Origins, Progression, and the Future of the Kennedy-Mighell Report

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

Origins, Progression, and the Future of the Kennedy-Mighell Report

09/22/2017

[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 #199 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Dennis Kennedy in St. Louis.

Tom Mighell: And I am Tom Mighell here in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode we had an actual debate about the best ways to teach tech to lawyers. Tom of course declared victory in the debate, but has since realized upon further reflection that I in fact won the debate. This is our 199th episode and as we prepare for a big 200th show we thought it might be good just to reflect on the history of the podcast as a way to introduce new listeners to the podcast and to remind longtime listeners about what we have done over the years.

Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well Dennis, in this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report we will indeed be doing some navel-gazing and self-reflection as we reflect on the first 198 episodes of this podcast, I guess plus the unnumbered first six episodes that I can really barely remember.

In our second segment we will turn the microphone on Dennis as he talks about an interesting conference that he just attended. And as usual we will 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 let’s take a look back on the history of The Kennedy-Mighell Report podcast. No, we are not going anywhere, and yes, we are the kind of podcast hosts who like to revisit things. I have to say it’s hard to believe, one, that we are almost at 200 podcasts; and two, that it frankly took as long as it has to get to 200.

But in looking back I think we both have to acknowledge that we both really changed I think quite a bit in what we have done, what we are doing now. Some things about the podcast have changed, but a lot of things have stayed the same.

Dennis, do you really think that we need to reintroduce ourselves to the audience?

Dennis Kennedy: You know Tom, I was thinking about that, because we started the podcast and we just kind of jumped in, so that if you are a new listener you go, Dennis is in St. Louis, Tom is in Dallas, but who the heck are Tom and Dennis. And so I think that you are right, sort of the work that we have both done, some of the projects we have been involved with have changed, and I think that we think that we are kind of experts on legal technology, but I think for a new listener there is a question of who the heck are we.

So Tom, let me just turn the tables on you and let you introduce or reintroduce yourself first and then I will jump in.

Tom Mighell: Sure. So my roots in legal technology went to my firm here in Dallas, Cowles & Thompson, where I worked for 18 years as a litigator. I spent probably the last eight or nine years of my time there, maybe ten years, spending about half my time as the litigation technology support coordinator for the firm and having a great time with that.

I since that time went on to work as a consultant for an e-discovery company and now I am an information governance consultant working with corporations on records management and information governance and litigation readiness.

In terms of legal technology, even though I may not work in the strictly legal sphere anymore, I still write a lot of books. Dennis and I are hopefully getting ready to release the Second Edition of ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies’ and I have got three books out on the iPad.

So I have been heavily involved with the ABA’s Law Practice Division, with ABA TECHSHOW, with the Legal Technology Resource Center, and so I stay pretty heavily involved in the field of legal technology, even though that’s not where my work takes me.

So that’s a shortish bio of me. Dennis, how about you?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, so as people may know, or may or may not know, I am a Senior Counsel at Mastercard for our Digital Payments & Labs Group, and I cover Mastercard Labs, which is where we do R&D, innovation, and the newest technology. So I am a technology lawyer by trade.

And then I have written on legal technology for more than 20 years. I was one of the original lawyers with the website, one of the original law bloggers, although as you were Tom, you were even before I was on blogging and that’s how we met. We had one of the early legal podcasts as well Tom.

(00:05:10)

So I have been around the area of technology. It’s gratifying that people have really liked the articles I have done, the speaking I have done and the other things, content I have created around technology.

I don’t know whether I published — I haven’t counted in a long time, I have got to believe I am close to a thousand articles on technology topics, if you count republications especially.

So I have been doing this for a long time and this just became a great outlet for, Tom, the thing that both of us like, which is thinking about technology and teaching technology to the legal profession.

But Tom, I went back and I looked for the actual date of the start of the podcast. Let’s test your memory, what year do you think that was?

Tom Mighell: The actual start of the podcast or do you mean the genesis of why we did the podcast?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think it was the same year.

Tom Mighell: Okay. So I went back and did research too, so it’s not that you are testing my memory. But let’s make sure that we are both right on that. I mean we spoke on podcasting at ABA TECHSHOW 2006.

Dennis Kennedy: Yes, yes indeed.

Tom Mighell: And when we gave that session, we actually called Podcasting TiVo for your radio, which I think is hilarious, because I don’t think anybody says that these days. I have to say, I still think for lawyers we were too soon back then talking about podcast.

And the reason that I think that is that our good friend Adam Camras here from Legal Talk Network and I did a session just last year at TECHSHOW on podcasting and in some ways it was like lawyers were learning about that for the first time. I think that’s because podcasting has kind of gone through a renaissance over the past few. We have mentioned that a couple of times on the show, but I think — I don’t like to use the word trailblazers, but I mean we really were talking about podcasting when nobody else was.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. It’s interesting too when you talked about the TiVo reference that we made, now a lot of people say that podcasts are radio on-demand and I wonder how soon it will be before that’s considered a very quaint and perhaps not too understandable reference for people.

But yeah, I mean we got asked to do that podcast and it was sort of like a how-to podcast topic and we realized that to have any credibility at all we needed to do our own podcast, and so that’s what we did, and we did it by hand. We figured out how to do all of that.

And then we tried to come up with an idea for the show, and I think our original goal Tom was we were just talking about how we were always answering other people’s questions and writing articles and stuff and we never had the chance to talk about tech between the two of us, so that the podcast could be a way that would give us on a regular basis the chance to talk about new technologies that were interesting to us, and it wasn’t any more complicated than that, knowing that we want to do a podcast and that we had something we felt we could talk about on a regular basis.

I don’t know if we ever thought we had 200 more or less different topics to talk about over the years, but it turns out that we have.

Tom Mighell: Well, you know it’s funny how time does things to the memory, because my recollection is not that we didn’t have these conversations, but we actually were having the conversations and we were thinking to ourselves why don’t we share these conversations with other people. I mean, we were a little — that feels a little bit presumptuous to do something like that, but that was my recollection of why we did it. We were having some good conversations about this stuff, why not turn it into a podcast and talk about it, because little did we know then, as we do now, that we just basically agree with each other on almost everything, and so that’s kind of how — the theme that we have developed over the years, I guess much to our chagrin, that we can’t develop more of a rivalry and we have to manufacture them in order to drive the ratings up or drive the drama on the podcast.

Dennis Kennedy: What’s funny though is that people think we agree all the time and we do on the podcast, but if they heard us talk about things and even in the preshow they would realize that we actually don’t agree all the time on everything.

Tom Mighell: Which is good that we don’t record the preshow, frankly. I am not sure we would have any listeners left if the preshow was ever let out to anybody.

(00:10:06)

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, we would probably be concerned about the libel and slander laws anyway if they recorded the preshow.

Tom Mighell: Well, speaking of miserable experiences, let’s talk about the first couple of episodes that we did and I guess you call them the basement episodes, the basement tapes of the podcast. I barely remember those episodes at all. Dennis, do you remember doing those?

Dennis Kennedy: I remember those and I sometimes call them the lost episodes too, because we did lose them at one point.

Tom Mighell: I don’t even know if I still have them. Do you have them?

Dennis Kennedy: I have them because we somehow figured out a way to find them. I think you found some backup copies somewhere, so I have saved them. So I do have the whole first six.

I remember them more because we recorded them and then I edited them and so that was a lot of work, and one of the actual episodes was a recording of the TECHSHOW session that we did on podcasting. So those are around, I don’t know that we — I mean they are interesting, we just never kind of put them back up on the Internet because really for us the podcast began when we had the incredible opportunity to be picked up by the Legal Talk Network to do our podcast, which meant that Tom, we just became the tail end. And so like all the hard work of editing and all those sorts of things were taken over by Legal Talk Network.

And so when people ask like what’s the best thing you can do when starting a podcast, I am like get picked up by a company that will do all the production.

Tom Mighell: Well, that’s the shame of it, because when I think back on those episodes that we tried to produce, the worst part of it was, I think, doing our own work. And you generally are not somebody to complain about anything, but I am pretty sure that that was not your favorite work to do in editing those podcasts.

Now, granted I think the technology was not quite as good as it is today, so it was probably a little bit more time-consuming, a little bit harder than it might be to do it today, but still what I am conflicted about here is, is that, I don’t want to — we give advice on starting your own podcast and we say just go ahead and start doing it and how easy it is and get some Audacity software and get a microphone and you can start doing it. And then we turn right around and saying that really the only way to have a successful podcast is to get picked up by an organization like the Legal Talk Network, which to a certain extent is true. So that’s why I am conflicted when we talk about this, because as great an experience as it’s been, not everybody can have a host for the podcast, so I feel a little guilty about that.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, and I think I did the production side and you figured out how to put it up on to Libsyn and to get it on to iTunes and stuff like that, which I never learned to do. But I do think you can — I learned a few things and I kind of — it was so time-consuming was the problem, but I kind of liked doing the audio editing, but it just took a lot of time. A lot of people tell me now that you can hire like a student or a professional audio producer to do it and it’s really simple work for them, because they are used to mixing music and stuff like that, so just doing two people talking on audio.

Tim Mighell: Oh yeah, just go into Upwork or one of those freelance sites on the website, it’s pretty inexpensive.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, so it’s easy and it doesn’t cost that much.

So Tom, I guess what some people don’t realize is when we first started out on Legal Talk Network there were actually three people in the booth, so to speak, and our friend Adriana Linares. And so there is a mini controversy usually between just the three of us, but let’s set the record straight here Tom, that Adriana just left the podcast to go on to do her own thing and get her own podcast. I mean, that’s just a flat out answer to what happened there. So Adriana was on, what, a few shows with us and then we decided that — she wanted to do her own thing. Actually, it’s kind of logistically difficult to do it with three people when you don’t have a video connection. So then it became Tom and me and with very few exceptions that has the way it’s been for 200 episodes.

(00:14:53)

Tim Mighell: Yeah, I miss having Adriana on the show, but I will say that she is really a natural with her New Solo Podcast, which is also on the Legal Talk Network. She does a great job there interviewing solos and learning about the types of tools they use to start their practice. And so I think that in the end it worked out well for everybody concerned.

Dennis Kennedy: And then when we talked about doing the podcast we had two podcasts that we both really liked, that we wanted to use as like our inspiration and the model for our podcast; one was ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption and the other was Slate Political Gabfest, which sometimes — and we have done tributes, especially to PTI, but really when you see the way the show has evolved, it’s really hard to find either of those podcasts inside of what we are doing now, but those were the original inspirations.

Tom Mighell: I think like the Slate Political Gabfest, which is still one of my favorite podcasts, we do divide it up into sections. We do have — instead of cocktail chatter, we have parting shots, so I think that the format is there, but I will say what I miss — what I don’t think we have as well, if I could change something about how we do the podcast, and I am going to be really frank about this and kind of air it out in the open here, so everybody is getting an exclusive, I wish our podcast could be more like a conversation like the Slate Political Gabfest.

Sometimes I feel like you say what you need to say and then I say what I need to say and then we let the other person say what he needs to say and back and forth. And I want to interrupt you more and I want you to interrupt me more and I want to make it like we are two people talking. And I have been thinking about why that is and I am wondering whether it’s because we talk to each other over Skype, we can’t see each other, we can’t see facial expressions. We are not seeing how each person is reacting to the other person’s stuff.

And so I am going to make a suggestion here and say that maybe we start doing more video podcasting or face-to-face podcasting to see if that changes, because some of the successful podcasts that I hear these days are the ones where they are people that are actually having a — feel like they are having a real conversation rather than they are not saying, here’s what I have to say and what do you think, and what do you think, and I would rather kind of make it more back and forth.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, so I have the same observation and I have been thinking along the same lines, but I think one is that we are both kind of polite in the way that we speak with each other and then —

Tom Mighell: Well, that’s the end of that.

Dennis Kennedy: And then the other thing that I was thinking of is, I am not sure that I am prepared for video to see you rolling your eyes and like surfing the Internet while I am talking, so we do have that.

I think the other goal we always had Tom that I think we have been really good at is that we always wanted to go to the leading edge on tech topics. So we wanted to — and partially because we wanted to talk about things that were really interesting to us.

So I think one thing I have been proud of is how a lot of times I feel like we are some of the first people in podcasting talking about a lot of topics, so it’s interesting to see some of the — there are topics now that people are kind of just starting to talk about that we talked about years ago on the podcast. So I think that what we have done in the A segment, as we call it, has always been really good.

Tom Mighell: Well, and it’s not just leading edge topics, it’s almost like — to some of the topics it’s like breaking news. Even though our podcast comes out every two weeks or so, we try to cover new developments that are important as soon as we can. It’s not that we are just covering artificial intelligence or blockchain or things like that earlier than some other people are talking about them, whether it’s a new crop of phones or tablets or a new security problem lawyers need to know about, I really like how we get to cover those current topics sooner than I think they are getting covered; I mean they are covered out — for lawyers they might not be covered as fast out in the regular media as anywhere else on the podcast, and I like that.

And frankly, I think Dennis, you ought to be pleased on the A topics. I pretty much leave that A topic up to you and I would say about eight of every ten podcast topics are from Dennis. I am happy to go along with most of the topics, except the ones that I really don’t know anything about, which happens a lot more often than I would like to admit, but I think that it’s all credit to you, because I think we usually get some really nice thought-provoking interesting topics to talk about.

(00:19:48)

Dennis Kennedy: And then let’s go to the problem child of the podcast, which is the B segment. I don’t know how many different things we have tried on the B segment and the bottom line is that we always wanted the B segment to be listener questions, and we have come up with like a zillion different ways to try to do that it felt like. And now I think we had the best idea ever, which is this voicemail that people can call in with questions that we are all but begging you to use.

And so that listener question thing is a really important idea that we want to carry forward and something we have always tried to do. So whenever we get a question we do try to fold it into the B topic, but we have tried to do a number of things, and I have got to tell you Tom, my favorite B segment ever was, I don’t know whether it was like half a dozen of these, and I don’t even know how you find which ones they were. But we did this thing where somebody had said that Tom was too mild-mannered and Tom would always be talking to me about how upset he was with like one tech thing or another.

So we decided to this B segment that was Tom’s rant. And Tom would just get this topic and just go wild on it. That was my favorite thing. I don’t know how many of those we did Tom. It seems like maybe like half a dozen, but those were the days.

Tom Mighell: I have to say that was probably my favorite B segment as well and the interesting thing is, I think we could still probably sustain a B segment with my rants if we wanted to do that. As I am getting older I find my patience with technology being tested more frequently, which I think is always a great source of amusement to me and I guess to my friend.

So yeah, that was a lot of fun because it let me express things that I probably couldn’t express in other places. So I hear you about the challenge of the B segment and I look forward to our listeners rescuing us from that challenge by sending us some great content to talk about.

Dennis Kennedy: And it’s at 720-441-6820, if I recall correctly, but I know that you will give people more information later.

And the one thing I have said since the beginning — I would say since the beginning is that people really like the parting shots and those are fun to do, and although I think Tom, we both, maybe me more so than you, we have this notion that it’s going to be this like 30-45 seconds quick tip or link to something that sometimes turns into a 10-minute segment, but that’s the idea there.

But I have gotten a ton of comments from people who say like it was great. I am trying this thing since you guys mentioned it on the podcast.

And that I think appeals Tom to our — what we like to do is like when we find useful things, we like to share those things. That’s what we do with our blogs and that’s a lot about what the podcast is about, and so I think the parting shots really, really fit what we like to do well.

Tom Mighell: Well, if I can be selfish, I actually like the parting shots most, because no matter what you make me talk about in the A or the B segments, I can always talk about something that’s fun or interesting to me in the parting shots. So I am always having a good time.

Dennis Kennedy: Then I think that hearing from our listeners makes it all worthwhile. I mean at the conference that I will talk about in the next segment, I had a couple of people come up and say that they had been listening to recent episodes and they really liked the podcast, so that’s really great, because sometimes you sort of feel Tom that we are sitting here on two microphones talking and you never know who is listening. But it has really been interesting to me that sometimes surprising people who say that they are listeners to the show. So I want to give a big thank you to them.

And then Tom, let’s go to what I think is probably like our biggest ongoing thing and I think it’s been going on for years, and it’s what I call the never-ending battle to get Dennis to try interviewing guests, do you want to talk about that?

Tom Mighell: Well, no, it’s the never-ending battle to get Dennis to continue interviewing guests, because we have had guests on the show before, we have had a couple, where we have interviewed them, and I think they have gone well. We have liked them. We have had good conversations, and then we kind of just slip back and do our regular thing.

But I mean, let’s face it, having guests would be a lot easier on us, wouldn’t it, instead of having to do the preparation it takes for us to appear knowledgeable on these subjects, all we need to do is come up with some good questions for someone who really is an expert on the topic. So I am just saying give us a break every now and again and let us have some guests on the show.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and I am just kind of looking at the clock saying it’s 10:52 p.m. on a Monday night and saying that we have to —

Tom Mighell: You are right. Well, it’s true that having no guests gives us the freedom to record the podcast when we want, and there’s no substitute for that, but it’s all in the nature of keeping this podcast fresh and different and interesting and the occasional guest I think would certainly do that.

(00:25:00)

Dennis Kennedy: So I just want to wrap up, I want to say Tom, I think the podcast has been way more fun than we ever expected, and I also think it contains some of our best work and ideas for both of us. I mean I think that we wish we wrote more on our blogs and stuff, but the fact is that a lot of the things that we would have written on our blogs and in articles and stuff we have done on the podcast and I think the way that we are bouncing ideas off of each other, I think we have really come up with some great ideas and thought through a lot of things that I couldn’t have done on my own. So I just really feel and I always say this to people, I think the podcast contains some of my best work.

Tom Mighell: Well, I think so too. I think we have both talked about a lot of great things. I would say that there have also been a lot of things that fortunately the audience doesn’t get to hear. If they could hear our outtakes, if they could hear our preshow conversations, I think they would hear a very different show. And frankly, I think probably we shouldn’t talk a lot about this because our great Legal Talk Network staff actually does have access to our outtakes, not a lot of them are interesting, but I still don’t want to see a blooper reel make it out there anytime soon.

But maybe that’s a good segue to say how much we love our family and friends at the Legal Talk Network for making us look and sound good and always having our back and supporting us as we do this. We have a lot of fun doing this and we are glad that they give us the outlet to do it.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and I also think being part of the Legal Talk Network team, because there’s other great hosts doing a really great podcast who are friends of ours and it’s just a honor to be part of the group.

So Tom, I want to talk about what we would like to do for the 200th show. So I think for the 100th show we did just one of our mock-ups of the Pardon The Interruption Approach, and we could do that, but what we really, really, really, really want to do is to have an all-audience question show.

And so we have this call-in number, 720-441-6820, or you can send us by email or LinkedIn or any way you can get a hold of us, questions for us, anything goes, anything is fair game, and we would like to build the show around that. So if the 200th episode is like a version of the Pardon The Interruption podcast, you will know that we didn’t get enough questions. And so we don’t want to be disappointed, you don’t want to be disappointed, so if you have ever had a question for us, whether you want to stump us or you just have something you would like to hear about, or you just want to get our take on some new topic, just send it in, because that’s the 200th show that we would most want to do.

Tom Mighell: Yeah, ditto on that, please get your questions in. We look forward to seeing what happens in the next couple of weeks. Before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.

[Music]

Advertiser: Looking for a process server you can trust, ServeNow.com is a nationwide network of local prescreened process servers. ServeNow works with the most professional process servers in the industry, connecting your firm with process servers who embrace technology, have experience with high volume serves, and understand the litigation process and rules of properly effectuating service. Find a prescreened process server today. Visit www.serve-now.com.

[Music]

Dennis Kennedy: And now let’s get back to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Dennis Kennedy.

Tom Mighell: And I am Tom Mighell. We are switching the order this week because Dennis wanted to talk about the recent Summit on Legal Innovation and Disruption, that’s SOLID Conference that he just attended. We discussed conferences on the last podcast and Dennis really loved the SOLID format and frankly after talking to him before the podcast he is as enthused as I have ever heard him after a conference.

So Dennis, we spent probably more time talking about our 199th podcast, so let me say in five minutes or less tell us about SOLID.

Dennis Kennedy: So SOLID was put together by my friend David Cowen in New York City and his excellent, excellent team. It was a small conference of between 100 and 150 people, invitation-only kind of conference. And it was done both as a structured conference for one day, but in an interesting way and then as kind of a unconference on the second day.

(00:29:53)

The first day was done in sort of, there were four segments, four different subject matter areas, four speakers doing about seven-minute TED Talk type presentations. And you were at a table and the table discussed their reactions in a somewhat structured way to those TED Talks as inspiration. And then they report on the highlights of their conversations at the table to the whole group. And then we went on to the next segment.

And there was a keynote to pull ideas together at the beginning and we went through that. And then the next day we had a tech showcase, which was — so there was a lot of focus on AI, new technologies, new business models, how talent had to change, what you needed to do to go from becoming obsolete in your job, to relevant in your job, to indispensable in your job, as technology and the profession and the delivery of legal services change.

So the next day we had this really cool thing with the — so there was a lot of technology sponsors in the AI area, but some other areas as well, and they each did about a three minute interview talking a little bit about what their product was, but sort of what need it solved and gave you some really — it was an interesting approach to learning about a new product. So I actually felt I learned in three minutes quite a bit about some of these products and it got me interested in them.

Then the best part, the sort of the unconference part, which was to say we gathered ideas, Post-It notes on the board what people wanted to do. Those were kind of collated and aggregated and then people could sit at the table with the topic that was most interesting to them, and then that group would decide what they want to do between now and the end of the year as a project together on that particular topic.

Tom Mighell: So let me interrupt you for a minute and just ask this question. So when you say between now and the end of the year, so up until now what you have been describing sounds maybe lots of interesting topics, but in a lot of ways not terribly different from past conferences or past unconferences. So it looks like though there’s homework, there’s more stuff to be done, which is really what distinguishes this from other conferences, right?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. So I think I might have said it on the podcast when we were talking about conferences, but I now want to go to conferences where you make me work, where I get to work on something, where I get to meet more people. So I would say that at this conference the percentage of attendees that I met and had conversations with was extraordinarily high, so that was great.

And then I was part of a group of I think it was like eight or nine people, we are going to do a project. It’s going to involve innovation. It’s going to involve an interconnection between law schools, law firms, and corporate legal departments in an innovative way, that if you take a look on September 28 there’s a legal tech meet-up in Chicago where there’s going to be discussion of — with more details of the actual project. And I am actually very excited about it because I think it’s something — and the group that I am involved with is really interesting.

And so you will hear more about that as we develop that. And there’s probably a good six or eight other groups, maybe more than that that are going to do some different things.

So it’s exciting, because it’s not that you just talked about it, but we have the opportunity to go on and do something, and with the idea that it will be a deliverable and it’s designed to say like, well, we have all these smart people in the room. Let’s figure out what we can do together. And so that’s the aspect of the conference that I like. I mean there were amazing speakers. People I have wanted to hear for a long time. People I have wanted to meet for a long time.

And then demos of some — especially in the machine learning AI area that were really fascinating to me. So my hats off to Dave Cowen, who I consider a good friend at this point; I have known him for many years, but it’s like one of those ideas that he said it could have crashed and burned and nobody was quite sure what was going to happen, but what you get is the thing where you feel like, man, the right people were in the right place, at the right time and there’s just like great energy coming out of it.

(00:35:02)

So Tom, I actually wish you would have been there, but very fun and it’s got me enthused about conferences in a new way that you are going to have to do some work on TECHSHOW 2018 to get me to the same kind of fever pitch.

Tom Mighell: All right, in 90 days I am checking back on our B segment to figure out the progress of the work.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay, cool. So 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: So in honor of looking back on our previous podcasts, I am actually going to look back and give a second recommendation for something I have done as a parting shot before, and that is the television show, Halt and Catch Fire on AMC. They are in their final season. It was interesting when they first started out, I thought it was a well-done show, showing how organizations were getting started really at the beginning of the computer era, Silicon Valley starting up, but people, just regular people in garages all over the country just starting to do things.

It’s really gotten interesting this year where sort of the competitors, the main characters are setting themselves up where one of them is developing a web index that looks a whole lot like Yahoo! and the other one is preferring to go about it as a search engine, more like Google, and it’s just fascinating to watch all of the thinking and the venture capital and all the ways that they are going through it. It’s really a very entertaining and well-acted, well-produced show. Halt and Catch Fire, it’s on AMC now, but you can I think get it somewhere on Netflix or Hulu or something like that as well.

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, my question is, I have heard in a number of places to not watch Season 1 and to start with Season 2, are you of that same belief?

Tom Mighell: So yes and no. I don’t think you learn the characters as well if you miss Season 1, so that’s my only reason. I think that from a plot standpoint it feels a little slower, it kind of takes off after that, but you really need to learn the characters, so I say dig in and enjoy the whole thing.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay. So my parting shot is a book and it’s called ‘Visual Intelligence’. It’s by Amy Herman. And it’s about her approach of using art and artworks as a way to teach people to see and observe in better ways and to start to see things clearly.

I read the book and it absolutely fascinated me. And then at the SOLID Conference I was at dinner, and lo and behold, Amy Herman was sitting at my table and she gave a talk with an example of how she does things. It was almost the perfect way to introduce the conference as a way to look at things in fresh ways.

So Tom, you will appreciate, I did like the total fan boy meeting author thing when she finished her presentation and came back to the table. But I just truly enjoyed that book and I think now I am going to go back to it again, but I just want to recommend it as a parting shot.

Tom Mighell: All right. And that wraps it up for this 199th Edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

You can find show notes for this episode at tkmreport.com. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes, in the Apple Podcast App or on the Legal Talk Network site, where you can find archives of all of our previous podcasts.

If you would like to get in touch with us, please email us at [email protected] or send us a tweet or actually visit us on LinkedIn. We both have profiles there and we would love to hear from you there. Once again I will repeat the number. The number for voicemail questions is 720-441-6820. We are relying on your questions for our next episode, so don’t let us down.

So until the next podcast, I am Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy and you have been listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an Internet focus.

If you liked what you heard today, please rate us in Apple Podcast and then we will see you next time for another episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

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.

[Music]

Continue Reading