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: | February 27, 2017 |
Podcast: | Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Category: | Legal Technology |
Nowadays, it seems like everyone, from your neighbor who writes about her nine cats to your teenage daughter who writes about makeup brushes, has a blog. Lawyers often see blogging as a means of marketing and getting to know their clients. In this episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, hosts Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell talk about what blogging looks like for lawyers and how those without blogs can start one. Their discussion includes where blogging started, how it has evolved as different mediums have developed, and tools that take some of the work out of the posting process. In the second segment of the podcast, Dennis and Tom answer an audience question about diversity within technology and why there isn’t an established diverse attorney search tool. This episode’s parting shots include Data Selfie, a tool that allows you to track and analyze your social media usage, and Scribd, a “Netflix for books.”
Special thanks to our sponsor, ServeNow.
The Kennedy Mighell Report
Legal Blogging the Right Way
02/27/2017
[Music]
Intro: Web 2.0, Innovation, Trend, Collaboration, Software, Metadata… 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 186 of ‘The Kennedy-Mighell Report’, I am Dennis Kennedy in St. Louis.
Tom Mighell: And I am Tom Mighell in Dallas.
Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode we shared some of our favorite tips for troubleshooting technology, something that can come in handy almost every day it seems. Shortly, before we recorded this episode my blog had its 14th anniversary or as some bloggers like to call it, it’s 14th blogiversary.
As Tom will be happy to tell you, his blog is several months older than mine and he makes a lot less fuss about blogiversaries than I do. Nonetheless, we thought it might be a good time to take a look at the current state of blogging.
Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?
Tom Mighell: Well, the reason I make much less fuss about it is because I don’t blog anymore and that’s a source of regret and pain for me but we’ll get into that later.
In this edition of ‘The Kennedy-Mighell Report’, we will be talking about the current state of blogging. In our second segment, we have an email question that is both appropriate as well as hard to answer. As a reminder, we always welcome your questions so please feel free to send and then you’ll get information at the end of the podcast on how to do that.
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 up, what’s the current state of blogging, the legal blogosphere, it’s hard to believe that the lowly humble weblog has been around for nearly 20 years and some of the oldest law blogs are hitting the 15 and 16-year-old age.
In some ways, blogs are kind of the Grand Dom of social media that some would say, and I maybe one of them that they may be on the decline. I think someone would disagree with me or not, but especially among lawyers I just don’t see the rise that some people may be seeing in blogging among lawyers.
But, Dennis, let’s kind of get to what made you think about the topic, what’s it like to be the parent of a teenage blog and maybe more importantly an old teenager.
Dennis Kennedy: Okay, as people know I just love blogiversaries. So I started my blog as an early birthday present to myself and I think I make way more fuss about the blog’s birthday than my own birthday, and I sometimes get accused of anthropomorphizing my blog, so sometimes I have — I do feel like my blog talks to me and makes suggestions, and so, I think that really makes me a classic blogger in that sense.
But it is a long time to think about it and there’s been a lot of changes. I went back, Tom, to an article that in 2005 in the Law Practice Magazine where we did a roundtable with what we call the Between Lawyers, Bloggers, so Denise Howell —
Tom Mighell: Ernie Svenson, Marty Schwimmer.
Dennis Kennedy: Marty Schwimmer, Tom —
Tom Mighell: Tom and Dennis.
Dennis Kennedy: Tom — me. Oh my God, I just know every other first name, I just blanked on last names here, but we have not reached out through for such a long time, we did a roundtable article, and one of the questions like, well, what do you think our blogs would look like in the future, and there was sort of the sense that our blogs would always be with us, it’s like hard to imagine that you wouldn’t have it anymore.
But I don’t think we knew exactly what they would look like as they got up in edge. And so, I think if you look at all of us, they’ve all changed pretty much and I think that as we’ve changed, but it is hard for me to think even if I don’t post that much that there’s ever going to be a time that I don’t have a blog.
So that is definitely one aspect of having a teenage blog, I sort of I know it’s there, it’s kind of always a thought of mine and I’m thinking about what to do with it and I’m trying to figure out how it evolves in its own way but it’s a tricky time, the teenagers in a blog are tricky these days.
Tom Mighell: Well, and see, I think they are even trickier because I’d make the argument and I’m going to be — I’m going to be kind of a sourpuss on this episode because I have my blog and I plan to always have my blog and I keep planning to go back to it, but I haven’t had a post in over a year, I think.
And so, I am not sure if we’re being honest that that qualifies me as a blogger anymore. What makes you a blogger? The fact that you have a blog makes you a blogger, I would argue that if you haven’t posted in a certain period of time or if you’re limited to a certain number of posts per year, or per every couple of years, I think that that somewhat limits your right to be a blogger.
(00:05:00)
But — so here’s my — I am going to start off on a negative bent and then we can talk more positively about blogging because I do still think it’s a valuable medium for lawyers to publish in. But I will say that blogging is really not getting anymore popular among lawyers. I was kind of looking to see what’s the number of law blogs out there?
I think we’ve talked about on this podcast long ago that I used to track all the currently existing law blogs that were out there but this is — it’s probably been at least seven or eight years before I stopped tracking — when I stopped tracking them, but I found an article about our blog post that Kevin O’Keefe, our good friend Kevin, wrote about three years ago where he said that about 3,500 law blogs out there and he was going to assume growth of 25%-35% every year, which would mean really nearly 7,000 blogs by this year, by 2017.
And I’m going to come back and dispute that because when I was tracking blogs still almost 10 years ago as when I stopped and there were about 2,500 blogs that I was tracking at that point in time. So I find it odd that only a 1,000 more came into being. So I’d actually argue that there’s probably a lot more than 3,500 blogs in 2014 and probably more than that now.
But here’s the problem that the 2500 that I was tracking, nearly half of them were actually defunct by the time that I stopped tracking them. So I think it’s not only hard to figure out how many blogs are out there, how effective blogging really is with lawyers. I think it’s just as hard to figure out how many blogs are not current because lawyers stop blogging. So that’s why I ask about the legitimacy of what makes a blogger.
If I’m a lawyer and I put up a blog and my last post is two years ago, am I a blogger, does that give me a blog? Clearly there’s something that exists there, but I’d argue that the number of actually contributing lawyers to regularly publish blogs is probably a lot lower than we would imagine.
Dennis Kennedy: Okay, so you raised kind of two interesting points to me. So for me whether you’re a blogger or not, it’s an easy thing, that’s the state of mind like I am a blogger.
Tom Mighell: Even if you write just one post every three years that doesn’t make you a blogger, I don’t think.
Dennis Kennedy: Well, am I a writer? Yeah, I’m a writer. I’m an artist. So it’s sort of like it is a kind of state of mind and an attitude, but yeah, I do think you have to produce something. So there is that aspect and I think there are people that you just see as bloggers and blog, blogging is at least one medium for them, and I think this sort of a big change.
Then I also think there’s the more kind of corporate or firm blogs, group blogs where you can clearly tell when they just run out of energy and die, and then so I think that sort of once they stop posting, it’s done but there are other individuals and if you go back to Dave Weiner blog, it’s the voice of an individual that they can appear.
So what I think this has been the big change is that when we first started blogging like blogging was the medium, it maneuvers a place to be, it made sense for writers, it was this incredible outlet that just did amazing things for writers. Now, that social media is coming along and you have other outlets then the people who I think — people who did a longer form of writing, I think a blog has become important but it can be just – I just see blogging as one outlet and there are certain things I want to do that fit the blog and that’s where I’ll put them.
I know those things might fit publications, lot of my energy, Tom, obviously goes into this podcast, social media, and then there are other things where you say, well, if I’m going to do something, is the blog the thing that makes sense, and I think for other people who might have said, well, is blogging what I’m doing, is that the right thing, you see that they’ve gone on to podcasting, that they’ve gone on to video, that they’ve gone on to some other things, and they sort of found the medium that works for them.
So I kind of have this artistic view of blogging, it’s a place where you express yourself in a medium where you do things, and Kevin O’Keefe would say there’s also a thing of — it’s a way that you connect and communicate with people. And so I think what’s evolved over time is that you pick a medium that makes the most sense to you and as opposed to early days when blogs were really it, I mean, it maybe email newsletters were another thing you could do, that now there’s a lot more options. So I think that blog is not necessarily the first choice and we’re seeing the impact of that.
Tom Mighell: Well, I think an outline you talk about whether or not the hub-and-spoke approach that we’ve talked about on past podcast still makes sense, having the blog as the hub of your activities but then using outposts like Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets as the spokes or as the outpost for you to bring people back to your blog.
(00:10:08)
And I think that if the blog is going to be the medium of choice for you, then I think that approach still makes a whole lot of sense. But the argument for me is going to be that the tool that lawyers are going to choose to some extent is judged by the barrier to entry and how hard it is to get invested in it. I can sign up for a Twitter account and send out a 140-character tweet in five minutes and I can begin to talk to people out there in five minutes.
Now granted that very reason is why some people don’t want to get involved in Twitter, but the barrier to entry is very low. It’s very low on Facebook where I can just go post something, I can set up a law firm site and it’s fairly simple to do.
Blogging I think presents a higher barrier because people tend to associate it with a lot more work. I was reading about the Blawg 100 that the ABA Journal does this year, they interviewed a number of bloggers, and there was one blogger who has contributed — I think he said he spent 3,000 hours writing blog-posts last year and that’s just — I’m sorry, it’s crazy, it’s straight-up crazy, if he chooses to dedicate the time and his business is successful because of that then more power to him and I believe it.
But I think — and I want to get into this in a little bit more later, I really think that lawyers who are going to blog will likely be more successful if they are able to — unless they’re tech-heads like you and me, people who enjoy getting under the hood and tinkering with the technology of the blog, I think that finding a blogging tool where the barrier to entry is very low and all they have to worry about is content creation, is going to stand the better chance of success.
Dennis Kennedy: Well, Tom, we had a kind of funny experience today where there was somebody tweeted, a compliment to me about an article that you actually wrote which was kind of funny, we had to get a correction from people aren’t.
But I think that there are these platforms where blogging is easier, so I mean, we kind of in our early days we kind of rolled our own blog, I mean, it’s like when you think about what we did is, it was pretty amazing. So I think that there is that aspect, but I still come back to that because I see blogging so much as a publishing medium where I say, hey, this is a way to get my message out to the audience that I want, and for me what was attractive about a blog is that I could put it out and I didn’t have constraints of the audience. Anybody could find it in the theory, everybody in the world could read what I was doing and that was exciting to me.
I think a lot of times lawyers look at blogging and they say, I’m going exactly for this target audience, or they are advised to go to a target audience they get really specific. And so, then I think they sort of struggle a little bit with how a blog is going to work, especially if they don’t see the return right-away. Then I also see because there are these other options I don’t know that if you’re not saying I want to have the most eyes possible looking at what I’m doing, did that — because that’s what I do, that you wouldn’t go — to me I would consider strongly making LinkedIn as being the vehicle for what I did as blogging in the past, if I were doing a focused law firm blog.
So you look at that and then you consider those things saying, well, there’s an audience there that maybe I created, it’s smaller, it’s more focused, and I think you kind of have to tick through those things, so I think blogging sort of fits in there somehow and there are definitely some pros and cons you need to think through but I think that as with a law firm blog or a lawyer blog I think as you consider audience you might say, hey, kind of putting my own blog and letting it find an audience I think is a tough concept for people saying let’s put it in a place where I know it’s going exactly to the audience I want.
Tom Mighell: And I think that I think you’re right, I think that being able to tailor what you say on LinkedIn to specific audiences is they are making it dead simple to do that. I mean, Facebook can do the same thing. You can tailor things to certain audiences and direct content to certain people and it’s a very simple and straightforward process. What concerns me about that is the “platform” for blogging is that ultimately I don’t like to talk in terms of ownership, but it’s all on their platform.
It’s something that they have if they shut down, you can’t take your stuff with you, it all belongs there, and to them. Where if you have it on other platforms or other tools you have a little bit more control over it, and that’s the one disadvantage that I see to using a tool like LinkedIn for that is just kind of that lack of control over what happens to your information.
(00:15:05)
I think if I was talking a couple of years ago I would say, absolutely positively, get a WordPress blog and play around with it and it’s a very powerful tool and you will really like it. I’ve kind of come around to that, in fact, I think my article has recommended WordPress. I really think that WordPress is a good tool if you have the time and energy to want to learn how to use a new tool on the computer.
So if that’s your technology resolution or your goal for the coming year, I say go for it. But if really just creating content, I was really pleased to see how Kevin O’Keefe has changed the model at LexBlog where it used to be that there was a significant out front payment for getting a blog created, now it’s much more of a turnkey process where you can get a blog set up in a design that you like and fairly quickly and he makes it very simple to just start publishing.
So that’s a great option, you’re going to pay money for it. There are subscription rates and the more you pay the better the service you get. That is one very good option, but I think that there are other tools out there that again tend to help minimize the amount of work the lawyer has to do.
Squarespace is a great blogging platform that a person really doesn’t have to do a whole lot to make sure that it works. I’ve been a big fan of — and this is kind of again waning a little bit of the website and the service medium, lots of people have been publishing on medium, it gets great audiences, your content becomes part of an app that goes out to people, not necessarily to the legal market, so that’s where it is differs from LinkedIn, but there’s questions there again too about kind of ownership and where that data is and do you get to control any of it. So that’s also an issue.
But I think the good thing is, and maybe the point I should say before I stop talking is that there are a lot more options these days that don’t require the user to know a lot about technology or how to interact with the technology as much that it really just gives them a platform to sit down and write what they know best and to talk about the subjects that they are expert on and then they don’t have to worry about technology get in the way of that.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I mean, I actually think it’s super easy these days to start a blog and inexpensive, so that’s been a big change, so I think it really comes down to what do you see the benefits of blogging to really be, and so, for me I always think that one thing is to explore your interests obviously, but I think blogs can take you to where you want to be if you’re patient. So this is sometimes when I am talking to people while blogs I say, if you know that you’re going to relocate somewhere or you know that you’re going to retire or you would like to develop a new specialty over time, you can start a blog and sort of develop some authority, maybe even get media interviews, that sort of thing.
And over some period of time, fairly short period of time, create that possibility for yourself in a way that I don’t think you can do in a lot of other ways. I mean, I think you do that with podcasting and some other things potentially in video, but my daughter was talking to one of her professors, she’s in graduate school now and she was talking about getting one of the papers she wrote and published, and one of the things they talked about was that maybe she should start a blog in her subject matter area and I was going, yeah, I mean, this is the thing that I think makes so much sense for students is to say, you start doing a blog which I think is a lot easier to do than some of the other things.
But you do the blog and you start to say, where is it that I want to go, what is the thing that interests me and you start writing about that and maybe you try to interview people and point people to resources and then over some period of time, typically I would say a year, a year-and-a-half you’ve created — you do it consistently you’ve created something of value probably growing in audience and then you start to get interviews, you start to get introductions, you start to network, and I think that’s sort of to me the hidden power of blogging and why I still recommend it for people who like to write, and so that’s a big thing.
The second thing that I think is still true these days is that Google loves blogs, like the algorithm still favor blogs and so sometimes by doing the blog you can get very highly placed in search results and that’s something to consider.
Tom Mighell: I think that we both agree that there are good benefits to looking at blogging and as a method of marketing yourself and publishing and having a regular medium for that maybe is a way to think about closing out this particular segment. We start talking about maybe what our best tips are or what some action steps that our listeners can use if they don’t have blogs.
(00:20:07)
And for me the number one step that I think about is to really just get your feet wet, just dip your toes in, don’t go a whole hog, don’t sit down on a weekend and decide I’m going to set up my own blog and I’m going to start blogging by the end of the week, and just sit at home all weekend and set up your WordPress blog and be ready to go, and then a week later decide that that was the worst experience of your life.
I instead would now with the different tools that are out there set up your own page on medium or on some of the other websites where we’ll link to them in the show notes, some of the other tools where you can create content on your own. Just see how it feels, see what about the medium is liberating to you and whether it helps stimulate you and feels like a worthwhile exercise, because it may be that that kind of writing for you is forced that maybe 140 characters of Twitter or the shorter communication styles of LinkedIn or Facebook are better for you and that you don’t need to be doing as much writing, although clearly for lawyers that’s a skill that we all try to have and should have to be effective communicators.
But I really think that going to it slowly is really my number one tip and I may have a couple more but I’ll stop for a second. So, Dennis, what about you?
Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think that it’s always been the case that you want to read a lot of blogs and then pay attention to the ones that you like and say, why do you like them, and can you do something similar, so what do you learn from them?
My biggest tip in blogging is to say, what content are you already creating for yourself that other people would be interested in? And so, people have been incredibly successful with blogs just by doing case summaries that they do of new cases that come out, that’s probably something they were doing on a regular basis for themselves anyway. There are people who do checklists, other things, maybe something topical. I think, lately, there’s — so this is February 2017, so recently huge interest in — changes in the way immigration enforcement was happening and I think people could really start some blogs now in that area and drop big audience.
So I think you look at those kinds of things, but it’s sort of like what content do you — are you already creating that it’s just sort of a natural thing and you do, and then I think you’ve got to be serious about evaluating whether you’re a writer or not, because to do it consistently is a lot harder than it looks.
And so, those are the things, and then I think look to some of the people who, I mean, Kevin O’Keefe is just a good friend and he is just the biggest evangelist for blogging and he really understands it and almost everything he thinks about blogging, although some of it I disagree with, is really thoughtful and he’ll give you some insight into what you can do. And so, I really praise Kevin and he recently did a thing where he’s making blogs available for free to law students. So he is a true believer. So I think kind of understanding what he sees in it, talking to other bloggers about what they like and not, not like or what you can do, but I think putting your fingers on where you’re going to come up with the content is probably the biggest tip I have.
Tom Mighell: And the other nice thing about Kevin is, is that it’s not just about blogs with him, if it turns out that there are better ways for you to get your message out then he’s not going to steer you towards a blog, and I think that’s a nice thing that I like about Kevin.
The other thing that I would have, I think you’re absolutely right that lawyers already are creating content and may not realize that it’s good blogging content. I’ll only add to that by saying that lawyers are I think by nature people who like to keep up with the latest in, whatever, in their area of interest, in case law, in the news, in new stories that affect the industries that we represent clients in but we’re always kind of checking up on what the latest news is. And, one of the things that changed for me when I started having a blog is, is that I stopped thinking about how all of that – or I shifted my focus and instead of thinking how does this news affect me and how I will practice, I start to think how will this news be useful to my clients, how would it be useful to people if I shared it with them, and granted, and I gave them my take on it and I gave them my interpretation of it and how will that affect my clients or the people that I want to be my clients, and I think that’s really a good way to get new content and to really think about what makes a successful blog is, how can I best get content that people want to use, and will find useful to them.
Before you move on to our next segment let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.
(00:25:14)
[Music]
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[Music]
Dennis Kennedy: And now let’s get back to ‘The Kennedy-Mighell Report’, I’m Dennis Kennedy.
Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell, we’ve got a great question by e-mail after our last episode, and we’re going to try to answer it here. Here is the question that we got. In its entirety for over 25 years I have the pleasure and honor to serve the diverse attorney of color community as a legal recruiter. When I read articles and listen to talk shows like yours it is seldom that I hear about folks like myself nor have I heard or read about legal search that is dedicated to and only to diverse attorney search. So my obvious question is, why not?
Dennis, I’ll give you first shot, how would you answer that question?
Dennis Kennedy: Well, there’s sort of – there’s kind of like two questions there, and I think they are both really interesting to me. So one is on the podcast and what we do a related technology is other topics that really impact the minority or diverse attorney audience, and probably “diverse’ is a much better term to use there, and I think that’s something that Tom — you and I think about, I know that we’ve looked at that from a number of perspectives, and so I think that’s something that’s always in the back of our mind, and I think that our approach would probably be to go the interview route to get some insights into that.
So I think if we go to an interview style, that’s definitely something that would be on the table. How can we bring in a diverse perspective and we tried also in the Parting Shots and other things over the years of points — things that give you diversity perspectives on technology. So that’s one piece, but I think that’s an ongoing issue and it’s really fascinating one to say, okay, when you think you’re talking about technology what are the sort of impacts that it has as you look at diverse perspectives? So that’s one thing, and then something I think there’s definitely an interest of ours and it’s something that we’re always trying to figure out a way to do a little better on.
The other one, was also interesting to me, is like are there specific diverse attorney search tools, and so, I did some checking into that because as a corporate counsel that’s a priority of ours and so you start to say, well, are there really tools out there that makes sense for that and I think there are tools within some of the like Serengeti and the other attorney management tools, I reached out to our friend, Mark Roche who’s highly involved in the world of Internet search, he does a lot of CLE presentations on that, and he said that he’s not aware of any specific lawyer directory, the Avvos, the FindLaws, Justia, Martindale, et cetera that has like a pure diversity search criteria.
And so, he and I sort of had the feeling that you just have to be creative in your searching, so you might use search terms, you may also look to some of the specialty Bars like a the Hispanic National Bar Association, might be one route, there’s definitely a search tool on the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms website. So there are some things out there.
And then, my other idea, as I started to think about this was that there’s something we talked about in one of our very early podcasts as I recall is that you can create your own Google custom search engine and Google allows you to do it. I think it’s just called Custom Search, nothing more than that, and then sometimes it’s really a tool that was designed so you can do a search engine for your own site but it allows you to put in the sites that it searches and it doesn’t have to be your own site, so you could put together your own search tool that maybe you pull together some of the Diversity, Minority, Bar Associations, other sites like that where you started to find information and you create your own search tool.
(00:30:09)
So I think there’s a number of ways out there, but I think that I did not find anything specific and I know, Tom, you are like a much better Google searcher and you’re better on research than I am. So let me see what you found.
Tom Mighell: Actually I really only have one thing to add to it which is that I agree with you, I think that there really isn’t anything out there and I would argue that the reason that there isn’t anything out there and I’m going to — I may show flashes of ignorance as I talk about this.
Of course there are tools that have job listings for diverse attorneys, like you mentioned, there’s the National Bar Association, there’s the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, there are dozens of diverse associations and organizations around the country that all have career centers.
I would argue though that, and I’m making the assumption that the recruiter who asked the question is already familiar with those and understands that those are out there, and I would say that that really doesn’t count in the first place because that’s really more job listings for which diverse attorneys might apply, but instead, if you’re actually searching for individual attorneys who I diverse, the struggle that I have there is that to be able to do that search, you have to have data, you have to have a database full of diverse attorneys, and I’m not aware that such a database exists at least in terms of a commercially available database.
You and I were talking, Dennis, about how as part of the American Bar Association anytime you sign-up for something or become a member they’d like you to self-declare your racial makeup before you can as part of your membership. And so that data exists somewhere and the American Bar Association maybe one big holder of that information, but I’m not aware that that information exists in a way that anybody is making it available.
The first thing that I thought of when you talked about create your own search tool is, you and I have been talking about Hackathons, we’ve talked about ways to innovate and develop new tools, that’s one way to do it, is to see if there’s a way to tap into a database of diverse attorneys around the country and develop a search tool around it.
I would tend to go towards something more of an app-based thing or something a little bit stronger than what Google used to allow you to do, create your own search engine or some of the tools that we’ve talked about on past search engines, but to me that sounds like an idea in search of a solution, and it’s really going to be a matter of getting your hands on the data and being able to put that into a usable format before it’s something that people can actually take advantage of.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I mean, the Hackathon idea is great because then you get a room full of people who have some ways to look at it and they can kind of start to surface the issues and see what problems you run into and how you might overcome those.
That notion of self-identification could be a powerful one because that data is out there. The trick of course is there are certain things and I guess sexuality, disability, other things like that where people might not want to disclose, because you have the whole range of things, and then there are other things out there as well as times change that people can become more public or more private about.
So as you said there you could run into legal issues, you could have — you are probably not going to have a 100% database, but it does seem like it’s a Hackathon idea waiting to happen. So I don’t know we totally answered the question but it is one that was super-interesting to us and we thought we would talk around it. Obviously anybody else has ideas we love to hear them.
So now it’s time for Parting Shots, that one tip, website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.
Tom Mighell: So speaking of data, one of the tools that I am intrigued with lately is a tool called Data Selfie. Data Selfie is a chrome extension, so you have to have the Chrome browser to use it and what you do is that you pull up your Facebook page and the Data Selfie app will analyze people’s posts that you stay on, the types of posts that you look at, it’s not something that’s being sent someplace else, it’s being stored locally and so it’s not – nobody is keeping this information although, frankly, it’s not any different than Facebook storing the information of all the stuff that we just talked about, just looking at articles and liking things and doing stuff like that but what’s interesting is, is that after you’ve used it for a while, you can generate a report that kind of lets you explore what someone might learn about your activity and it tries to predict what your political views are, people you spend the most time with and whether you are a relaxed person, whether you tend to be emotional, what’s your emotional makeup is.
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I think that it is — we are seeing tools like this that are starting to predict what people are like based solely on their Internet activity which I find both terrifying and incredibly interesting at the same time. So if you want to get an idea of what Facebook knows about you, this is one way. There are several ways to know, but Data Selfie seems to be really interesting and intriguing way that’s kind of data-driven.
Dennis Kennedy: It’s cool. So I have two things, one is just a short follow-up, in the podcast, I think at the end of the year where I talked about gifts that I wanted. I was interested in the notion of sort of Netflix for books so I could read more ebooks and I was talking about Kindle Unlimited, actually I did a little research and I went instead with a tool called Scribd.
So it looked like it had more of choices, so I just started experimenting with that. So if you’re looking a way that you can get a few ebooks a month for a monthly fee of — I think it’s about nine books a month and you also get one audio book as part of that, then there’s some other free selections that change month-to-month, but that’s what I decided right then, the Kindle Unlimited and then I’m always interested in what’s happening with LinkedIn.
So there is an official LinkedIn blog, and so, recently there was a post on where they brought in LinkedIn career experts as part of a series and one of them was called Tips for Building a Great LinkedIn Profile. So we’ll put the — it was in February 2017, so we’ll have a link in the show notes, but a great post that kind of hit all the highlights on what you can do to improve your LinkedIn profile, and I just think that having a great profile is so important these days, whether or not you’re looking for a job, whether or not you’re looking for new clients, but I just think that that profile just can help you in so many different ways.
Tom Mighell: So that wraps it up for this edition of ‘The Kennedy-Mighell Report’. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for the episode at HYPERLINK “http://www.tkmreport.com/”tkmreport.com.
If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes. Give us a review on iTunes, if you like, it helps us get more subscribers. You can also subscribe on the Legal Talk Network site where you can find archives to all of our previous podcasts as well.
If you’d like to get in touch with us or ask us a question that we can address in our B segment, please email us at [email protected] or send us a tweet, I’m @TomMighell, Dennis is @denniskennedy. And the folks at the Legal Talk Network are also taking audio questions for the podcast as well as you heard in our last episode. 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.
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Outro: Thanks for listening to ‘The Kennedy-Mighell Report’. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together’ from ABA books or Amazon, and join us every other week for another edition of ‘The Kennedy-Mighell Report’ only on the Legal Talk Network.
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Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell talk the latest technology to improve services, client interactions, and workflow.