Good Tech Spending Decisions in Tough Economic Times

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

Good Tech Spending Decisions in Tough Economic Times

04/10/2020

[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: Welcome to Episode #258 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.

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.

Dennis Kennedy: And we 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 now, even more than ever, knowing the right tools will make all the difference and what a difference another week or two makes.

In our last episode we shared what we’ve learned and our best tips from the last few weeks of this massive shift to work from home. This week we are all in lockdown, the legal industry is seeing layoffs, reductions and much more. We all have to make smart decisions about spending, especially technology spending. 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 discussing making good tech spending decisions for tough economic times. In our second segment, Dennis asks for my help with court cutting, and as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one-tip website or observation you can start to use, the second that this podcast is over.

But first up, how do you make good economic decisions about technology spending in a time of maximum uncertainty, which is pretty much describes where we are right now. Here in my family, no one’s lost their job. We have had once salary reduction, possibly one more on the way depending on how things go. Already in the legal market, we’re seeing lawyer salaries being reduced, we see some our associate programs being canceled, and I’m going to guess that this is likely only the very beginning, and while this isn’t necessarily the time to go out and buy new technology, it’s also not the time to go without technology. So we thought we’d talk about how to approach technology spending when the economy is bad or at the very least uncertain.

So, Dennis, knowing you, I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you’re going to be recommending a portfolio approach. But let’s start with that fundamental question, which is, should we all, individuals and organizations be looking to cut technology expenses?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think the short answer is clearly yes. The longer answer is that we really have to be smart about how we do that and the better question might be what we need to do to reduce unnecessary tech expenses, and I think we’ll dive into that topic a lot and so you hear talk these days about essential jobs and essential things and non-essential. So it’s almost like the same approach to technology. We try to figure out what it is that’s unnecessary that you’re spending on and use that as a place to start, and I think that’s going to help you walk down the path towards smarter technology spending.

Tom Mighell: Well, I think the unfortunate answer is that many of us are going to need to cut expenses not just in technology but in a lot of different areas, and like all of these other areas, it’s not necessarily about cutting expenses or it doesn’t have to be. It’s about figuring out the smartest way to spend what you have, or to use what you have to get the most out of what you need.

So that might mean reducing in some areas, cutting out entirely in other areas. It might mean increasing your use of technology or spending something more that you usually wouldn’t do. So it’s really about being smart on your spending to get to a point. I think what we will talk about more is really about how to make those smart decisions so that you are keeping the lights on while making sure that you don’t go bust.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, in fairness, if we all had good disaster and strategic plans on technology, all of this would be easier but we really don’t have those plans. This is sort of unprecedented anyway. I sort of felt with my tech resolutions for this year. I was in a better place because I was thinking about revamping my technology and simplifying it. So I do have sort of a plan but I can see right away it’s not complete enough.

So for those of us who can’t dust off the strategic plan, we’re scrambling a little bit, and even with the plan I have like I said, I don’t feel it’s that complete. So what about you, Tom?

(00:05:07)

Tom Mighell: Well, it hard to hear what’s interesting. If we think of a disaster recovery plan as a strategy that gets you or your firm up and running with the bare minimum of resources and still provide the right level of security to client information that provides the basics of running a law office, a law practice then I would argue that most lawyers outside of the biggest law firms don’t have one. I would guess that most big law firms have some type of business continuity because they operate more like regular businesses do than smaller firms. But I would say that the lawyers in those big firms probably don’t know that their firms have disaster recovery plans or at least most of them anyway.

What’s interesting about this is, I’m thinking back to Katrina. There were hundreds of webinars, and books, and other materials basically practically begging lawyers to develop a disaster recovery plan, and I guess to be fair, we’ve made some progress, more offices are paperless now, but certainly not all of them. More lawyers have moved to the cloud but certainly, certainly not all of them.

But it’s interesting, I’ve seen stories from the past two weeks just on Twitter or other anecdotes from lawyers who are having trouble working from home because their entire practice is actually located in their office on paper or in servers, so I don’t think that the message got through to nearly enough lawyers.

From Katrina, I certainly don’t have a plan, I mean our company has the outlines of a plan but has it been tested, is it complete? Not even close. But I would like to believe that I’m a little bit farther along than some lawyers that I’ve seen about because we at least have got the outlines of what it takes to be able to work remotely, to be able to work in a way that where it’s not possible to work in the way that you’d work before.

Dennis Kennedy: And it always takes something extreme to remind us that it does make a lot of sense to have a forward-looking plan but most of us fall down on that, let’s face that, so I think really we have to start with where we are and that where we wish we were and for most of this, I think that means triage right-away, and to me I think there’s sort of three areas, Tom, so where do we decrease spending, what do we free spending and where do we invest perhaps more expenditure in. I think that’s fairly uncontroversial, but what’s your reaction to that, Tom.

Tom Mighell: Well, I agree with those categories, but I’m wondering. As I was thinking about them, I wonder where there is a fourth area that doesn’t neatly fit into them or maybe it fits into several of them, and that is, to make better use of the technology that you have or that subscription you still have that you never used or some way to take advantage of something that you’ve got and use it in a way that allows you to save money or at least not spend money by making better use of what you’ve got. And when we talk about that on all kinds of podcasts and there might be those opportunities to do that here that make you more efficient, that help you save money or at least not spend money that you haven’t thought about.

Dennis Kennedy: And it is potentially one of the cheaper investments that you can make. So if you look and say I want to cut this out, I want to cut this out, and then you say, oh wait, there are some features or some aspects of this technology that we’re not using, but if we do use it, it would help us find other savings or move forward, then it could also fall into that investment category.

Tom Mighell: Well, and like for example real quick, I’m using Adobe Acrobat, but you know what, I forgot totally that my Adobe Acrobat also allows me to sign documents electronically, which now I really need to do better. So maybe if I just spend a little bit of money subscribing to that electronics, eSignature part of Adobe Acrobat maybe that would help me get my work done and it would be worth doing rather than trying to sign documents and send them out and worry about paper signatures.

Dennis Kennedy: Right, and I think that’s — so usually when like a salesperson says to me, like what kind of investment are you willing to make as their way of enticing me to spend money? I kind of pull back from that. I actually think this is a case where I think the phrase “investment” makes more sense than just spending, and your example is a good one, Tom, because you could say, oh, I need the ability to do electronic signatures and it’s not just like I’m spending a small amount every month. It’s actually a great investment because I can leverage what I have fairly cheaply and not have to go out and say, oh, I need to get a DocuSign or get some other electronic signature platform because I already have it.

(00:09:46)

Tom Mighell: And I think that what I like about using the word “invest” is that this is really part of your disaster recovery plan, is investing in the technologies that are going to help you out the next time that this comes along because we can’t assume that Katrina was the end or that this is the end or that there might be something ten years from now where we have to do something like this again or we have to alter the way that we practice it, and so I think that lawyers tend to be prepared for a lot of things, technology isn’t one of them and I think that by investing in some things, I think that eSignature is just one of them. I think that certainly we and everybody else has kind of exhausted the topic of online meeting services, but if there’s not kind of an explosion in lawyers using that after this whole thing is done, I will be very surprised.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay, so although we’ve been talking about investment, the fact is, Tom, I think you are like me that investment is something right now that we’re just talking about, that what we’re really doing is we are cutting, and we are looking at things that should be cut and we’re trying to save money where we can. And so I think that when I look at the cut category, I think that, Tom, you and I always like to talk about audits. I really think that’s a part of it. So I think you’re looking for what’s the low-hanging fruit here.

So what technology, and especially what technology spending is unnecessary, what aren’t you really using? What is just too expensive and that it makes sense to go to a cheaper service and what are places that you could move to those cheaper alternatives easier? So you may look at things — and I know this is what I’m doing. I’m saying, okay, so I have this service and it costs so much a month, do I really need that? Can I get something else? Am I even using it? So I think if you are starting to go through and say, what are those things where it makes sense to do some cutting that might even be fairly painless, but just get that low-hanging fruit as quickly as you can.

Tom Mighell: I think you’re right and in fact my notes here have the words “low-hanging fruit” in here. I do think that this is the hardest one to follow-through on. Certainly if you have unnecessary expenses, admittedly — I haven’t practiced law now for 12 years. So I don’t know how lawyers approach things but I was thinking, well, what if there are lawyers who’ve purchased maybe more than one of the online research services? You may not have, you may have decided that just one is enough for you and maybe I’m just talking crazy here, but if you did, do you really need all three of them? Do you have more than one of anything that you’re using? If you purchase technology that you don’t use or if you have subscriptions that you don’t take advantage of, I think this is excellent low-hanging fruit to get rid of.

But the caution that I have here with cost-cutting is the potential danger of moving to a low-cost alternative is you really cannot sacrifice security or confidentiality for cost. So don’t just go with a cheaper alternative if it — unless you are certain that it’s not going to sacrifice security or confidentiality, there’s a whole — not to bring it up again, but there’s a whole backlash against Zoom right now and there’s a ton of other video services that people are touting, but we don’t really know whether they are anymore or less secure than Zoom happens to be.

So I am worried that lawyers will actually choose to forego technology altogether rather than stick with potentially a more expensive alternative, but I really think that that’s why I think that this is going to be some hard decisions to make. I think that there’s a balancing act you have to have is saving money is one thing, but you cannot sacrifice the security or confidentiality of the information you’re protecting for your client.

Dennis Kennedy: And there’s another way to look at the cut category too, and I would think of it as reducing. It’s possible in this environment especially in cloud services or where you are working with the longtime provider that you can actually negotiate a lower price or maybe the ability to go for three months at a reduced price or no price, because there are some cloud services definitely making services available to lawyers at a reduced or even free in some cases. So you might be able to leverage your existing providers and just get a reduction or a delay in what you owe and that can help you through this period as well.

And then, the second big category that we talked about, Tom, is freezing, and so this is what we’re saying we need to keep some things that are necessary or it has a very high cost of switching, and we’re also looking at things that actually keep the lights on and the doors open. So the technology you need to actually help you get revenue, to collect revenue, to send out the bills, all those sorts of things. Does the technology help you survive and then there are some basic areas that Tom has already touched on security backup, remote work that you’re saying, okay, these are the things we need, those technology which would kind of freeze them and kind of keep the costs where we are, but we just need to have them so they do not go on to the cut list.

(00:15:00)

Tom Mighell: I really don’t have anything to add here other than to say that, yup, the bare minimum or the minimum that you need to keep everybody working, to keep the lights on, to keep the law practice in business and if there’s technology that pays for itself, then all the better. If there’s a way that you can leverage that kind of technology then it’s got to be, I guess I would call it “cost neutral”, so that it’s not imposing an additional cost.

Like what Dennis mentioned, those basics of keeping your data secure, having an adequate backup, having the minimum technology tools you need to practice; a computer, an Internet connection, tools for creating documents are obviously the bare minimum that you need.

I mean, Dennis, you talk about an audit, this is another time to take a look at as part of that audit you make a list of all the technology you have and part of that list needs to be what is the minimum that I need to survive and operate my practice and that goes at the top of the list and never comes off.

Dennis Kennedy: And I would say the other thing that I think is a great example in this category is that if you say that you’re using laptops for yourself and the lawyers in your office and now all the staff in the office as well these days, then you are on a — I mean it used to be like a three-year replacement cycle, I think it’s more realistic these days, it’s a four or five-year replacement cycle. To me, it’s like super-easy decision in the freeze category is to kick out that replacement cycle for another year, unless it’s actually causing a significant problem for someone.

So you’re looking at things like that and then obviously if there’s some purchases that you were planning to pull the trigger on this year, you might also delay those, and then the last category, Tom, and I think the one that’s easiest to overlook, it might be the most important as time goes on is the investment category, and I don’t know, why don’t you kick off the conversation about invest?

Tom Mighell: Well, for me this category includes the technologies that — as I said before, one, are going to help you survive the next downturn if we have one. Two, help you become more efficient which hopefully will help you survive a downturn, and three, hopefully help you learn more about technology, what are the tools that can help you the most now that will in turn help you serve your clients better in the future?

I think the low-hanging fruit here are the practice management tools, the document assembly tools, the workflow tools. If you’re not already using them, this is a great time to invest in that.

I think that our friends in AI might not like that I’m saying this, but I really don’t think that now is the time to invest in Artificial Intelligence tools. I just don’t think it’s a must-have in hard economic times unlike some of these other tools. I think that there are other priorities that I would choose to invest in. The AI is a nice to have, but I don’t know that it’s a must-have today, and I would look at it that way to say, what is going to serve me the best moving forward and while AI I think is going to get there and it will serve you well, I think that you need the fundamentals helping you before you get to something as advanced and as powerful as Artificial Intelligence or even other more advanced tools.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I mean, I’d also look at the basics to say, okay, so what is it that’s going to help me and in a lot of ways it’s what’s going to make it easy for clients to pay you?

And so, if you’re not happy with your current billing system and approach or in any aspect of it, that’s a place that you might want to invest. I think to the extent your firm has strategies, you want to say what do we need to do in technology that will align to that overall strategy? I think anything that’s client-focused or client-driven becomes a potential area of investment and that includes things like client portals and client delivery tools. And then I think you should also look at accelerating your movement to the cloud because you’re learning right now the importance of being able that people can work from home, work from anywhere, and that means cloud.

And then as Tom pointed out, I think anything that’s going to help you with workflow process improvement and that the ability to deliver good legal work and deliverables in a changed environment, where your clients might want to pay less frankly, all those things can help you, and those are really sound technology investments. You are probably just going to pick a few of them, but try to pick the ones that make the most sense for the overall strategy of your firm and survival of the firm.

Tom Mighell: So I’m guessing to hear by the way you’ve made this description, I’m guessing that the answer to my initial question is, yes, you are moving to a portfolio theory.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. So I think we’ve sort of learned this and one of the things that reinforces the portfolio theory is that what we have experienced in this with our investments in the last few months.

(00:20:09)

So now some of us might be kicking ourselves because we had invested too much in stocks and we wish we would have just had cash, but now we know that cash is going to make pretty close to 0% and so if we had this totally safe investment portfolio odds are in five years from now, to have it all in cash, a 100% in cash would not be like the smartest move. So historically that’s been true.

So I look at technology in the same way and I say we need to look at sort of short-term, medium-term, long-term approaches that we are taking, not cut out the long-term approach. We need to balance high risk to low risk, obviously we are going to skew more than ever to the lower risk side and we are going to look at low return versus high return thinking about technology. And I just think you have got to get some kind of balance in a portfolio approach and you are going to skew way more conservative I think in the coming year, but I think you have to balance that in some way; it’s the same way you balance a portfolio by putting some higher risk, higher return in longer term investments in there.

So yes Tom, I did go to portfolio theory, which is not a surprise to you at all.

Tom Mighell: Not surprising in the slightest. So let’s wrap this up by maybe giving some tips or giving advice on what to do first, do you need to get help. I will go first and then Dennis you can wrap this up with any final thoughts that you have got.

I think I have got two main tips right now. The first one may or may not be controversial, because although it may not be for everyone, you might look into seeing if you qualify for a small business loan under the new legislation, it might help you out either with investing in technology or in keeping the technology that you currently have, something to think about.

And I am going to repeat again what I mentioned in the last podcast, which is the resources that Bob Ambrogi has compiled on his page of the legal tech companies that are providing free or discounted legal tech services while we are still in crisis, I think this is absolutely the time to take advantage of them, especially if you are going to make smart investments in technology at some point in the near future. You can try them out, you can learn about them. If this is truly a downtime for you in terms of work that you have the time, there is no better time to look at some of these tools, figure out do these make sense for you, can they or should they be added to the portfolio approach that Dennis is talking about and maybe when we come out on the end of this, that will have served you well.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah and I think it comes down to, we talk in terms of audits, the easiest way to think about this, but we learn every single day that you can’t really manage unless you can measure what you have. So you just need to figure out what it is that you have and that’s going to help you make better decisions.

One great place is can you get more out of what you already have and then I think it really does come down to this question of, do you need to get help and I think that on the cost cutting side, definitely having the outside eye may help you there on the cost cutting side, but I would say more important on the investment side, that’s where I think you need that, where having somebody who can look at what you have, what your strategic plans are and give you just a little bit of advice on that can make a big difference and kind of keep you from going in a direction that might not make as much sense and then to keep reminding you.

I think somebody on the outside can keep reminding you, like talk to your clients, talk to your clients, see what your clients want and that will I think really help you drive some good decisions.

Tom Mighell: All right, and before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.

[Music]

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

[Music]

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

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy. From time to time we use this segment so Tom can educate me on something I probably should have done a long time ago. So today that’s cord cutting.

(00:24:52)

Dennis Kennedy: As I looked at my personal money outflow the cable bill sure seems like a great place to cut expenses. And of course it’s been a great place to cut expenses for a long time and many of you who have already done away with the cable and the big cable bills would call me a laggard in that category, but Tom of course is too polite to do that.

So Tom, could you walk me through how do I actually do some cord cutting; I have already noticed that cable providers do not make it very easy for you to learn how to do this?

Tom Mighell: Okay. So as I was preparing for this I realized we could easily make an entire A segment out of this, because there is a lot to talk about. So I will try to break it down into three quick parts.

The first decision to make is to decide whether you want to use an antenna to capture broadcasts of your local over-the-air networks. There is a number of antennas that can do this. The downside is you also need a DVR that works with antennas if you plan to record any local network shows. I am not a fan of antennas so I just skipped over this entirely. I didn’t want to do it. A lot of people do it, I didn’t, I am not a fan so I said no and I moved on.

Next, you need to figure out the other hardware that you are going to need. Some people make do with a good laptop or phone that they connect to their TV, they can stream that way, and it’s easy to do. I prefer to have something a little more stable or a little more full-featured.

Then you have got two choices; you either want to consider and granted this is — we have talked in our A segment about cost-cutting and now here I am talking about buying stuff. The two ways to do this are a Smart TV or a media hub. There are a lot of Smart TVs out there; Samsung, LG, a bunch of companies make them. They allow you to connect directly to some of the streaming services that I am going to talk about next.

Or you can buy a media hub like a Roku or an Amazon Fire TV or an Apple TV or a Chromecast. We went the Roku route, they are not terribly expensive. We bought one for every room and hooked it up to the TV, hooked it up to Wi-Fi, it works quite well.

Once you have got that hardware and I think hopefully a solid Internet connection, that’s one of the tech purchases that you really can’t skimp on, having a good solid Internet connection these days is critical.

You need to choose your streaming service. There are two different kinds of streaming services. Again, we could talk about this for a long time; there is on-demand streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+.

Or there is live TV streaming services that actually stream live television like YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, Sling TV, there is a new service from AT&T called AT&T TV NOW. For us, we chose the service that had the most channels for a reasonable price, for us that was YouTube TV. We get local networks, we get the sports that we want, we get all the channels that we usually watch and we supplement that with HBO and Netflix and Amazon Prime for the movies and the things that we can’t get on YouTube. All of that together works out to about a third of the cost of our previous cable bill and so far it has been worth it.

There have been some bumps. YouTube TV’s DVR doesn’t work exactly like your normal DVR does, but all in all the tradeoffs have been I think minor.

Dennis, have I convinced you yet?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, well, I am convinced. So I have a couple of questions. So I know you and I talk about how people just lost their minds over privacy and security issues around Zoom, but I would say the area that people have shown the most concern about on privacy is Smart TV. So I definitely do not want to go that route. So I am Apple TV because I already have one.

Tom Mighell: Yeah.

Dennis Kennedy: I do want to use antenna because it looks like I will get — being close to Detroit I will have access to tons of channels. So I am not like in a really rural area. It sounds like I am going to have to buy a special DVR that works with that antenna setup, is that right?

Tom Mighell: Well, see, what I am going to ask you though, I am going to challenge you first and say, what I would do first is I would go to one of the live streaming services and plug in your ZIP code and it will tell you what local channels you get and you can see what you can get live and let that drive your decision. If you don’t like the choices and you feel like there are other Detroit options for you that are not included, then I would go the antenna route.

I mean for Dallas, I mean granted I do live right in Dallas, so I don’t — but every single local TV channel is included, so there wasn’t a single local channel that I had to worry about. So that would be my first step. But it’s true that if you — my understanding is, is that if you use an antenna to record those channels, you have to have a separate DVR for that.

Dennis Kennedy: And then everything else would be on-demand and I was actually thinking about putting off the YouTube TV until I decided whether I was actually missing enough, based on what we were actually watching.

(00:29:56)

And I guess the lockdown period we are in now has made me question how significant it is to catch every single sporting event, which has always been the test and I think that’s probably what would move me to like a YouTube TV, but I am not at this point totally convinced how much I am going to miss from that. Plus, I have like potentially an ESPN app that would give me access to sporting events. So that to me is the big wild card.

Tom Mighell: What I like about YouTube TV is that based on your region and your geography it will give you access to the Fox Sports channels that serve your market. And so I can get access to all of the Dallas sporting events that I need to if I were so inclined to do it. I haven’t terribly missed them too much, but those are what I get.

I tend to record only the network shows, a couple of off Network shows, but to be honest we spend more of our time on things like Amazon Prime or Netflix watching other shows these days, mostly because there is not a lot of new stuff coming out on the networks because of the lockdown.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. And I would say that we have Amazon Prime and we have Netflix, so it’s kind of like I think I can get pretty far pretty cheaply. So yeah, so that’s been really helpful Tom, especially on that DVR piece, which was one thing I hadn’t been so sure of, but the YouTube TV as I understand is probably about $50 a month, it looked like from when I was pricing it.

Tom Mighell: $50 a month and most of the other services are comparable. The AT&T TV NOW is actually pretty comparable too, but that’s only for a year, so don’t be — I initially thought about going to that, but then I realized that that’s just a one year promotion and then it goes up really expensive, it goes up over a 100 and some dollars after that year is out, so I might avoid that, but most of these other ones are pretty comparable.

Dennis Kennedy: And then the other thing, the other point that’s worth making is that you invest part of the savings into the fastest Internet connection you can get.

Tom Mighell: Oh, absolutely. I mean I would say the one thing I did keep was I kept my fiber, my one 1G or one gigabit speed, which is just awesome. We get great Wi-Fi speeds and great — that’s what I have chosen, I don’t spend a ton of money on my Internet, but it is absolutely the best investment we have.

Dennis Kennedy: Great. So now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip, website, or observation that you can use the second this podcast ends.

Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: Okay, I have two tips, both around our current COVID-19 crisis. One is to call out a COVID-19 Resources for Lawyers page on the Legal Talk Network site. There are a number of our Legal Talk Network colleagues who are recording episodes on coronavirus and on the changing practice of law and federal legislation and all sorts of things about working from home and dealing with the law and other types of things. So I encourage you to visit that page. If you are not already subscribing to these podcasts anyway, go visit the page and look at all the other resources there.

And then I guess on the lighter side, I will direct you to, you probably need a haircut.com, which is recognizing that before we come off of lockdown we likely will all need a haircut and this website for $18 will set you up in an online meeting with a professional hairstylist who will direct you on how to cut your own hair.

So if you are brave enough and desperate enough, you can get a haircut — give yourself a haircut for $18 while being guided by a professional. So you probably need a haircut.com.

Dennis Kennedy: It’s interesting because I actually pulled out — looked at some of my college pictures to see what I might look like now with hair that long. So I don’t know — the great thing, I don’t think works that well with long hair, but we will see when we get there.

So I also have two things and they are upcoming soon right after you have listened — after this podcast comes out. So first one, Rocket Matter is doing something they call Rocket Aid, which is a two-day CLE presentation, $25, that goes to a number of charities and lots of great CLE content, especially on remote computing, lots of well-known experts and ways to improve — and a number of other ways to improve your practice of law, April 16 and 17, all day, 12.5 hours of CLE credit. Congratulations to Larry Port of Rocket Matter for coming up with this idea.

(00:34:48)

And then I am going to be involved with a company I advise called FoundationLab and they are going to be doing two workshops on innovation and they are called Beyond Ideas and the idea is that we will focus on not just ideation and brainstorming, but kind of the next step, so how do you validate that your ideas are good and how do you test them and design experiments.

And I helped the guys at FoundationLab do this workshop live and we want to try it online. So, it’s free, information will be at foundationlab.co and then we will publicize it on social media so that will get you to it as well.

But if you are interested in innovation and moving the next step down the path from your latest great idea, this will give you some really good techniques and almost a scientific approach to take your idea, test it and see if you can move it to something that actually can go out into the real world.

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 on the Legal Talk Network’s page for this podcast episode.

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 along with transcripts.

If you would like to get in touch with us, reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget, you can leave us a voicemail at (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.

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.

[Music]

Outro: Thanks for listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together’ from ABA Books or Amazon, and join us every other week for another edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Continue Reading