20 Tech Tips in 20 Minutes and Takeaways from the Consumer Electronics Show

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Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

20 Tech Tips in 20 Minutes and Takeaways from the Consumer Electronics Show

01/31/2020

 

[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 #253 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 would like to thank our sponsor.

 

Dennis Kennedy: And that means we would 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.

 

Tom Mighell: And we also want to mention that the second edition of our book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies’ is available on Amazon. Everybody agrees that collaboration is essential in today’s world, but knowing the right tools will make all the difference.

 

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode, we continued our tradition of sharing our legal technology New Year’s resolutions for each year and spoiler alert for Tom, I’m already making great progress.

 

In this episode, we wanted to share some of our favorite technology tips in general and the number 20 for 2020 seemed like a good one.

 

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

 

Tom Mighell: Well Dennis, in this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will indeed be sharing 20 of our favorite technology tips for 2020, some old favorites and some new ones, but definitely something for everybody.

 

In the second segment, we’re going to talk about what was most interesting to us from the recent Consumer Electronics Show and as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots that one tip, website or observation that you could start to use the second that this podcast is over.

 

But first up technology tips, Dennis and I have done presentations like 60 tips in 60 minutes all the time. I still do them. Dennis, I know you still do them too, we probably don’t do them as much as we used to, but we always love to give tips, we always have a lot of great tips.

 

So we thought we’d avoid the middleman this time and bring our tips directly to you in this episode, except it’s going to be 20 tips and I am glad that we chose 20 because it will allow me to help make sure that Dennis doesn’t make this segment go longer than 20 minutes.

 

So if you’re ready Dennis, let’s get started, tip number one.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So my first tip is something I’m realizing, I’m working with a lot lately as I’ve switching between different programs and let’s just dig into the settings and preferences, and it could be the applications you use, it could be social media you use, for example, on LinkedIn, there are a lot of settings that can really make a difference email, other things, and it’s just a simple matter of going in and looking at settings or preferences usually it’s called in on the Mac and just rummaging through them.

 

And you’ll find some changes you can make that can make your life a whole lot easier and make you someone who complaints a lot less about the problems you’re having with your technology.

 

Tom Mighell: Well, my first tip is not a joke although it might sound like one, but it is a tip to try the new Microsoft Edge browser. No, I’m not talking about Internet Explorer, I’m talking about Edge. The first version of Edge wasn’t so great, I didn’t like it, I didn’t pay attention to it, I’ve been a Chrome user forever and so I was not planning on changing.

 

But the new Edge is really intriguing to me because one of the reasons why I don’t change browsers is that Google’s extension environment and being able to put so many different extensions in is I think superior to everything else.

 

Well Microsoft Edge is built on Chromium, which is the same foundation that Chrome browser is made on, so you can actually download the same type of extensions into Edge that you would in Chrome. So now I have my LastPass extension. I have a couple other extensions that I use on a daily basis, it’s fast, it’s very responsive, it’s very interesting, it’s a lot more lightweight than Chrome is and I think I’m going to start to use it every now and again, give it a word.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So my best, one of my best tips for 2020 is Facebook in politics and now you could say the same thing about Twitter but Facebook is where it really bothers me and it wouldn’t be nice to just turn the volume down on politics on your Facebook newsfeed.

 

And the good news is you can and you don’t have to unfriend people. So you can do some muting for some people who are super obnoxious.

 

(00:04:55)

 

But a lot of times there are friends or family and there are non-political things you’d like to keep up with it that they might post. So my little trick is that sometimes when they just kind of forward something through or share it, you can click on those or right-click on those and one of your options is to hide things from that third-party that they’re forwarding along.

 

And if you’re sort of aggressive about that for a while, you’ll find that a lot of the political stuff starts to disappear from your Facebook Newsfeed. If that’s a problem for you on either side or both sides or all sides, you’ll thank me for that one, because with a little bit of work you can really have Facebook become like a much nicer and less controversial place.

 

Tom Mighell: And so my next tip also may sound like a joke, which is talking about Google and security, you might not necessarily think that Google has your best interest at heart, but it really does when it comes to security and they really I think have made some great strides.

 

So if you have a Gmail account, if you use Google on a regular basis, then go over to your account and run a Google Security Check. It helps you make sure that everything that you have that’s connected to Google is secure. So it’s going to show you every device that’s currently connected to Google in some way.

 

If you notice that you don’t use that device anymore or something connected that shouldn’t be, you can always remove it. You can take a look at any recent security events that may have occurred like a password reset or something else that changed that is interesting that you need to pay attention to.

 

You can enable 2-Step Verification there, you can check and see what third-party services have access to your account, you can check your Gmail Settings and make sure that they’re also secured, and then you can also do a password check up, if you use Google, if you use Chrome to save your passwords. Hitting the password check up will review all of those passwords tell you what might have been exposed in a hacking scheme, which passwords tend to be very simple and things suggesting that you change maybe passwords that are old and need to be changed.

 

All in all the Google Security Check is a great way to keep control of your Google account, make sure that it’s up-to-date and as safe and secure as it can be.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So, my next one is Design Ideas that feature in PowerPoint. So there’s a part of me that would say my tip is really to use new versions of products but this is an illustration of why I think that. So in PowerPoint, there’s — you’ll find a little menu choice that says Design and it gives you some options on designs over at the far right and also now it’s on the actual home button as well, I believe.

 

There’s something called Design Ideas, you click on that and what it does is give you about 10 choices of the texture slide and shows you what it might look like if it were designed in certain ways. So it can give you a consistent design, it can place your pictures that you put on a slide really well, set your fonts, all those sort of things.

 

So it looks good and it’s super easy and I just find that — I’m using that a lot more than kind of customizing each slide that I do, so really — it’s just my hats off to Microsoft for adding this new feature.

 

Tom Mighell: So, I will do a quick PowerPoint tip to hop on the back of Dennis’s tip and that is a transition that I don’t use very often, but I think is really fascinating. Transitions kind of have their place in PowerPoint, you don’t want to go crazy with them, but there are ways that they can make sense and make your presentation a lot more interesting and this is the Morph, Morph Transition.

 

And what you use it for, I in the past have had things move from one part of the screen to the other and you had to do this really clunky motion path and you’d have to draw a line and it would move along that line or you could make it a curvy line and it would curve around the screen and it looked ugly and it was clunky and it didn’t work very well.

 

The Morph Transition allows you to place something of kind of one size and on one slide and then on another size on the other slide and it looks like it’s either growing and or moving. So you can make a square turn into a circle or a triangle. You can make the demonstration I saw had a bunch of planets that were all along the top of the screen and when you morphed it they went into sort of their position in the universe or in the Solar System.

 

It’s I think an interesting way to display things if you need to show how things might progress from one way to another visually and it seems to be pretty easy tool to use.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So I’m going to stick in the Microsoft world for one more tip and it’s the Microsoft Templates that you can find either in the programs or on the Office site for Microsoft and sometimes there’s just things that you would like budgets, certain types of spreadsheets, certain types of documents.

 

(00:10:04)

 

Those kinds of things, typically business things, even business plan templates and there’s so much there and a lot of times you just want to get a quick start that’s something that gets you like 80% of what you need and looks pretty nice and can be done quickly. It’s a terrific resource.

 

Tom Mighell: Well I think I’m going stay in the Microsoft world longer than you Dennis and I’m going to talk about getting text messages on your computer. Now for those of you who are in the Mac world, it’s a fairly simple process to enable iMessage to be on your Mac, if you use a Mac.

 

But if you use a Windows computer harder to do that with iMessage, there are some guides out there that I think there’s an app that most people say don’t pay attention to because it’s not good for you. It’s harder in the Mac world to have messages, text messages on a Windows computer but it’s a lot easier now if you have an Android phone to have text messages.

 

Just go in the Google Play Store and download an app called Your Phone Companion. It’s made by Microsoft and once you install it on your phone it will essentially connect on your computer and whenever you get a text message if you get a message then it will show up on your computer screen.

 

Now I don’t use this a lot, I don’t want to have text messages show up a lot but there are times where I may need to pay attention to something that somebody is sending me and I don’t want to have to keep looking at my phone because I’m working. So having that notification come up on the computer is I think a very useful thing in the right circumstances and I like that I can get those messages from my phone delivered direct to my computer.

 

Dennis Kennedy: And as we recently turned over to January of 2020, it reminded me that one of the things I do to organize my files on my computer and it’s typically more personal files than work files is I just do a folder for each year. And so I don’t have like a whole bunch of nested folders and all these different things and try to figure out where things are. I figured that I can remember whether something was done this year or last year and add search to that and I’ll find things that are done in previous years, if I’m not quite sure when they happened.

 

So at the beginning of January, I just create a new folder for that year I change the default where things are saved to the 2020 folder and boom, I’m done and that’s my file organization for the next year is taken care of.

 

Tom Mighell: All right my last Windows related tip I think for the day and it is actually being better about finding the things that you want. The help in Office 365 has gotten better and better. It used to say at the very top of the screen Tell me what you want to do. Now it’s just called Search and Search is kind of a universal search because you can search within a document but you can also type in what do you want to do.

 

So the other day, I wanted to email my calendar to somebody and I wasn’t exactly sure I couldn’t find a button to do it and so I just went up to that search bar and I typed in an email calendar and — or how do I email my calendar I got the answer right there. You can put in plain text and just ask a question and it will bring up documents, it’ll bring up actions that you can take, it will bring up help articles if you need to get to it. Sometimes it’ll bring files that it might be able to see somewhere out in your Office 365 account. The search function within Office 365 is now really powerful, a whole lot more powerful, it can do a lot for you.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So my next tip is the security tip. Public Wi-Fi security is a big deal these days. So I just think a VPN service, I use NordVPN is essential, super easy to use, inexpensive, no reason not to use it. And then if I’m going to I mean hotels and sometimes coffee shops and other places are sort of notorious for bad security, you can also buy like a $30 travel router that you can plug-in in your hotel room especially and that gives you like you an extra firewall to protect yourself when you’re in more risky places; but super-easy and really essential these days.

 

Tom Mighell: So my next tip is actually I’m cheating when I bring you this tip because I use this as a parting shot one or two or three podcasts ago. But since that time I’ve started to use it and I really like it. It is a website called The Noun Project, not exactly sure why it’s called that but it is a site that offers access to over two million icons that you can use in documents and presentations or anywhere where you need an icon.

 

(00:14:59)

 

And it’s amazing that you just type in words like justice and you get thousands of scales that you can look at or money and you can get depictions of money in an icon, no matter what you want. It is tremendously powerful and what’s nice about it is you get access to certain of those icons for free. It comes with a Creative Commons license. So you do have to give attribution if you want to do it for free.

 

I went ahead and opted for the yearly $40 a year because I use an icon so much in my work to spice up documents and presentations that it’s worth it to me to spend $40 a year. When I get that, I get all of the icons for free and I can edit them. I can change the size. I could change the color. I can modify them however I want to. I can then save them as specific types of files and even better I get access to apps within either my Office 365, they’re available for Windows, for Mac, they’re available for I think your Android phone a couple of different ways you can get them in as extensions to your browser.

 

But if I’m in PowerPoint and I want to add an icon now all I have to do is push a button within PowerPoint and I have direct access to that entire database of icons rather than have to go out on the internet and find it and download it and put it into my presentation. Very convenient, I think totally worth $40 so far and great icons.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So my next tip is about your smartphone and the home screen and I would say that nothing really reveals how much our computing and especially our phone experience is personalized these days and looking at somebody else’s home screen and trying to find the apps that you would normally use, if especially you’re trying to help them out.

 

So I take a look at my home screen from time to time and there are different ways to organize but one that I like is to put the things on your home screen in order of frequency of use, so the stuff that you’re going to use is always right there and simple thing and as it’s the 80/20 rule in action in some ways that always what you want to use is right at hand, you may use folders, a limited extent on that home screen if you have some related apps just for a little more real estate but just that frequency is a great way to go in organization.

 

Tom Mighell: So if Microsoft and Windows was a theme in the first half of my tips, digital well being is sort of the theme of the last set of the tips that I have. And I’m going to start with a notification tip. I see a lot where people have gotten notifications set up on their phone. So that there’s a buzz or a noise or something that happens whenever they get a text message or any type of notification that comes in and I don’t want to discourage the use of notifications because I think that they are useful in the right circumstance, in the right context you need to get the notifications but please take some time to explore how you can make those notifications silent.

 

I get I think right now the only the only notification that I get on my phone that makes a noise is text messages. Everything else is completely silent but it’s still sitting there waiting for me to when I check my phone if I need to look at notifications I see them there and they’re available for me but they don’t make noise, they don’t distract me while I’m working or while I’m talking to people or while I’m doing other things but they’re still there when I need them.

 

Dennis Kennedy: Well the only thing that makes noise on my phone is the alarm clock, everything else is silent. So my other one is a security one and this is something Tom has mentioned in the past. I used to use my password manager which both of us highly recommend that you use one. Just as a vault to store my accounts and the password and Tom was always like well there’s this open and fill function and I’ve started to use that more often and it’s great because it just cuts a step or two out of the process.

 

So I can go into my password manager, hit the open and fill it takes me right to the web page for something and puts in the username and password and then I just log in. So it’s a great little time saver, helps you be more secure. The only downside is that we are going through a period where it seems like many companies are changing URLs and approaches. So from time to time you may have the open and fill thing which has worked for you really well stopped working because the interface to a page has changed but otherwise just a nice little time saver.

 

(00:19:53)

 

Tom Mighell: My next kind of wellness tip is around what Google is doing. They have introduced a number of sort of experimental apps that help you understand how you use technology specifically your phone and either make it easier to do, or just show you give you some awareness of what’s happening and there are probably six or seven different apps on the Google Play Store that you can get to do it.

 

So that one of them, there are two apps one is called Unlock Clock and one is Activity Bubbles, which will show you in different ways, the number of times you’ve unlocked your phone it’ll be on your screen all the time. How many times you’ve unlocked your phone so you get a visual glance at that anytime.

 

There’s one called Post Box which will package up and deliver your notifications to you like four times a day, sort of like delivering your email only at the predefined times during the day. There’s one call We Flip that pairs all — you’re in a group of people and you want to power down. It’ll pair all the phones in a group and it allows you to switch off as a group and it kind of gamifies, whoever looks at the phone first loses the game but it helps to switch things off.

 

There’s one called Desert Island that only provides shortcuts to the apps that are most important to you; camera, email, text message, those types of things. There’s one called Morph. Morph, it tries to adapt to what you do and it shows the apps for you at the time of the day when you need them which to me is the most intriguing one.

 

I wanted to anticipate what apps I need depending on the time of day when I usually use them. They’re actually a couple of more that are really kind of crazy. One of them has you print out a paper phone and use that instead of your digital phone, the other one has you print out a paper envelope and put your phone in it to not use it which I think is taking the whole wellness thing a little too far but some interesting apps all worth trying.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So my next tip involves the — often the scariest place on your computer and that is the junk or spam email folder and what I’ve noticed recently is that whatever the rules are being used on junk mail, I’ve gotten to be super aggressive and so I’m finding a lot more things going into those folders than I would like. So my tip is, I think you really need to check that from time to time.

 

I’ve had some serious emails that I did not want to overlook that were caught in there and that’s happening more regularly. It’s also interesting as a way to see what kind of scams are working out there these days. It’s a still pretty crazy world out there.

 

Tom Mighell: The next one that I have is when it comes to podcasts, I’ve started to want to listen to podcasts that just give me the five headlines of the day for the news, or the sports, or technology or whatever. A lot of podcasts are going way long. This podcast notwithstanding, I mean we talked for a long time and sometimes that’s great but sometimes you just want a little bit.

 

There’s a new app called Trebble FM and it specializes in podcasts that are short form. So it’ll give you the New York Times top five stories of the day or some top five self-help meditation tips of the day or the ESPN or CBS Sports headlines of the day and you can stitch those together so in 10 minutes or so, you’ve listened to four very short form podcasts and picked up that the main headlines that you need to hear for the day.

 

If you use another podcast out like with Pocket Casts which I use, you can create that yourself within there. You just really need to know which podcasts to go look for. The Trebble FM app will tell you which podcasts they are and make it pretty simple if you want to just set up your own playlist and pocket cast but either one of those apps, I think it’s a great way to get caught up fast without having to be invested in a long podcast.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So Tom my last one is an old favorite of mine with a modern update. So a lot of times especially if you’re doing a presentation you just want to screen capture, or to capture a picture of a website and then put it on to the slide. So a lot of times the easiest way is just do Control Print Screen, a little print screen button and it captures the screen and then you just paste it onto your slide and boom you’re done, simple and easy.

 

So that’s a great tip in itself. But there’s a tool out there called Snagit which takes it up like several more levels and allows you a lot of sophistication and what you capture on the screen, what’d you do with it, how you can crop it, edit it, blur it, put arrows, put text over it and its newest version will even let you do a simple screen video capture and very simple editing which may be all that you need. So if you do any presentation, any training other things like that where you’re explaining things, super useful tools.

 

(00:24:58)

 

Tom Mighell:  And my last tip again is about well-being and it’s about the idea of digital minimalism, which is a term that is the title of the book, a recent book by Cal Newport who did the Deep Work book it’s called Digital Minimalism and it is not about being anti-technology, it’s about being more intentional about the technology that you have, which is figuring out what value technology brings to your life and figuring out how best to square that technology and the value that it brings with the life that you want to lead.

 

And it’s about not being overrun by our technology but in using it in a way that supports our values and what we want to achieve both in the short term and in our lifetime and I think it’s a good read to think about it. This is not about digital detox, this is about thinking about thoughtfully how to be intentional about your use of technology, so that it’s best for you, for your family and for the profession.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So I think we did it Tom.

 

Tom Mighell: Well I’m not sure we did it in 20 minutes. I may have gone over on some of my tips but we got through it. Before we move on though to our second segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.

 

[Music]

 

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[Music]

 

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

 

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy. The Annual Consumer Electronics Show usually referred to as CES was recently held in Las Vegas. It’s an annual showcase for what will be available soon in the world of consumer electronics. So neither of us went this year but we’d love to follow the reporting to see what’s new and to prepare our technology budgets accordingly.

 

Our friend Steve Embry wrote a great two-part article on his perspectives as a lawyer attending the show at his tech crossroads blog and we highly recommend that for his always really interesting perspectives on technology as it relates to law.

 

We also scoured the reporting and wanted to talk about what interested us without comparing our notes first. So Tom, what got your attention?

 

Tom Mighell: Well what really got my attention this year was that there wasn’t any what I would consider to be a blockbuster at CES, not in my opinion anyway I didn’t really see anything that just kind of blew me away. There’s a lot of future forward technology and I think that for me what is the most interesting about CES that it’s always giving us a view of what’s just ahead.

 

It’s not quite there, we’re not quite at that point but it’s just ahead and it’s coming around the corner and I like CES to tell us what are the new trends and there were three things that I thought were the takeaways of things that were interesting to me.

 

First of all and what I’m actually really looking forward to once this happens and once they get it right is flexible screens. It’s not enough to have one screen, now I’ve got to have two screens and because two screens are too big we’ve got to find a way to fold them together, foldables aren’t quite ready yet, we’ve seen that with Samsung. They didn’t do a very good job on it but screens are definitely becoming more flexible, phones are coming first, the Motorola Razr is coming out in February. It’s supposed to be a foldable screen.

 

Dell and Lenovo debuted some really interesting laptops that have flexible screens on them. Next year I cannot wait to see what Windows is going to do with its foldable Duo which is not — it’s not a — it’s actually got a hinge on it. They’re not trying to make a flexible screen, they’re trying to make two screens that fit together which I think is actually the smarter move but interesting to see what they do next year can’t wait. I might actually buy something like that.

 

We talked about 5G on this podcast a while back. There are even more devices out there that that have 5G but you know what, still not a ton of progress on getting 5G networks everywhere, still not a lot of people on 5G. So we’ll see what happens there. And then I think that the other big takeaway is that the continued onslaught of sensors and cameras in devices, in things in your life continues unabated.

 

Some of the weird and wacky things that that were at CES this year included underwear that have sensors to monitor your vitals, a robot vacuum that can also patrol your house when you’re not there and a couple of different refrigerators, not just one but a couple of them from different manufacturers that use cameras to see the food that you’ve got, suggests what dishes you can make with that food and let you know when you’re running low on food.

 

(00:30:01)

 

So, I think we’re going to just see a lot of ways that things are being monitored, because monitoring things leads to data and data leads to information and it helps people be more useful. I don’t see that ending anytime soon. Those are my big takeaways. Dennis, what about you?

 

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I was just going to say, what was the one thing that you think you’re planning to buy?

 

Tom Mighell: Oh. I missed that. No, no, it’s not that what I planning to buy, it’s the gadget that I want the most, but I will never be able to — well I probably can afford it, but I will never buy it, is Segway’s new S-Pod, which is it looks like an egg, it’s kind of like a wheelchair but it’s on the two wheels that you would see on a Segway and you just sit in it and go, and I’m thinking when I get old enough to need some mobility or to do that, I want an S-Pod to take me everywhere, it looks awesome and I cannot wait.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So, we did not rehearse this at all or even reveal what we’re going to say, but the one thing that the gadgets/device that interests me the most was the Segway Scooter.

 

Tom Mighell: Get out of town.

 

Dennis Kennedy: It’s — no kidding. No, I’m not kidding at all. So which, you know, this scooter thing is kind of cool but as you get older, I was reading this thing that you — it takes a little bit more work than you want. So the idea of putting a Segway technology into scooter just makes it like more realizable to me, so it’s interesting that we had that similar approach.

 

So my reaction is I looked at all this stuff. So my first reaction is that when you go to read the articles about CES and the reviews, oh my god, it’s like people make it so hard to read, there’s a zillion ads popping up at you, videos all that kind of things. So it’s kind of hard to even figure out what’s going on and if I weren’t doing this podcast I would have given up before I went through all of these.

 

So one thing I noticed is a lot of things that are happening say like our smart home devices, huge, huge TVs and loud, loud, loud speakers. So for me has since we’ve moved to an apartment it’s almost like I’m not even in the target market for that anymore.

 

The other thing I noticed is that a lot of these devices still are like really cool engineering feats and cool for engineer’s face and even though it’s a consumer show it seems like they’re not quite to the consumer playship. Super interested in the wearables, so I would say the sleep aids for me, I think hearing aids not for me yet, but I think that is a really cool market and there’s a lot of health sensors out there.

 

All of which raises the issues I think in almost everything I saw of we really need to think about how — what data we’re providing and how it’s being shared, so that’s like the one cautionary tale, but look for Tom and me on our Segway’s before too long.

 

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 maybe you’re thinking of doing your own podcast, but you don’t know exactly how to get started or where to get started. Well hopefully, if Dennis and I can come together and do our online course that’ll be one opportunity for you, but in the meantime you might want to check out the Resource Guide provided by listenapp.co and it is a curated directory of important tools used by podcasters and I love the categories that they have.

 

So here you can find editing services, you can find educational resources, you can find the best hosting and analytics tools, you can find places to license music for your podcast, you can find a list of the best microphones to buy, note-taking, podcasts websites, recording software, scheduling, transcription, it’s all in a directory of different tools and sites that are available to help you start a podcast and make it successful. I think it’s a great resource to use and I think you — if you’re interested in a podcast this should be one of your resources.

 

Dennis Kennedy: So I have one that I think is actually as a practical matter is a super useful thing and so in the time I worked at Mastercard I worked with people all around the world and names can be really difficult to pronounce. And so there was a recent Harvard Business Review article that was simply called, if you don’t know how to say someone’s name just ask and I just think that’s a great piece of advice that a lot of people understand that their names are difficult for people and they’re happy — they’re happier to tell you how to pronounce their name even a couple of times, then to have hear you butcher it over and over again.

 

So, it’s just great useful advice and I think a really great parting shot. So the main conclusion I draw from this article and I would say for myself as well even though people don’t think that I have a difficult name is that some people still get it wrong. That nobody really minds if you ask how to pronounce their name and they may be very happy about it.

 

Tom Mighell: Well, speaking as someone whose name is almost never pronounced correctly. I agree with that wholeheartedly.

 

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 on the Legal Talk Network site.

 

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

 

If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can reach out to us on LinkedIn or don’t forget, you can leave us a voicemail. Our number is (720) 441-6820.

 

So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

 

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

 

If you liked what you heard today, please rate us in Apple podcasts and we’ll 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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