A Global Legal Tech Space: Aiming for a Truly Collaborative Online Community

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report
A Global Legal Tech Space: Aiming for a Truly Collaborative Online Community
05/06/2019

[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 #236 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: Thanks first to 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: And we would 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 took a deep dive into the ways pictorial language especially emojis and gifs are changing the way we communicate online every day in almost every way.

In this episode, we wanted to share our perspectives and ideas on a big project please are starting to discuss, is there a way to bring together all the parts of the legal tech community in one place and promote collaboration in that community?

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 brainstorming about ways to bring the entire global legal tech community together in one place. Why not have at least one really big goal this year, Dennis?

In this second segment we are going to discuss a recent trial balloon floated about a major change in Twitter, and whether as a result we might be looking into Twitter alternatives. 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, the not inconsequential goal of bringing together the entire legal tech community in one central place, that also promotes collaboration. No small feat.

Lately, Dennis, I have been noticing that you have been getting into a lot of conversations on Twitter with other people in the legal tech community about solving big problems in #legaltech.

To be honest, I think this idea of building a community for the entire legal tech industry has to be one of the biggest.

So how did you get involved in the discussion and this potential project while in these Twitter discussions?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I was sitting at home one day and looking at Twitter and all of a sudden I saw that Kevin O’Keefe had tagged me and asked me for my response on this very topic. So it’s difficult to kind of leave that one hanging out there, so I answered Kevin’s original question and it started a conversation and revealed a lot interest in taking on that project.

And so, I mean, Kevin’s original notion was that there are all these different silos in the legal tech community and there are also a lot of — especially the legal tech vendors, he points out, don’t really use blogs in a standard way other than for the ordinary types of marketing.

And Kevin’s approach is that blogging is about community and in my approach and Tom’s as well that blogging is really about people sharing their individual voices, kind of come together on this.

So Kevin’s notion is, can we look at the different things that are out there these days and I will use the word “platforms” here to say, okay, what — is there a way we can put all these groups together and allow people to communicate and maybe work together on projects so you could go to one place and find out what you needed to learn about legal tech, and from the respected voices in legal tech. And then have something within that community that helps you evaluate who those respected voices were.

Tom, it is a huge goal. I would say, and I think you will agree that people have been talking about this for years and years. So there is some history to this, but I think the real question is, is now the time where this makes sense? And so, I think that’s the conversation that Kevin kicked off and then he followed up with a blog post today as the day that we are recording that you might want to talk a little bit more about where he goes into some more detail.

(00:05:09)

Tom Mighell: Well, he does go into some detail, and I guess what I’ll say is one of I think his major complaints is not necessarily that vendors are engaging in more traditional marketing and communication activities, but I think that a lot of the leaders in legal tech are not using some of the online tools that he and I guess some of us think that they should to communicate online. And I think that’s right, I mean, but that’s always been I think a part of Kevin’s. His mission is to get more people engaged online and if you see somebody not engaging, that tends to be something that he draws to.

I think that Kevin’s post and we will put it in the show notes, Kevin’s post is a great start towards discussing it, but here is my criticism of it, is if we are talking about building a community, the first question really is how. In my mind it’s how do we do that? Whether it’s the right time or not? It’s how.

And Kevin seems to want to get past that part. He is like, he says in his blog post, rather than discuss how to form a community and what medium should be used, why not just start using the mediums we have the open Internet, and to me that means let’s keep using Twitter and blogs and Facebook and LinkedIn, which are the very silos that Kevin is talking about.

And I don’t necessarily see those growing into a community. I see that little silos of communities happen there and that people may have conversations in different places, but unless everybody agrees, all right, we are going to Twitter or we are going to LinkedIn and we are all going to meet up there and do it. I don’t see how using the open Internet, I don’t know how just without a plan, without somebody leading the way you are going to actually get to that point.

I think that lots of discussions can be held and they can be good fruitful discussions, but they’re still going to be silo discussions and they are going to be suburbs and mini communities rather than one big community.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay, so Tom, you know what I’m going to go right-away, which is that I think we have jumped to the how way too quickly on this one. So I think that it’s why what how and that you need to spend a lot of time on the why. So why are we doing this anyway? Why would anybody want to participate in this and then what is this thing that people have in mind? Once we have that down, then you can start to focus on the how.

Tom Mighell: I tend to be more interested in the how anyway, that’s why I jumped straight to it; so start with the why.

Dennis Kennedy: Because you are a process guy, so that’s what we get, I am like the idea guy, you are the process guy, and that’s why this works so well. And I go back to jobs to be done. So what am I hiring this legal tech community to do? It’s like how is this going to make sense to me he as opposed to some of the other things that are out there that I already participated in, because I’m getting a lot of the information that I want. I agree with Kevin, there is a lot more out there that it’s really hard to access.

So that’s one thing. The other thing is, I look back and I say, there’ve been a bunch of examples here of people trying to meet this goal, and I mean, just a few of them at ABA Legal Technology Resource Center, Neil Squillante’s TechnoLawyer, in the solo says e-mail list, there is a bunch of places where these kinds of things are happening, have happened, and got some critical mass.

And so when you go, like this big global, all things to everybody thing, that’s a really, really difficult concept, because I was talking to somebody the other day about, oh, wouldn’t it be great to have all this legal information in one space, one in you as a lawyer love that, and I am kind of like, look, I do like — in my area law is so specialized that there is anything that has to do with a case or something like that, I am just not really interested in it, it doesn’t really relate to the type of work that I do.

So, if you said, oh, here’s all this law information in one place, I would go like, it’s like noise, noise, noise, noise, noise. So, a couple of things there, Tom, for you to react to, but I guess part of it is that it just feels too big when you go to the how question first.

Tom Mighell: Okay. So it seems a little bit like you jumped from the why to the what, because I didn’t hear a whole lot about the why, but I think that we are all in on the why. I mean, I think that Kevin has framed the issue that having a community being able to talk about things in one place is important, and I don’t know that we need to spend a ton of time talking about the why unless you want to jump back to that. But let’s talk about the what, what are we hiring this community to do? What do we want it to do?

(00:10:00)

So if I had my best of all possible communities, my community would be a place where people can have discussions and they can have discussions on the topic of their choice, and that those topics wouldn’t necessarily be all on top of each other that you could go, it’s like if you go into a house party and in one room, they are talking about access to justice and the other one, they are talking about blockchain, then I want to go and join that discussion and have that conversation.

So I want to be able to have a conversation where I want to have it and have it be in its own location, where I can go back to it. I want a place where I can access resources. So maybe as part of a blockchain stuff, somebody I talked to wrote an article on it. They can post it there for people to have access to. So I can access those resources.

What if a group of people who are meeting in that community want to start on a project together? I’ve seen tons of people talk on Twitter about, hey, who is with me, let’s do X, Y and Z and let’s do great things together in legal tech. Well, why can’t our community do that too? Why can’t there be a capability where people are able to work on a project together and communicate in that way?

Finally, I think that what if people can have in-person meetings or live meetings where they could have an online webinar or a live event that anybody could tune into? So, the ability to have some type of multimedia I think is important as well. That would be on my wish list of what I would be hiring the community to do because I think in that way you kind of capture all the things people want to do, they want to talk, they want to learn more things, they want to work on things together, and they want to watch things or participate either in-person or online with certain things, that’s my wish list.

Dennis, how does yours differ?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think there is obviously an overlap; although, I think what people want on top of that is high-quality trustworthy, easy-to-understand information that’s current and accurate and so there is this big trust element, which is always the part of any community piece.

And there has been some tools that have been build up that help with that, that we will talk about in a little bit. So I think there is that and then there is — I mean just to me, it’s a tricky thing because then you say of, what you are describing, Tom, feels like my current experience of the Internet or what Kevin might call the open Internet even, but it’s just that it’s siloed but I know the places I need to go, and that if I have certain questions, I know where I need to look and then I want to – other things I have to find that stuff.

So it’s a big difficulty to get over as to say, okay, how do I make this a separate place that I’m willing to go that gives me more than what I’m already finding on my own, that’s my struggle. Although, I generally agree with what you are saying and I think that I guess one more thing before we start to go into maybe the how potentials is that I also feel that legal tech is really vulcanized.

There are people interested in tech, what I call hardware, software, cloud services, there is people interested in security, there is vendors, there is lawyers, there is big law, there is solo and small firm, there is access to justice, there is academia.

And even in the Twitter conversation I was part of, people were falling into those silos really quickly, that’s another piece where you say I like the idea this grand community. I just think it’s going to fall into silos again, and then I would also say just in the side, Tom, that this Twitter conversation, that I was part of, remind me why Twitter is absolutely the wrong platform for any type of conversation, it’s really hard to follow and to involve people.

Tom Mighell: Well, if we are going to talk about the how then I will get into that too, but I think it’s hard to avoid silos anywhere because if you are on Twitter, you’re still in a silo, you’re in the silo of the people that you follow, and the people that they may put together. You may coincidently or consequentially come into contact with someone that someone else re-tweets occasionally.

But ultimately, you’re following people in your lane, in your channel and I don’t know that that’s tremendously different in other places. So I think that there’s got to be the element of the silo, no matter what form this community takes. I still come back to the house party, it’s like you put the silos close enough together, so people know they are there. They can wander into the room and talk about blockchain and go, hey, what are you guys talking about. Oh, this is interesting. Or hey, let’s go into this room and talk a little bit more about access to justice.

(00:15:02)

I think that the problem with the silos is that the people who might benefit from one or the other silo doesn’t even know that it exists. They don’t even know that it’s there and that’s why I think that having it in a place where people can see it all in one location is a benefit. I don’t think you can solve the silo thing but you can reduce its effects.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, and I think, Tom, and you would probably, I think we both had the experience of, I don’t know, countless times people saying, I wish there was a way I could learn this and you go like, have you tried X Plus, have you looked at TechnoLawyer, have you gone here?

And so I think there is this thing the great value of bringing everything together, which is sort of the both with like TechnoLawyer is a good example and the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center is another one and there are obviously many others, is to have everything in one place where you go like, well, I know it can go there and there’s going to be a bunch of stuff and it may not be everything but it’s likely to cover what I’m interested in.

So there is that resource learning side, which probably can be pulled together in different platforms. I think it’s sort of like the communication and then the collaboration of, say, okay, now that we’ve identified people who are interested in the same thing, how do we work together because that stuff tends to fall out of platforms really, really quickly.

So there’s that and then also I think that sometimes and I am not guilty of this myself, but when I think about Kevin is talking about is like look at the early days of the Internet, and the early days of blogging, you go like, oh, all the stuff which is happening, people are doing this stuff, people became trusted, they develop their own audiences, you figure it out who was really good, that sort of thing.

Now, it sort of feels like that there is orders of magnitude more stuff out there that you really have to evaluate, so it’s almost like that old blogging model of everybody put stuff out and then the best stuff bubbles up to the top that seems — I mean I could be wrong, it just seems like it’s really hard for them to work now.

Tom Mighell: Well, I think that it’s because there’s not an effort to bring it into, it’s assuming that the entire world is one big community on Twitter. I think it’s hard to have a community now on our current tools and platforms that we have that doesn’t get so massive. I think that before it was a smaller population of people, it was a smaller universe that was out there and now that everyone’s participating and everyone has a voice, you’re right, it’s harder to get through it, but let’s talk about the how, let’s figure out what the best way to do it.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay, so I put them into three categories, three separate categories. So one is that we just do a whole bunch of experiments out on the Internet and then we figure our way to aggregate what’s in those. So we might have one entry point but is pulling from a lot of places and there’s a whole bunch of experiments going on and you have sort of the central place that allows you to better find these things. So that’s one really open approach that you could take.

The other is to find a specific and it’s a precision approach but you’re looking for something that’s really one place that you can go to, that gives you most of the features and is it a place that it’s easy for people to go on a regular or even daily basis.

So you look at Facebook or LinkedIn groups, something like Mighty Networks, Slack potentially, CORA, which is a question and answer site, maybe even a Reddit type of model, so that should be the second one.

And then the third one for me is what I call an API model, which is saying or I can call it the dashboard model, but say like, hey look, all the stuff exists out there, all I really need is something that pulls information from all these different places and allows me to look in something like my own dashboard or my own viewfinder into that. And I take advantage of whether it’s an open Internet or not, I am just able to pull everything together in one place and then that would then allow me to link up with the people I need to. So sort of three different approaches. I don’t know if any of those makes sense to you, Tom.

Tom Mighell: Okay, so your first and your third approach have elements that appeal to me and I like the ideas that are in them. I will say that I think the second approach that where I really fall down is, is that I think that all of our traditional channels right now are really crappy ideas for communities because if I apply the – what am I hiring my community to do rule to them, none of them — they all meet maybe one criteria but not all of them.

(00:20:05)

I mean, Twitter, I think is lousy for everything. Twitter can’t handle really any of that stuff. Facebook and LinkedIn, I think really Facebook group or a LinkedIn group, it’s just one single channel of communication. And so everybody is talking in the same channel. You do have the capability of adding a couple of things to it where you can provide little branch offs and things like that, but again, it’s just one channel of communication. Blogs tend to be one channel of communication. Now if you have a whole network of blogs that you can link to and maybe have an aggregate page that we are talking about, maybe you start to get to that point.

To me the only models that come close to working that exist right now, and I think that you are suggesting, the other part that I’m suggesting is along the lines of what you are, which is we need to invent something to either connect them together or something entirely new, but the ones that work right now I think are things like Mighty Networks, Slack or Microsoft Teams, just thinking about and I’ll use as an example LawyerSmack. LawyerSmack is a company that has developed a very robust community of lawyers and what they have been able to do is they have been able to in Slack create all sorts of channels based on the topics that they are interested in talking about. And using a tool like Slack or Teams you can also have documents that people can access so they can have libraries in there that people can access the resources that are important to those groups. You can have live events. You can have meetings through Slack or Microsoft Teams. You can engage in projects there and have communications and work on things and have goals and tasks and to-dos and all sorts of things.

The downside to those tools are they are relatively close. They are not open like you talk about, and so — that would be something I would want to try to solve, but in terms of the functionality of everything that I would want to see, I like that model. I like — I don’t know a lot about Mighty Networks, but looking at it, it looks like you could create a community that has many of those same aspects that I’m talking about. But I think that, that most of our traditional tools just aren’t up to the task of everything we’re talking about, unless — unless you want to try to bring them all together into a dashboard model, and I just don’t know how I feel about that. I just feel sort of like I want to start all over with something new, but I realized that’s a very hard prospect as well.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, that was a kind of a cool thing about the early days of blogging, it was we were starting all over with this tool that we were probably using beyond what the original expectations were, and it was forming these communities.

I think what’s different now and I would say, this is one thing we will learn by doing the second edition of the book is that when we looked at ways to use social media as a collaboration tool, it was really difficult to see how that was really going to work.

For me it’s like that workspace notion, brainstorming space, bringing people together and then maybe finding projects. So I don’t know, I mean, there are things out there like GitHub, and — so there is a whole bunch of things out there. Any one person will go like, oh, this is the most amazing thing. It’s like when you say Slack, I can see Slack but I also know that in the corporate setting it’s really difficult for people to get permission to use Slack at all in their corporate network.

Tom Mighell: Well, they have problems using social media in corporate networks too.

Dennis Kennedy: So you run into those things and that 00:23:36 just toured an open Internet type of notion. I would say like, man, TechnoLawyer has been around forever and it solves a lot of things. It does a lot of things on the content side, but again, I’m like, okay, so if I find these things then I kind of have to move out of there. First of all, I got to find my way in there but then I might have to move out of there and do work and they have like do we do a Google Doc, do we do this or that?

So, there is that notion where you said, if we just find like some new platform, that is a community platform and maybe just start to work with it and see who joins up. And that might be one thing. So you can do that and say, okay, this is the place because this is the way you are thinking about the Internet, right, Tom. If you and I say it right now, here is the new legal tech community, Tom and I have started it, then it will be there on the Internet, because we put it there and something might happen with it.

So you could do that and say, oh, there is a governing group of people who will decide we are going to do that or you say, let’s just do like a whole bunch of experiments and figure out a way to time together, and I guess that seems nearly impossible, because I am not a programmer and I don’t want to take on the — be the network manager of that, but if somebody did, that one seems like has it most potential because we are not kind of locked in, and it’s just saying, okay, let’s see what works and what doesn’t, and what can we do with that?

(00:25:08)

So I don’t know, Tom, maybe we probably should wrap up here, but I don’t know that we have the definitive answer, but which way are you leaning these days?

Tom Mighell: Well, so here’s the difference to me between the old days and now. The old days there wasn’t a Twitter or a Facebook or a LinkedIn, or a tool that people are already using and invested in. And so whatever we do, we have to provide a compelling argument to move away from what people are currently using. There have been a number of networks both legal and otherwise that have tried to rise up over the past 10 or so years that as far as I know they’ve all been miserable failures because we are still stuck with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and some other tools and so that’s why I think why just trying some experiments is not going to work. If just Tom and Dennis have set up a community, unless I would want to go to all the big names in legal tech and say, hey, we want you to be in on this, we want you to be a member from the ground up, we want you to bring along the people that work with you and let’s all get in this together.

I think that there would need to be some type of a coordinated effort to do this. I think that there needs to be some tech experience involved who can come in and code and create things. I view this as a group of people. I view this as a community of people putting this together, frankly.

I’m interested to continue the conversation. I would imagine that both you and I are both interested in hearing from other people about continuing this and may be trying to make this a reality, but I don’t think that it’s going to be any one person doing it alone, I think it’s going to be a bunch of people doing it together.

Dennis Kennedy: And I would say that my response at the end of the conversation was like, okay, I’m in, let’s build it, like what’s — what’s next, and that’s where the Twitter conversation declined into nothing.

So that always gives me a concern. I always worry about you get a group of — especially in the legal community you get together and you say, okay, we are going to have these rules, we’ve got like a board of Governors and we are going to do this and it is like a year-and-a-half later and you’re still trying to decide whether the page is going to be blue or gray.

And, so that concerns me. That’s why I am kind of say like, let’s just — let people try a bunch of things and then make it easier for them to reach out to each other, but if I am going to start somewhere I would say, okay, what are the — not just to plug our book, Tom, but I would say, like, let’s figure out like what are the tools — what we need is workspaces, like how do we work together, and so what are the tools that make sense for that. Where are the online whiteboards, where is it? Is it Google Docs, is it other things that we have talked about and written about over the years?

To me that’s the next step. It’s like let’s figure out some common places to work together and then maybe this larger community comes out of it, otherwise I am kind of like, hey, Kevin, just start something. Like there is a blog on LexBlog that like anybody can work with and may be it turns into Wikipedia of legal tech and maybe it’s like other things that kind of falls by the wayside.

Tom Mighell: I am not real sure that, hey, let’s just start something in this day and age gets it done like it did back in the early startup days, but I am intrigued and willing to follow along to anybody who wants to just get something started.

Dennis Kennedy: It’s like, hey, let’s put on a show, but you’ve got to do more than just say it.

Tom Mighell: All right. Before we go to our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.

[Music]

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[Music]

(00:30:02)

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

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy. Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, recently suggested or I would say floated a trial balloon that Twitter might change from a people-following platform, that most of us have used it for, for many years to a topic-following platform, which is what some of us use it for one more following, trending topics. So lots of long-term Twitter users immediately proclaimed that they would leave Twitter if that happened.

So I actually posted to the legal Twitterverse the question of where you might seriously move to if you left Twitter? I basically got one specific answer on that, so which was maybe LinkedIn.

So, Tom, I don’t know, there is a kind of question out here, these days are there really any Twitter alternatives that either could or would be something that could either be built or that you might use? So, Tom, what do you think on that?

Tom Mighell: So, I think it’s interesting that we are having this topic as the B Segment today because I think it’s a natural topic to follow the discussion that we just had because it’s asking us to come up with something that’s better than what we have now, better than what we are used to.

I’d personally think that turning Twitter into a topic-following platform is a horrible idea. I think it shows how deft Twitter leadership is to what its users want, but that said, I mean, if I were forced to leave Twitter, I’m not sure where I would go. I don’t think that it’s LinkedIn because I don’t just have conversations or follow lawyers on Twitter.

I follow tech journalists and tech websites and I follow politics and journalists and things like that. They are not on LinkedIn. Unless they all went over to LinkedIn, I wouldn’t be able to do it there. So there have been a few alternatives to Twitter but none have caught on because as I said before, Twitter is where everyone is.

There was a site called Ello, E-L-L-O, it still exists. I joined it a couple of years ago, it looked like it was kind of a low-maintenance version of Twitter but nobody else joined, so I never did anything with it. Today, what I keep hearing about is a tool called Mastodon. Mastodon is an interesting Twitter alternative because instead of being centralized, it’s being run on different instances.

You can actually pay to start up your own Mastodon instance and talk about whatever you want to, you can have your own community. So we could have our own Kennedy-Mighell report instance. But the downside is, is that it’s really what Twitter might become in the future, which is that all the instances are topic-based, so it’s not about following who you want, but what you want to talk about.

And so I have to say, I will just end it here. If Twitter takes this direction, I’m really not optimistic about any alternatives. They just don’t really, right now, provide the same features that we actually do like about Twitter.

Dennis Kennedy: So I didn’t hear you recommend Google+.

Tom Mighell: No, because it died about two weeks ago, three weeks ago, gone, dead.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I just — I agree with you, Tom. I looked at what’s out there and Twitter does its own unique thing and also I think what’s interesting to me is that everybody’s experience of Twitter is a little bit different. So my experience of Twitter is way different than anybody else.

So I look at if you’re following topics, so if I followed just like #Legaltech, I’m not really sure that that would be ultimately very satisfying to me because a lot of people post great posts where they want to put that hashtag in.

Tom Mighell: And a lot of vendors put Legaltech in or marketing or even outside of the legal market, put that hashtag in and has nothing to do with what you want to say.

Dennis Kennedy: Right and then also, I don’t really follow topics on of — like a regular basis. I mean, I see that Twitter is making that available as part of trending but I mean it’s like how – when I follow topics, it will be like too many follows or past interference or like, replay, like refs robbing us, those sorts of things.

So it’s kind of like I do follow topics but it’s a very, very short-term thing or you might follow something like on the season finale of your favorite TV show. So I’m not sure there’s anything out there and I think that part of — I would consider an open-source kind of Twitter platform but — I would have to basically have the same people that I am following on Twitter or otherwise like what’s the point. It’s like get one more silos to go through and you comeback to now this is favorite wish, it’s like, can I just have a dashboard that like pulls everything that I do in social media and everything else into one handy viewfinder, that’s easy for me to 00:35:00sift? So the only thing that’s ever tempted me to actually become a programmer is this – my lifelong quest for this dashboard notion.

(00:35:10)

So I don’t know, Tom, I think we are sort of stuck with Twitter for a while unless like I said, the people we follow all end up deciding go to one place. I mean, the worst thing would be that everybody decides to leave Twitter and then you’ve got like a-third of the people that you follow on Mastodon and 20% on Instagram and some people on these other things and then you go like, that didn’t work out so well.

So now, it’s time for our partying shots, that one-tip website or observation that you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: All right, so this week, I have an observation and I think those of you who listen to the podcast know that you can count on me to give you the latest about phones and new phones that are coming out. And I have been very intrigued that since the beginning of the year at the major electronic shows, some of the manufacturers have been teasing the first foldable phones. Phones that kind of look like a slightly thicker phone and then you can actually unfold it, on the inside will be a screen that looks like maybe a little bit smaller than an iPad mini, kind of the perfect Kindle reading size. It’s a little bigger than your phone and it provides a bigger screen, and some of these phones look really genuinely interesting, not sure I would get one, but I think it’s an interesting evolution of the phone.

Well, Samsung has recently gotten ready to release its Samsung Galaxy Fold, and I got to tell you, after the week it had last week, foldable phones are not quite ready for primetime.

Several reviewers who received review units were reporting that it was breaking, the hinges were breaking apart, the screen was breaking, all sorts of problems that they were having and after sort of that bad publicity week, Samsung has put an official hold on distributing the Galaxy Fold for a while, while they try and improve on their quality.

So, if you’re looking at a foldable phone, I’d wait awhile because it looks like the future is not quite here yet.

Dennis Kennedy: Or you could buy a few in hopes that their collective value goes way up in the future.

Tom Mighell: There you go. But the Galaxy Fold is $,2000, so you better be prepared to spend a lot of money upfront for a bigger payout later.

Dennis Kennedy: I would say it was $2,000, and it reminds me of like, hey, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. What I have is, is actually a plug for the Ask Dave Taylor blog, which we refer to many times over the years on this podcast, which is a great — he has done this forever of answering questions about specific, very specific technology things, and so as a result, you get a lot of great tips and reminders about some things that you might have forgotten about that actually exists, that make your life a lot easier.

So, recently as Tom knows I had a photo and I just needed to do like a quick crop of it and save it in a smaller version, I would like it in a smaller file size, and it actually was kind of an ordeal for me, but I got to figure it out. But anyway, the example I want to use for this parting shot is there was a blog post he did recently, which is called “How Can I Easily Edit Screenshots on my iPhone.”

And so, this is just one of these — and this is a perfect illustration of why this blog is so good to the point he goes like, did you ever think you wanted to do this, you take the picture, there’s a little image of it, you tap on it, this thing pops up, it’s super-easy to crop however you want and you save it, and boom, you are done, you do it all on your iPhone.

You go like, oh, that is so great. I wish I would’ve had a class in that because this is something if you didn’t learn, you just don’t know about it, and it’s something that’s easy to forget. So Ask Dave Taylor blog and if you like to edit screenshots on your iPhone, that’s the place to start.

Tom Mighell: And 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 like 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, or suggest a topic, we’ve got a document at bit.ly/2QNwhZu.

If you’d like to get in touch with us, there is a couple of ways to do that. You can reach out to us on LinkedIn or leave us a voicemail. We love to get messages to talk about on our B Segment. Our phone number is (720)441-6820.

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.

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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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