Top Tips & Tools for Better Online Presentations

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

Top Tips & Tools for Better Online Presentations

05/22/2020

[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 261 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: First of all we would like to thank Colonial Surety Company Bonds & Insurance for bringing you this podcast. Whatever court bond you need get a quote and purchase online at colonialsurety.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: And of course, we want to mention the second edition of our book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies’ which is available on Amazon. Everyone now especially agrees that collaboration is essential and more than ever knowing the right tools can make all the difference.

As I like to say at the start of our recent podcasts, what a difference another week or two of pandemic makes.

In our last episode, we talked about ways to improve your audio and video presence and even to create your own production studio setting. In this episode we wanted to share some of our best tips on presenting online. We’ve done a lot of online presentations over the years.

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

Tom Mighell: Well Dennis, in this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will indeed be discussing ways to improve your online presentations.

In our second segment we will — ye, answer a voicemail question from a listener something we’d like to do more of, remember we have a voicemail and voicemail box at 720-441-6820, that’s 720-441-6820. That’s the number for our voicemail box and we’ll be answering a question on our second segment.

And as usual we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can start to use a second that this podcast is over.

But first up, nobody have you noticed is doing really very many live or in-person presentations these days, it’s all moving online and as you might imagine presenting online content requires a different skill set than you might need for in-person presentations.

So in this episode we thought we would discuss some of the important things you might consider to make sure that your online presentation is on point.

Dennis, how many online presentations have you done lately?

Dennis Kennedy: Well really Tom, it’s all of them lately. Seriously though I taught half semesters of two classes online, law school classes and I’ve done several webcasts and I’ll be doing one on LinkedIn with the Allison Shields tomorrow. So it’s really been a quite a turn. So nothing live at all. I don’t really see much live coming for me and maybe even through the end of the year. What about you, Tom?

Tom Mighell: Well, I have to say it’s been kind of a refreshing break for me. I’ve given one presentation on guess what, Online Meeting Tools. So very timely, but I will tell you that working from home as a matter of course, pretty much all I do when I give presentations these days for my company is we do online webinars frequently.

So I am giving online presentations maybe once or twice a month sometimes depending on how often we do things and so I not giving as many as I usually have, but definitely has been — that definitely something that I’ve had a lot of experience with over the years.

And I think that, I think that we both agree that you need a different skill set to do something online. Dennis, what are your thoughts on what’s necessary for giving online presentations versus in-person?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think it’s — it really is as you said different set of skills to learn and the good news is and we’ll talk about this is that a lot of people have done the work on this in terms of online education and other things like that, so there’s a lot of resources out there that can help us and we’re just at the early stage of this and I know that for the fall semester, I want to spend a good amount of time the summer looking at online courses and how to do them better.

(00:04:56)

But I think the big one for me that I really noticed is that, if you don’t see the people you’re talking to and you’re not seeing the video of them, which I don’t think is an exact substitute for seeing people live and you can’t interact with them the same way you do at the live audience, that really changes everything, it changes the energy, it changes your approach, you don’t get a good sense of the reaction and it’s just a completely different skill set. But I really track it to the energy that’s missing that you get from doing a live presentation.

Tom, is that sort of you — you sort of feel like you don’t know what’s landing and and what’s not, you don’t necessarily see people’s heads nodding yes. So I don’t know, do you feel that, that loss of energy?

Tom Mighell: So my question to you is, can you see my screen, can you actually see the notes that I wrote down to talk about this point, because I have almost the exact same words that you’re using, because I think that when you are presenting to a live audience, there is an energy level and that you gain your energy from their energy. You can sense, you know I usually will glom on to the one or two people in the audience or maybe more hopefully who are nodding along and were saying we get it, we understand. I look frequently at them and that helps me move along better.

And I think even if I can give an online presentation where I could see a bunch of faces staring back at me on Zoom, would still give me a sense of that energy. But I’ll tell you the one presentation — well any webinar that I give, it’s like speaking into the void and you have no idea if you’re killing it, you have no idea if you’re bombing, there’s no way to tell if you’re — if something you say this funny is, is landing. I mean there are things that I’ve said in person that got great laughter and then when you say it there and you hear nothing in response, I mean it’s — it’s a terrible feeling at first when you first have it happen.

And frankly I think that what it can lead people to do is, it can actually lead you to be more tentative the longer that you go along, that you lose some of the energy and that’s kind of the danger that you run into and I think that’s one of the first tips we want to talk about is, don’t let the fact that there’s no audience there drag your energy level down, you have to keep it up like you are in front of an audience of 500 people and you’re killing it no matter whether you can see them or not or whether you’re killing it or not.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, it’s like one of those things that in terms you may use the same hand gestures you would use if you were talking live or like big gestures, just to kind of help your energy. You might decide to speak a little faster. So there’s some things like things like that, and it is weird when you do get the reaction.

So at the end of one of my classes I finished up and all the students started clapping, on Zoom and it was — it was really kind of a weird feeling but it was cool, but it’s like really hard to know that that things were going over as apparently well as is as they did.

Tom Mighell: Well, I will tell you real quick and I’m sorry for interrupting, but I’ll tell you real quick just to on the point that you have is, when I give my online webinars, I, I don’t do this on purpose. I just have started doing it just instinctively. I will start gesturing, I will start moving my hands around as if I’m on stage talking to people and I will tell you it does wonders for the way that I — it does wonders for my own energy, it makes me feel like I’m in front of people, I’m sort of pretending that I’m and I tell you it’s so much easier than just sitting in front of a microphone and talking into it, doing those gestures and kind of living, living like you’re giving that presentation really does make a difference.

Dennis Kennedy: So and then there’s two other things that I wanted to mention is that and they’re sort of related, but so one is that when you’re presenting online, there’s a lot more things that can go wrong. You can have a lot of moving parts. So you might have a chat session, you might have polling questions, you might have like Q&A thing, you might be sharing screens, you might be looking at who’s muted not muted, all these sorts of things can happen. You might have little internet glitches, you might have sound glitches.

So there’s — it can be a lot of moving parts and then in that sense, if you do decide to share screens then I think your approach to slides, you really need to rethink it, and I’ve still haven’t decided what’s, what’s better to go with like really sparse slides when you’re doing online, or to put more information, more like the traditional bullet point approach which I typically will never use going live and in-person.

(00:10:03)

But in some cases might make a little bit more sense when you’re online and sharing the screen, because it’s right in front of people, and then you also want to have a good understanding of where — and sometimes you just don’t of what people are seeing when you’re showing those slides or you just see a small box in the corner, if you’re co-presenting. Are we both on the screen at the same time. So there’s some things out there.

So those are sort of two big things that, that I’ve found as I’ve done more of these Tom.

Tom Mighell: Two quick things on that. I think that the fact that things can go wrong is a lesson that you really need to know how to use the technology that you’re using. You need to practice on it frankly if you haven’t practiced on it before.

And my example for that is, last week and this wasn’t a presentation, this was just a meeting with a brand new client and the one of my colleagues was getting ready to show a number of different documents, and she was verbally taking everyone in the meeting, there’s probably 10 or 15 people who are attending this meeting, taking them all through her entire mental process and she was saying out loud, oh that’s not working, oh, I can’t, oh, this, this is not happening the right way and oh, I can’t toggle between these screens. Okay, what if I do this. Maybe if I do this, this will work.

If you know your technology you’re not going to have those issues. I think that we all have had experiences when technology doesn’t go right, so be prepared so that you’re not — you’re ready to ad-lib in case your technology goes wrong, but I think the better lesson is, make technology go right for you or at least know how to use it.

Here’s my question to you Dennis about slides, because I’m sort of surprised that you haven’t said this yourself. I always fall down on the side of, I like to have more content than you prefer on a slide whether it’s live or whether it’s virtual. I want my — the people that I present to, to have some content to take with them rather than just what I say to them. I want them to have both.

But here’s what I’ve noticed after a month of being locked down and attending a lot of webinars, not everybody’s using slides. I’ve been in conferences where slides aren’t being used at all and people are just joining us from their dining room or their living room or their office and they’re just talking and there’s no slides at all.

So when we’re talking now about this new world of presentations, are slides necessary period?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and then you also have to remember that people are attending your presentation in different ways, so some people might be on their phones, so even if you have slides they might not be looking at them or they might not be able to read them, some people are just on audio. Like I was on a webcast today where I just put in my AirPods and I don’t think I watched any of it, but I was just doing other things and walking around the apartment, and so whatever slides they had were meaningless to me.

So it all comes back to — some of the stuff just goes back to those basic presenting skills of like knowing your audience, learning your audience, no other preferences that sort of thing. You know that’s what I found, so yeah, I’m struggling a bit Tom with slides. I still think I’m going to end up in my comfort zone, rather than to try to over think it.

Tom Mighell: Yeah, no I — I actually prefer to have slides with some content on them, because I want my audience to have a takeaway. I want them to have something to take with them that’s not just my words, in case they’re not taking notes, in case they’re not — I need them to have some sort of documented proof that I did something.

So let’s maybe talk about some of the other issues. What else have we learned? I know that you’ve put here in the questions about whether or not it’s useful to have other people handle the tech for you, handle tech in questions, do you think that’s a good idea, a bad idea, ideal what — how do you fall down on that issue?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I was — I did a class where I was sharing the screen doing breakout sessions and a number of other things, and I really wished to have somebody handling the tech. I’m a lot better at the questions than I used to be, but I think if you have somebody who can handle that especially if you’re concern about security and privacy where you have a waiting room and stuff like that, especially where you have the breakout rooms, it would be nice to have somebody who can handle all that stuff.

You know obviously, you don’t always get the chance to do that, but that kind of ties back to — I would say what I’ve learned so far are two big things. One is that I’m just beginning to learn and there’s a lot more for me to learn and that I just think you go simple, simple, simple until you develop familiarity and confidence.

(00:15:01)

And so having a bunch of things going on is, is tricky and if you have the opportunity to have that co-host who can handle some of the tech stuff and especially the questions and things that can really help you. Obviously it’s not going to happen every time.

Tom Mighell: Well, and so I agree with you about the tech. I think that having someone who can help with the technology is useful, but in one specific instance is it really useful and I noticed this when I — if I ever give webinars for somebody else and there’s some — a team to help you with that, the best, the best feature of that is you are always going to have someone trying to attend your meeting who is going to post in the chat or in the help saying, I can’t hear the audio or why won’t this work and they’re complaining and if you as the speaker are having to manage it, then you become distracted just like my colleague did and you don’t really focus on it.

Let someone else focus on it and I think that, that’s a good, a good choice of that. With questions, I have a slightly different approach, because I think that — I think that there’s two ways to answer questions during a presentation. I think that if they ask a question during your talking and it’s related to what you’re talking about, I think it’s appropriate to answer that question in line and in time with what you’re talking about, and that’s why I like to have the question show up on the side of the screen, so I can always kind of keep track of what the questions are and I can pick and choose.

But you know that there will always be someone in the presentation who will ask you this out of left field question that has nothing to do with what you’re talking about, and say oh by the way, what about this. Well those are the questions you can wait till the end.

So answer the ones that you need to answer and I tend to want to handle those myself. I feel like if there’s a moderator to ask the questions that feels less authentic to me, I’d rather answer them myself and talk about it myself, but obviously I don’t — that’s not a live or die on that, but that’s kind of how I prefer to handle it.

Dennis Kennedy: And the other thing I would say and this relates to questions is that what I’ve realized is that on these online presentations, online meetings that chat is actually a second channel, that’s can occur simultaneously. And Tom, as you know from when we used to do these podcasts and stuff in it, we would do anything by video, you would like instant message me with something and I would never look for it.

So now, I really use the chat and now I can see it a lot better than I used to. At the time I’m aware of it and there may be separate conversations going on, if you’re co-presenting with somebody, you might be responding somebody in chat and it’s just — as we move to more of a chat world, that I think awareness, that that’s going on. that’s why it can be kind of complicated to speak if you have a number of things going on, and you’re — it’s just you and you’re responding to the chat.

And again, part of my learnings have come from working with students who will even though they might not want to raise their hand or to speak out in front of people, will ask me questions in chat, so you have to pay attention to it.

So I think as a speaker you need to be aware of what’s happening in the chat session, which again is, shows how many different things are going on as you’re trying to do a presentation.

Tom Mighell: Which I think is a new thing. I mean chat wasn’t always the thing that you describe in online presentations. I think more people are making use of it and I really think that the reasons you describe, back-channel between speakers to talk about things, legitimate questions that people might be asking are great, but I will tell you I’ve been to a couple of online conferences where they’ve left the chat open and it’s really open season, it’s where they — somebody will ask a question, why would the speaker say X & Y and then another attendee will come in and say well because they said this you dummy, and then they almost get into a fight and have these kind of side conversations that don’t make any sense and are actually distracting.

And so I don’t really know how to fix that. I’m not sure that you can or want to, but I think that there’s a good way to use chat and a not so a good way to use chat and I think we’re seeing both of those.

Dennis Kennedy: Then also I think there are some other things. So one thing I have a question about is and that I prefer that when I’m watching people do online presentations, that they actually are quite close to the screen so that their face takes up most of the screen, as is my preference, but what I’ve heard from a lot of people is they don’t like that. They prefer that you – that feels too close to them.

(00:20:02)

Dennis Kennedy:  What I’ve heard, from a lot of people is they don’t like that. They prefer that you have — that feels too close to them and so you see more people sitting further back and I actually decided to sit further back from the camera than I used to but I don’t — actually when I’m looking at the screen while I’m talking, I don’t like that. I would prefer to be closer. But it’s kind of –- you need to kind of figure out what — again it’s like, what is the — what does the audience like, you cater to that and then I want to look at the research as well. I have to say, hey are there — I’m not going to say best practices but that’s sort of the way they think of it. Like does it makes sense to sit at certain distance, what signal does it give people if you’re closer, you’re far that sort of thing. So I don’t know — I think Tom, you’re one of the people who might have told me that I was too close to the camera but —

Tom Mighell: Well I think what’s useful about this discussion is to let the audience know that we’re watching each other on video right now and Dennis is very close to the camera and I am further back from the camera. So I am the opposite, and I’m a little closer to the opposite. I should be closer, doesn’t really make sense with this computer and this desk but I tend to agree. I think that closer up is a better experience. I think the farther away that lens kind of a distance, I think that from a technical perspective, if you are farther away, it’s — if you’re not using the right equipment, it can be harder to hear you.

I think, I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve been farther away and they’ve been using the microphone on their computer. So it really is like listening to somebody on a speakerphone and it’s just a horrible experience. But, I tend to think that the closer view tends to be the better, I think it’s a more — although frankly when I say that I like to gesture a lot with my hands, I maybe having enough room so people can see you gesture and have you talk like a real person also make sense. So I’m kind of –-

Dennis Kennedy: I can see both sides of that but I would tend towards a closer view of a speaker.

Tom Mighell: Yeah I don’t know. It’s time we probably need to wrap up, I know we have a number of things and maybe we can tick through some of them. I am starting to explore more how to use interactivity and polling during presentations, just because you’re saying is people don’t like to just sit and watch a talking head for an hour. So you want to add some things in. I would consider putting videos into a presentation just to do something a little bit animations, definitely to do something a little bit different. I probably do — I consciously think more of roadmaps to say, here’s what’s going to happen, and here’s what’s coming up and here’s where we’ve been and then this is something people don’t do a lot of but if you’re co-presenting, I think you really need to put the extra effort into identifying the speakers and think of how you do the handoffs and if people aren’t watching or paying attention that sometimes we do this on the podcast. We’ll go like, so Tom what do you think of that or and this just kind of helps people identify who’s speaking and what’s going on and personalize is a bit.

So it goes back to, what do we learn when we’re watching TV and other video presentations and then I said, for me I just wanted this summer dig into a lot more of the research that’s already out there, so what works for online instruction. I don’t know Tom, do you have like a few things you want to be sure to cover?

Tom Mighell: Sure a couple of things, I totally agree with you about using polls. I see a lot more speakers in person using it. I think it’s actually even better for online presentations because people have closer access to the web and can participate in the polls. I think easier from their computer than when they’re sitting out in an audience and they’re having to scramble to get to stuff and the internet might not be as good and I just think its better.

Two tools that I recommend are either Poll Everywhere, Slido is another one that I know that gets good reviews. Dennis, I don’t know if there’s any other tools that you use you’d recommend that we can include in the show notes.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah I don’t know. I’ve done things just using the polling, building to Zoom and I think that blue, I can’t remember when I use BlueJeans whether that had, had something and Webex may have polling built into it. It sort of depends on the platform. I have this feeling that everybody’s, all the different tools are going to get referred to as Zoom before too long.

Tom Mighell: Eventually it will all be called Zoom. So the other thing to think about, especially if you’re going to use PowerPoint is consider about whether you want to use subtitles in your presentation because now new PowerPoint allows you to put in subtitles which means that — and you can do them in any language. So if you happen to be presenting to people in a different language, you could actually do your subtitles in any almost any language around the world.

(00:25:05)

But it might be good if people maybe don’t have a good connection, or have trouble hearing or need some help, having those subtitles might not be a bad idea. I think that what we talked about in our previous podcast about audio and video, all those same things apply to online presentations.

Have a good microphone so people can hear you, have a good camera if you’re on a video presentation so people can see right. Make sure that you have good lighting so that it doesn’t look crazy. I think all of those same rules apply for giving a presentation. I wouldn’t really, I think those are all very similar things. I think that one of the things and I’m probably springing this on Dennis by saying this is that, we’ve talked in general about whether we want to host maybe some live events using Microsoft teams and they have live captions that are part of that. They could have live captions, they have recording, think about whether you want to record a presentations that you give, and your ability to do that. So just a couple of things to think about taking that online presentation game up a level, some of the things that Dennis and I are going to be probably trying out here over the next couple of months.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah and I just real quick want to mention, breakout rooms because in the right situations they can work really well to get your audience involved and so the breakout rooms you can basically either randomly or pre assign people to rooms in smaller groups and then they automatically go into that group and they can have a conversation there and then come back to the main, the main meeting our presentation, and in the right situations that’s just a, that works really, really well.

Tom Mighell: Yeah. Totally agree. Zoom is very good at that. Microsoft teams are going to get that same feature soon but not sure when on the roadmap that’s going to happen.

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

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

Dennis Kennedy: And I am Dennis Kennedy. We love to get questions from you. Tom, even more than me and our voicemail line is 720-441-6820 and we love even more to feature those questions in this our B segment. In this episode, we have a great question that we got from Mike in South Carolina and let’s play that now.

Mike: Hello. Thanks for all the great content that you guys are putting out during these times. It’s very much appreciated by people like me and I just wanted to call to thank you and secondarily, I was just wondering if you could recommend some people, or companies, or resources that you like to follow on social media like Twitter. Thanks.

Dennis Kennedy: So Tom, do you want to start us off on the answering Mike’s question.

Tom Mighell: Sure. So unfortunately Mike, I’m not going to name a lot of names because once I name one, I feel guilty for not naming them all. So I’d like to talk in terms of themes instead. I follow a lot of tech news sites. I will give a name The Verge is one of my big favorites. I think that they do a great objective job of reporting technology. But there are a lot of other tech news, Twitter pages that can keep you up to date on technology news, Wired Magazine, just a bunch of other Twitter feeds that are from tech news outlets.

In legal tech, I like to follow people who I know from a legal tech world, who I’ve seen speak at conferences. So if I am watching a conference and I like a presentation, I’ll go find them on Twitter. I’ll follow them. There’s a lot of very smart people who are part of the college of law practice management. If you go to the College page and you look for the members, there are a lot of really smart people there who I do like to follow. They have a lot of good things to say.

(00:29:48)

And what’s interesting is that once you start to follow them, pay attention to, if you’re following the legal tech pages – I mean excuse me the technology reporting sites, follow the reporters, the reporters have their own Twitter feeds and they have their own interesting things that they like to talk about beyond what’s going on, on those specific journalists sites.

And then also watch out for who all of those people re-tweet, that’s where I have actually found a lot of people to follow, because if people I enjoy following on Twitter are also tweeting about people they enjoy following, then I might enjoy following those people too. So I find that it’s useful to see who else I like.

If you want to be a little stalkery, you can actually go on Twitter and go to the profile page of somebody you like and see who they follow because you might get some inspiration from that also.

I will say that who I don’t follow a lot of are vendors. Most vendor tweets are too promotional, they are way too promotional and there are not enough good solid content. The exceptions I make are for big companies. I think Microsoft, Apple, Google, a lot of their content can be a lot more substantive, so I am more likely to follow and look at their stuff, but even during, I hate to say, this is sacrilege, even during ABA TECHSHOW, most of the vendor tweets are, come to our booth and learn about our new product for doing this, and I would really rather know — give us something substantive about what you do or something substantive about legal technology, I will be more likely to follow your product.

So sorry, that took a little bit longer than I expected, but Dennis, any tricks you follow or anybody you specifically want to mention?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. So I think you touched on this. So in the early days of blogging, the very early days, people used to do this thing called a blogroll, which would say, here are the blogs that I read and then what you typically would do is you would try some of those out and you would go oh, I like reading this person’s blog so I will read some of the blogs that they read and then you would sort of build your own list from that.

So I think that Twitter can be the same way. So it’s kind of like you kind of leverage what other people are — what they have already identified and then build what makes sense for you from that.

I kind of agree with Tom in a lot of ways that you are looking — Twitter seems a place where you get the best stuff from individuals, so you might — if somebody is like in the vendor world, you would want to see people who are kind of the evangelists for a company or like a CEO of a company who tweets a lot, say like a Kevin O’Keefe at LexBlog, who has been doing it for a long time. Sort of institutionally there are some things that I like that I have been involved with, like the LTRC feed and the Law Technology Today feed, that can be a good starting place. But I think for me it’s primarily individuals and finding some of the journalists.

And then my big advice on Twitter these days is get yourself outside the US on the people that you follow. There is really interesting stuff being tweeted on legal tech, tech in general, legal innovation from all over the world and kind of tapping into that can be really cool, but kind of follow your own inclinations and the things that you like and just kind of slowly build and see what you like and follow the path that it leads you on.

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: All right, I have two parting shots and they are both frivolous, time-consuming addictive websites to go find kind of random, but I am totally enamored with both of them.

One is called Listening Together and what it is, is it’s — I think it’s by the music service Spotify and what they do is they say what are the chances that two people start listening to the same song somewhere in the world and it’s happening a whole lot and so you can just click a button and it will show you that so-and-so in São Paulo, Brazil started listening to this song at the same time as someone in Moscow at the same exact time started listening to it. I kept watching that for probably 30 minutes just to see what songs and where the people were that listened to them.

Likewise, a site called Astronaut, I will give credit to Recomendo, the great newsletter that we talk about all the time, it featured this, it’s called Astronaut and what it is, is it’s a feed of YouTube videos that have like one or two views. Nobody is viewing them, they are things you don’t expect, they are not terribly interesting, but they are also fascinating. They are usually things that just individuals have filmed, whether it’s of their church service, because lots of churches are doing their own in-home sermons now or a yoga class or people just walking down the street but it is fascinating to watch all of these and they just keep on going in a continuous cycle of things within the past week that get very little views.

(00:35:13)

I am totally mesmerized by it, I can’t stop watching it, so I need somebody else to foist off this addiction too, astronaut.io; I will make sure that the links are in the show notes. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: So I have to do two as well Tom. So one is we were talking about this beforehand, you see all these people now, especially in the legal field who have discovered collaboration and how important it is and there are these tools out there and gosh Tom —

Tom Mighell: Shocking, it’s just shocking, isn’t it?

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, you and I, we wrote a book to this, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide To Collaboration Tools And Technologies’, so I am going to mention it because we go into like how you need to think about collaboration tools and what’s out there and all the categories and it’s a darn good book. I just can’t stop myself from saying that it’s a good book that people should look at.

My other one is as — and I think that lawyers put on a brave face that nothing is really changing, but there are a lot of layoffs and other things. You are starting to hear about more and more people losing their jobs and changes coming and clients with business problems, all sorts of stuff happening.

And so I go back to LinkedIn, which has got to be really valuable when you are in a situation where you either need to find a job, you have concerns about your current job, you need to develop new business maybe and develop a new practice area. So what I want to mention are the LinkedIn Premium accounts, which I think are really valuable because you can do them for a limited period of time, but if you are actually looking for a job or you are trying to market your business, there are there two Premium accounts I think is great.

So one is the Career account, which is $29.99 a month and that’s going to give you a set of extra tools that are helpful when you are looking for a job. And the Sales Navigator account, which is $79.99 a month, which is great when you are trying to market in a very granular way what you are doing because it gives you tons of information and ability to search and to reach out and to categorize leads and all sorts of things. And like I said, you can turn them on and turn them off, but in this environment, just truly valuable tools for actually a very modest price.

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.

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 episodes with transcripts. If you would like to get in touch with us, reach out to us on LinkedIn or remember, I will give that number again, please leave us a voicemail, that 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. If you liked what you heard today, please rate us in Apple Podcast 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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