had the box around it, I hit the CTRL + space, and the box disappeared. It was totally amazing. So anyway, there are actually a set of three of these, but I think CTRL + space is probably the one that will give you the most benefit when you run into those weird things. So there’s a CTRL + Q which will allow you to remove paragraph formatting. Could be useful when you get some weird paragraph things going on. And then here’s one that I will never remember, but if you do CTRL + shift + N, it takes you back to the normal style. That could also be useful when you get to some weird bolding or font change that you don’t know how to take care of. So CTRl + space is up there on the list with Paste Special and Print Screen and the things that can be really helpful when you’re desperate using Word.

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.

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