Hypes and Lows: Breaking Down the Technology Hype Cycle

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

Hypes and Lows: Breaking Down the Technology Hype Cycle

08/10/2018

[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.

[Music]

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to Episode #219 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

Tom Mighell: And I am Tom Mighell in Dallas. Before we get started, we’d like to thank our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy: First to all thanks to the very useful TextExpander for sponsoring our show. Communicate Smarter with TextExpander. Gather, Perfect, and Share Your Knowledge. Recall your best words instantly and repeatedly. Learn more at textexpander.com/podcast.

Tom Mighell: We’d also like to thank ServeNow, a nationwide network of trusted, prescreened process servers. Work with the most professional process servers who have experience with high-volume serves, embrace technology, and understand the litigation process. Visit serve-now.com to learn more.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode, we revisited the topic of the Internet of Things and its probable impact on lawyers and I even suggested that the Internet of Things was quickly becoming an area of technology Internet of Things was quickly becoming an area of technology where lawyers needed to gain knowledge under the ethical rules relating to technology competence, something for you to think about.

In this episode, we take a look at hype around various new technologies, how to separate fantasy from reality and something known as the Gartner Hype Cycle.

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 looking at technology hype and how to survive in spite of it. In the second segment, we’re going to talk about whether it might be a good idea to visit your email spam filter from time to time. 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, technology hype. I don’t really have much of a lead in here, Dennis. I just want to think why this topic right now? What’s the hype about hype?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think that it could just be the people I follow on social media or what I’m seeing in legal tech, but man, there’s a lot of negative comments about technology; especially artificial intelligence, blockchain and other things. I even saw somebody in legal tech post about wanting to shoot blockchain in the face if they ever heard it again, especially in a conference.

I have gotten upset with technologies and sometimes wanted to throw old laptop, computers out the window, but geez, that’s to me seems way overboard, especially on a new technology that hasn’t had much chance to develop. I’ve seen people say if you use AI or blockchain on the slide at a conference that should just flat-out be banned or talking about robots, chatbots, other things like that.

I just don’t understand the psychology around that because I guess I’m generally positive about technology or to see where it’s going. And also as an aside, Tom, I don’t know about you, but sort of in our history when you look at the anti-bloggers and anti-Twitter and anti-social media, people take these strong positions on new technologies. Always seems like in about a year from now there will be some of the biggest blockchain advocates out there.

So, that just brings us to hype and sort of like there’s the technology, there’s what people think about it and there’s what people say about it, and there’s what people are kind of screaming at their top of their lungs about. And it’s good to I think develop some ways to think about that and sort through what’s reality and what’s fantasy.

Tom Mighell: Well, and I think before we talk about the Gartner Hype Cycle and what others have said about it, I will briefly race to the defense of the people who want to shoot blockchain in the face. Although, I would never advocate violence against blockchain or anybody who talks about blockchain, and I’m going to circle back to this in a little bit, because I’m going to adopt a theory, someone else’s theory not mine, but what I can actually understand when I see people say they’re tired about it is that sometimes in technology and certainly, in the legal community, whether you’re a legal technologist, whether you’re just a lawyer with an interest in technology, there are always going to be people who talk about technology for the sake of talking about technology.

It’s always been the case that people like to crow about that latest technology to the point where it is unbearable, and it has something to do with the latest new shiny.

Every time a new technology comes along, lawyers and technologists like to talk about and I don’t know if it’s to show their bona fides, to show how much that they’re up on the topic, I was trying to think of some examples.

(00:05:04)

And the one, unfortunately, that comes to mind was the whole hype over the iPad as being a laptop substitute. We’re all going to trade in our computers for the iPad and my gosh, every lawyer and I was partially on that train. I mean I talked about how good the iPad was for lawyers to use. I didn’t quite go there as far as a laptop replacement, but it was all about iPad, iPad, iPad, iPad. And suddenly we got comments on Twitter or on other parts of social media about how every legal problem could be solved with an iPad.

And when I saw that, I realized you know what, there’s a lot of hype around this that’s really not right. I’m generally positive about AI, about blockchain, but I think that hype for the sake of hype, is a thing that I could definitely do with a lot less of, and I think that as you’ve decided that we want to talk about today about the Gartner Hype Cycle, there’s definitely a reason for this hype. I think it’s a natural thing that occurs or that is happens and I think that’s kind of what we want to talk about.

Dennis Kennedy: Well I, and I guess I’m always troubled by people kind of guarding their existing turf a lot and so being negative about the new thing and saying like show me one example of how the Internet is going to help us or how blockchain is going to help us.

Well I mean as a MasterCard, so in the financial tech or fintech world and people going like show me examples of blockchain. I’m kind of like we’ve been seeing them for several years now, I mean and identity and other things, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on.

Tom Mighell: Well, I think real quick, I think it’s easy, if we apply this to lawyers, there have always been ever since I’ve been in legal technology, there have always been lawyers who like to say here’s why this new technology is going to be dangerous or unethical or there’s something wrong with it and we need to really be careful about it, because lawyers by nature, are risk managers and there are a lot who flock to that thinking that that’s how they earn their keep, that’s how they let people know.

And so as a result, they turn out to look like or be curmudgeons, frankly lawyers have always been, a lot of lawyers have always been naysayers around technology and although that started to change, I think there’s still plenty of curmudgeons and I think that’s not going to end because it’s in the nature of us as lawyers to be skeptical about things and technology more so.

And I’m not saying that’s a right thing or a wrong thing, but I also want to question whether or not it’s ingrained into who a lawyer really is.

Dennis Kennedy: And curmudgeonous is frankly a marketing strategy for some people we always use. You and I always used to laugh about some of the anti-bloggers who had blogs, telling lawyers that they should never use blogs and what a terrible thing is. They were – while at the same time, they’re gathering all this publicity for themselves, I think generating clients and other interests as well and you’re kind of like well, if it’s such a bad thing how come — how come you’re using it so well. Are you just trying to keep other people off a successful platform?

But I actually like to hear all the hype, because I want to understand what the potential outer reaches of technology are, because that helps me better understand a new technology and it assess it. So anything like cloud, other things like, from the early days, I want to say okay, so what — how far do people really imagine this is going to go.

And then I can, that will help me learn to assess it and to can put things into potential and then because I think that as with everything else these days, we’re reminded every single day, we just have to learn how to read and think critically about news, about anything, whether it’s technology and then make our own decisions and find the ways that we want to investigate those things.

Tom, I jotted down what I call a few basic axioms before we turn to this kind of interesting tool called the Hype Cycle, but I said, I think of three axioms and I will let you make some comments on these sort of like consider the source of anything that you look at, look outside the legal silo when you’re considering technology and its potentials and that notion that we — we actually do tend to overestimate the short-term impact of a given technology and underestimate the long-term impact.

So those are sort of my three axioms. Tom, do you have some comments on those?

Tom Mighell: Oh, no absolutely. I totally agree, and although it would probably not say underestimate, it would be more or just don’t think about them at all, is that I think that people think more of the short-term impact and don’t even consider what might be happening in the future.

But I am totally behind you with considering the source, which is it might be that getting all of those tweets about the iPad for lawyers is annoying or all those tweets about AI or blockchain are annoying to get, but figuring out what it is that we’re talking about, and I think that not to toot our own horn, but I think that we try to do that.

(00:10:05)

We try to look at these things. I will admit on many occasions that I get on to a podcast with you where I’m not completely convinced of an application of technology to the practice of law that you’d seem hell-bent on trying to persuade me to, sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t, but I think that’s part of the nature of what we need to do. We need to look at it, with an unbiased eye. We need to understand what the truth is about that and try to separate what the hype is from what the reality is and make your own decisions on that.

Dennis Kennedy: So let’s move to the Hype Cycle, which is what we wanted to talk about here and in a way as I like to say, let’s just kind of go to the Wikipedia for a summary.

Tom Mighell: No better place.

Dennis Kennedy:  So there’s this notion of the hype cycle and then company called Gartner, which even if you are lawyer and any lawyer interested in technology needs to know about Gartner and their publications and the analysis they do.

But Gartner has a branded version of it. And so Tom maybe there’s sort of five things and it describes a curve and let me just out grab the first three maybe Tom and then you can grab the last two but —

Tom Mighell: Sure.

Dennis Kennedy: So they call Phase One the Technology Trigger.

Tom Mighell: They’re calling it the Innovation Trigger now, Innovation Trigger is what the latest one is saying.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay, so you have this potential new breakthrough kind of you get some early proof-of-concept, some media interest that starts to really generate some publicity and oftentimes, there is no usable products yet, and it’s unclear whether there’s anything that’s commercially viable as well. So that’s sort of phase one.

Then you would next see Phase Two, which is the Peak of Inflated Expectations. So that publicity generates their interest, you start to get some success stories, even though there might be lots of failures but then you’re starting to see people feel they have to be involved in it, but not even a majority.

So you’re starting to get a move upward on the curve and then it starts to slack off into what they call the Phase Three, which is the Trough of Disillusionment. So people kind of get worried, they wondered about it, the interest wanes, people threaten to shoot the technology in the face. The implementations failed to deliver on what people predicted and you start to see some shake out, investment starts to drop and people wonder whether it’s going to happen.

And then things start to turn a little bit whereas we get to Phase Four, right Tom?

Tom Mighell: They do, and I have to say when I — because frankly when you mentioned this, I had to learn about it and in learning about it, I have to say that these phases of the Hype Cycle remind me of like looking at place names on the map of the moon maybe or in some fantasy book, because they’re all these locations.

So we head first to the Peak of Inflated Expectations, then we dip down into the Trough of Disillusionment and what’s interesting about that Trough of Disillusionment that I learned is that even at the end of the trough, you’ve even gone past that Peak of Inflated Expectations and into this again Trough of Disillusionment, you’ve only got about 5% of adoption at that point.

It’s still a very low rate of adoption that you have, even through this point, which I think is the interesting part about the hype cycle and you talking about overestimating the initial impact and underestimating the long-term impact.

But then once we get through that trough, then we start to climb out of the trough to climb, guess what another geographical reference, the Slope of Enlightenment and that is where people start to find more used cases, where you start to see more cautious investing by conservative investors.

More people start to understand the benefits of the technology. It’s kind of the phase where it’s — let’s take a second look at this, let’s take a fresh look and maybe it’s time to revisit it again.

And then finally, we land on yet another place, the Plateau of Productivity, which is really a leveling out. It’s where people begin to adopt that technology in greater numbers, although frankly it’s still only around 20-30% of the anticipated audience, but it becomes the time where it becomes an accepted technology, becomes something that people are commonly using and it is an area where really you’d expect the greatest level of success for those types of technologies at that point in time.

So that’s your general cycle and I think we’re going to probably focus most of our time talking about the actual Peak of Inflated Expectations in that area, am I right?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, so Gartner comes out with their Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies every year. So at the end of August 2018, which is after hardly recording, they will do the 2018 one. But so, we’re going to look at the 2017 one.

(00:14:56)

And what’s interesting to me is a lot of the technologies that people seem to be shouting down these days are discouraged with are absolutely at the top of the inflated expectations area. So if you look at — if I look at those I do see blockchain, I see machine learning, I see cognitive computing which is another term for artificial intelligence, I see deep learning, I see connected home, I see other things like that.

And so, I think that this Hype Cycle then becomes interesting because then you would sort of see where these things map and maybe why you’re hearing so much about them and wondering why there’s not much to show for them. And then as we move down into the who we go past the Trough of Disillusionment to where it starts to come up again, it’s actually kind of interesting because what’s most advanced sort of as far as it’s out on the curve is virtual reality, which you don’t hear a lot of people complaining about and then augmented reality which start to be feel like more, they’re new of course but they feel like more stable technologies.

And so their place on the map makes sense. And I guess the other thing that I would say about this chart Tom is, what people say is what you want to try to do is whether you’re investing in stocking companies or in the technologies themselves, it’s when you get down toward that the bottom of this where it starts to move up, that’s when you want to start to put your money in because you do get that maturity.

And it is — I think people, it is different but you’ll notice the similarity with the diffusion curve or the adoption curve, early adopter, late adopter curve. So that’s an interesting part of this. But I think it’s useful Tom to me is just to kind of take a look at this curve for the current year and that will kind of help you figure out where a major technology analyst thinks these technologies are in their maturity.

Tom Mighell: Right. And I was surprised to see that pretty much all the things we talked about at least this time last year, we are at that Peak of Inflated Expectations; the Internet of Things, Virtual Assistants, the Connected Home, Machine Learning, Blockchain, even Autonomous Vehicles, they were all actually sort of on the downside of that peak, heading towards that Trough of Disillusionment.

And when you think about the actual value that you’re getting from a product, from one of these that we’re probably still several years or at least a year or two out from really hitting that Plateau of Productivity, where you start to see more adoption and more acceptance, and it’s interesting that we’re really seeing that stuff.

We still have yet to see that even given the amount of attention that some of these platforms are getting right now.

Dennis Kennedy: And then, so I found an article by a guy named Scott Brinker on site called ThinkGrowth.org that really goes through and analyzes some of the different ways to think about where things are in the hype cycle and I just want to hit on some of the highlights there that so when you’re in the area of Inflated Expectations, the reality is actually far below what’s being discussed sort of on all the blog posts and social media and conferences.

And then when you’re in the Trough of Disillusionment, the actual potential is probably sadly underestimated he says. So people are already starting to look to the next set of things that are up at the top of the hype cycle as these technologies people have kind of been disappointed by are now kind of actually being ready to come into use.

And so here is some great suggestions we’ll put this in the show notes of when, how you look at things, when you would might want to spend on things, how to consider the likely results. But I thought one of the things he talked about was at a peak like you we are on a lot of the things that we have mentioned, he just talks about you want to evaluate the claims carefully, run things as experiments, focus on what you actually learned and really take a more experimental approach and just don’t be distracted by the negative chatter and kind of focus on your practical needs and get some realistic expectations. And it’s a great time to learn more about how it can have an impact on you.

Tom Mighell: Well, when I started to do some research about it, I came across this theory that I think is incredibly interesting and I want to raise it maybe to be controversial, maybe I’m not being controversial. It’s by a guy whose name is Josh Bernoff, he has a website, because this is a family podcast, I will only say that it’s called Without BS.

He was a longtime analyst for another agency like Gartner called Forrester, you may have heard of Forrester and he was an analyst for them for a while. And he sort of compares the Gartner Hype Cycle to something that I’d never heard of before, maybe I had known about it I just didn’t know what it was called, but it’s called the Dunning–Kruger effect

(00:20:07)

And what the Dunning–Kruger effect is, essentially it’s a psychological state where people who are incompetent at something are unable to recognize their own incompetence; or maybe the better way to put this in terms of the Hype Cycle is you know just enough to perform but not enough to know what you don’t know.

I kind of like to call this the American Idol effect. I used to watch American Idol all the time, watch people come on who show up to audition just knowing that their voices are amazing, but in reality they aren’t.

And I think what is interesting is that, that Peak of Expectations really is a little bit like the Dunning–Kruger effect. People know just enough about technology to start talking about it but they not enough to know what they don’t know. I think that that Peak of Inflated Expectations is about ignorance and confidence. We’re still pretty ignorant about some of these technologies or at least everything that they can do or everything that they’re going to mean or maybe we just don’t know what we don’t know yet.

But what’s interesting is, is that because the Hype Cycle is something that analysts engage in and it really doesn’t stop the pundits and analysts. And frankly, I’ll talk about the legal technology bloggers from getting excited about something new because change is exciting. It’s something new to talk about instead of how to create a table in Word or how do you develop macros in Excel. Nobody in legal technology wants to talk about that anymore and frankly, in this case, it’s more important to spot a trend early on and be wrong about it than to miss the trend.

I mean frankly, I would say the same about our podcast. I’d rather talk about it early and nobody cares. They’re not going to go back and listen if we happened to be wrong about something, but we’re talking about it early and I would make the argument that maybe the hype cycle represents an unfortunate way that we look at it, that we look at technology, that we don’t give it the chance to evolve, that we — that it has to engage in this exercise, but it feels like it’s something that gets perpetuated by the analysts, by the legal tech bloggers, by whoever wants to talk about it because we know just enough about it to be dangerous but not enough to just wait it out and see where it’s going to head. And I don’t know if that’s controversial or not, but I thought it was an interesting argument.

Dennis Kennedy: No, I think that is a really interesting argument and there are pros and cons to this approach. There are also other things as Tom mentioned that tool that I use, a really simple tool as well than anybody can use, which is Google Trends. So you just kind of see how much something is being talked about in the Google search results and there’s an easy way, a tool called Google Trends. So we’ll map that.

So I was speaking last year about Artificial Intelligence in law and so one of the things I did was I went to Google Trends and I thought that I would just, I would do a graph and what I expected was, if I went back about 15 years there would be like this hockey stick curve so that now like dimensions of AI would be like the highest of all time and what it actually happened and it traces the history of AI was that last fall, it wasn’t even as high as it has been at a couple different points in the 15 years, where there was a lot of interest in AI. But what was different, when I went into it, is if I looked at machine learning, then there was a big jump in the last few years and that can give you a little bit of insight into what’s going on and where the interests are and that can be helpful.

So I think the Hype Cycle, so many other things can be useful to you. I think it will give you a good way to see at least what’s on the radar and maybe why you’re hearing so much about some things and then to make smart decisions about it. So I think it can be a really useful tool, but Tom, I left a note in the script and I know that you will want to talk about is the analysis of the Gartner Hype Cycle since 2000 showed something that might be a little surprising, don’t you think?

Tom Mighell: Oh, we mean the fact that very few technologies actually have a hype cycle that most of the technologies were not identified early in their adoption cycles. I find that, well I guess I find that very surprising when I look at the current hype cycle I sort of feel like it’s covering most of the current hype technologies, like although I guess, if it’s not being hyped I don’t know about it yet. So maybe it’s something that we’re yet to see.

Dennis Kennedy: So I would say just keep these things in mind. It could be useful tools but what you want to look at is what the actual data is showing you and then look at practical applications that are being tried. Look at them as experiments. See what are then become successful and what results you get from them, but it’s a great way to kind of take a look at what the coming technologies are and that can be useful to our listeners in many different ways.

(00:24:57)

Tom Mighell: Well, and that’s what I was going to say is that we try to cover most of the things that are on the Hype Cycle on this podcast, but if you want to really get an understanding of what’s the up-and-coming technologies, what as a lawyer do I need to be aware of, and if we really take that duty of technological competence to its farthest extreme and we start thinking about what technologies should we know about, just taking a look at the hype cycle and seeing where things are on the curve. Understanding what their position on the curve means for what is likely to happen to them in the next couple of years is a really good way to get started. To understand what’s important to be aware of, what are the things maybe you don’t need to be totally aware of yet, what things are getting ready to pass you by. I think it’s a good reference tool to use for just being aware of what’s out there and what’s to come.

All right, before we go on to our next segment let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.

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

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy. So, incredibly in 2018 Tom and I were actually talking the other day about spam and spam filters, and spam filters have gotten so good, we kind of take them for granted, and we’re no longer saying things like I want to shoot spam in the face if I ever hear about it again.

Tom Mighell: It’s not hyped — it’s not hyped, Dennis. It’s off the hype cycle.

Dennis Kennedy: So I will admit to this, that on occasion every couple of months I take a quick look through my spam folder just to see if it traps something I would have wanted to see and I would say for several years, I just marveled at what a great job the Gmail spam filter does.

But in the two most recent passes I did I really wasn’t happy with the choices it was making, not that they were big things but there were a lot of things going into spam I didn’t expect, including some things that newsletters I subscribed to, that it kind of sporadically would pull something over, which would surprise me.

So Tom, we’ve been talking about this a little bit over the last week or so. Have I convinced you last week that spam filters are slipping a little bit or do you still think that people are pretending when they tell you that their spam filters are now being so aggressive they just happen to grab your specific email?

Tom Mighell: It’s definitely the latter. I’m not convinced, although, so here’s my story. I actually for the past — I don’t know, a couple of years every day I was getting in the habit, right or wrong, that when I kind of clean up my email every day I would also go and this would just be on my Gmail account, I’d go into my Spam folder, I only get maybe 10 or 20 spam messages a day. I would look through them real quick and I would just delete him. I wouldn’t even let the Gmail spam filter delete him automatically after 30 days. I’ve stopped doing that since then, but there was a time when I was going every single day and looking in there and I have to say it did a really good job of the I guess I would call the false positives. It really didn’t put that much into my spam folder that didn’t already belong there and I will say that the emails that did get in there by mistake, I would call honest mistakes. They were usually vendor promotions. They were marketing, they were sales, they were from somebody trying to sell me something.

And so I wasn’t upset or offended or had a problem seeing all of that. I would call that an honest mistake by the Spam filter because I could see that happening.

Now, what you’re talking about Dennis is, is somebody who told me that they never saw my email because it was in their spam filter and I can’t remember the last time that a person-to-person email got caught in a spam filter, and I just, I don’t believe it, I just don’t believe it’s possible these days. Somebody, if there’s somebody out there who can convince me that it’s happening then I will stand corrected.

(00:30:00)

But I will tell you in preparation with the podcast, I went out there to try to look and see, what’s the current state of spam filter accuracy? I found a study where most of the spam filters that were tested, came in at between 94 and 99 and a half percent accurate in capturing stuff. And I think that’s really pretty good. So I will have to say Dennis, you’re alone on this one in the podcast. I’m feeling pretty decent about the state of my spam filter.

Dennis Kennedy: Well Tom, I think it’s not so much that I think that spam filters are failing. I just think it’s worth taking closer look at them and as you mentioned, there’s a range of effectiveness let’s say between 95% and 99%. I feel like maybe it slipped down a little bit more toward the lower end of that range, which is still extremely effective. And that’s happened in the six months, the last six months or so and I’ve just noticed that the last few times I’ve gone through my spam filter.

As I said, some of the things surprised me. It would seem like the tools and the algorithms these days would be able to figure out that if you actually subscribed to an email newsletter, then certain random issues of that email newsletter shouldn’t be sent over to the spam filter. So I know there it just seems a bit more aggressive in ways that are hard to understand so that’s one thing.

The filtering of political or electioneering content while not a big deal to me was a little troubling and I could see how that could upset some people, especially in the highly-charged environment we have these days.

So I think that for me it’s another one of these places with technology where you kind of grow a little complacent and you think that technology is doing a great job and I think this is one of these places where it’s worth doing a little experiment, maybe over the next three months, once a month just doing a little run-through of your spam folder and seeing what it’s grabbing and maybe it becomes something that you do on a regular basis to go through that and to make sure there aren’t things that are missed.

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 those of you who are longtime listeners to the podcast will know that I am obsessed with my smart home devices and I started out with the Amazon Echo. I graduated to the Google Home and have loved it ever since.

One of my favorite echoes that I had was the Echo Show which was basically Alexa with a screen, and I could see things and it would display information on the screen rather than just tell it to me. And all I could think to myself was I couldn’t wait until Google made something similar with the Google Home.

Well Google didn’t do it but Lenovo did and I this week received my Lenovo Smart Display and I cannot have enough great things to say about it. It has all the smarts of a regular Google Home but it has a screen on it and I can — it shows my Google photos when it’s not doing anything for me. If I want to look for directions, it’ll show me a map. If I ask it to show me pictures of things, it will. I set a timer. I usually set a timer in the kitchen when I’m cooking something.

This time it showed the timer on the screen so I could glance over and see it rather than have to talk to it all the time. It’ll play videos, so I can ask it to play YouTube and watch it on there. I really haven’t started exploring everything that it can do but it is a — and it’s a swipe touchscreen too, so I can touch it and swipe things around and it’ll show you — I will tell you that one of the most amazing things is the cooking feature.

You can have it bring up a recipe and it will go step-by-step and keep that step on the screen and it’s time and then you just tell to move on and it’ll move on to the next step with the next ingredients. It’s really a great extension of how Google is moving with its Google Assistant and I’m really liking it so far. It’s the Lenovo Smart Display.

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, it sounds like the virtual assistants are starting to take the place of headphones in your world.

Tom Mighell: Yeah. I am done with headphones for a while, we are moving on.

Dennis Kennedy: I have two parting shots. So one comes from LLRX.com, which is a great site that’s been around for a long time, focused on law librarians primarily but just tons of great information put together by our friend Sabrina Pacifici. And I can’t recommend LLRX.com enough.

But I wanted to point to one article today or a recent post and it’s called The 6 Types Of Cyber Attacks To Protect Against In 2018 by Lizzie Kardon, and I like it because it’s a great little intro resource on some of the standard cyber attacks and it explains them in plain language and makes them suggestions about what to do with them.

So I mean briefly it’s talking about malware, it’s talking about phishing, man-in-the-middle attacks, distributed denial-of-service attacks, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks.

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And if you read this article, you’ll have a sense of what those are and I think that can be really helpful to make you aware of what dangers are actually out there. And it may help you set your strategy and your priorities in dealing with cybersecurity in this year. So I’m not saying it’s the complete resource but I think it’s a great intro place and like many other things on LLRX.com. I highly recommend it.

The second parting shot is something you’ll hear from Tom and I over the next couple of months but the College of Law Practice Management is having its 2018 Futures Conference in Boston, October 25^th and 26^th. Tom and I will be presenting on cybersecurity in connection with collaboration tools. We’re excited about that presentation and the entire program, which does so focus on cybersecurity.

So it might be something you want to put on your agenda as an event to go to but you’ll hear more about that as it gets closer.

Tom Mighell: Yep, we would love to see you there. 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 this episode at tkmreport.com.

If you liked what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site, where you can find archives of all of our previous podcasts.

If you like to get in touch with us, you can reach out to us on LinkedIn or Twitter, or leave us a voicemail at (720)441-6820. We would love to get your questions to cover on our next podcast.

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 Podcasts and we will see you next time for another episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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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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