Dennis Kennedy is an award-winning leader in applying the Internet and technology to law practice. A published...
Tom Mighell has been at the front lines of technology development since joining Cowles & Thompson, P.C....
Published: | September 25, 2020 |
Podcast: | Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Category: | Legal Technology , Practice Management |
Given the advances in technology over the last few years, the question of whether lawyers should code needs some revision. Today’s movement toward low-code/no-code applications has created new opportunities for those with little to no coding experience, so should lawyers learn to use them? Dennis and Tom unpack this topic with attorneys in mind and offer their take on the benefits and challenges involved in working with low- and no-code applications.
In their second segment, they discuss folding phones and the pros and cons people may ponder before investing in one. As an actual foldable phone owner, Tom gives his perspective on whether this tech is worth the cost.
As always, stay tuned for the parting shots, that one tip, website, or observation you can use the second the podcast ends.
Have a technology question for Dennis and Tom? Call their Tech Question Hotline at 720-441-6820 for answers to your most burning tech questions.
Special thanks to our sponsors, ServeNow and Colonial Surety Company.
A Segment: Low Code/No Code
B Segment: Why Would Anyone Want a Foldable Phone?
Parting Shots:
Kennedy-Mighell Report
New Take On an Old Question: Should Lawyers Learn to Code?
09/25/2020
[Music]
Intro: Web 2.0, innovation, trends, collaboration, software —
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 270 of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.
Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas. Before we get started, we’d like to thank our sponsors. First of all, we’d like to thank Colonial Surety Company Bonds and Insurance for bringing you this podcast. Whatever court bond you need, get a quote and purchase online at colonialsurety.com/podcast.
Dennis Kennedy: And we’d also like to thank ServeNow, a nationwide network of trusted pre-screened process servers work with the most professional process servers who have experience with high volume serves embrace technology and understand the litigation process. Visit servenow.com to learn more.
Tom Mighell: 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. Everyone agrees that collaboration is essential in today’s world but now more than ever, knowing the right tools is going to make all the difference.
Dennis Kennedy: As I like to say at the start of our recent podcasts, “What the heck?” As I like to say at the start of all our 2020 podcasts, “What a difference another week or two makes.” And big changes just keep rolling along. In our last episode, we had a fantastic interview guest, Gina Bianchini of the CEO of Mighty Networks, lots of great stuff on that episode about online community building. Give it a listen if you haven’t already done so.
In this episode, we have a new take on one of our recurring questions: Should lawyers learn to code? You might be in for a surprise. 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 digging into coding or I guess more accurately, into the lack of code as we discuss the idea of low-code/no-code applications, which is a very hot topic these days. In our second segment, we will talk about why someone might want a foldable phone with some hands-on investigative reporting conducted by yours truly and as usual we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip, website, or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over.
But first up, we’re revisiting a topic that we have covered in an earlier podcast although I swear I couldn’t find which one it was. I know we’ve talked about this before, which is should lawyers learn to code? But given the advances in technology over the past few years, we’re going to revise that question for this podcast and now it’s: Should lawyers learn low-code or no-code? We’re going to define those terms in just a minute but for now, let’s describe low-code and no-code as developing computing applications but in a way that is much simpler for those who don’t have traditional coding skills.
So Dennis, as we start this topic up, what do you think have we been asking that wrong question all along should lawyers learn to code or has the question been changed for us?
Dennis Kennedy: Yes and yes. I’ve always felt it was kind of the wrong question that was kind of situational depending on what you needed to know, what you were trying to accomplish on whether you needed to code and whether you’re the right person to code. A lot of cases, you just need to have an understanding of what coding actually means but I think the no-code/low-code world, and we’ll define that in in a moment to keep the suspense going, really does kind of change the way we do things. And part of it is it kind of forces us to come to terms with what coding actually is.
And so I thought we’d talk time a little bit about our own history with coding and learning to code and how we came along and first thing I have noticed always is that coding always seems like you’re talking to somebody and that whatever you’ve done is not considered real coding in the same way I always feel like when I’m talking to a criminal defense lawyer or to trial lawyers, you start to hear that they’re doing real lawyering and whatever it is that you’re doing is not real.
Sometimes I think of what I’ve done that I thought might be coding isn’t really considered coding by some people and we’ll jump into that. So, Tom, I don’t know if you have a similar experience or maybe we can dive into our own histories in coding.
Tom Mighell: Well, let’s dive into the histories because I think it’s the same thing. We were talking before the podcast and I mentioned that I really don’t think I have a history in coding and you pointed out clearly that I have a history in what some may think of as coding but I think that others may very well not think of the things that I’ve done in the past as coding, and honestly, I really don’t think that it qualifies but in a purely technical sense of the word, some of it was coding. So, let’s maybe talk about it. I think you’ve got more experience than I do. Why don’t you get started and then I’ll come in with my pitiful experience at the end?
(00:05:30)
Dennis Kennedy: Well, sort of the many things that I’ve done that kind of touched on coding but a lot of people don’t count as coding is in high school in the 1970s, I was programming into one of the first HP programmable calculators. I typically wouldn’t consider that that would count these days and in college, again in the 70s, I was learning basic in programming this computer game of basic really isn’t considered coding by most people these days. I learned HyperCard, which is really important in my development and my approach to the web. I’ve done document assembly, again, typically not considered coding, macros, HTML, JavaScript, other scripting, lately been playing with TextExpander, Keyboard Maestro, if this and that and always been interested and played around a bit with APIs.
Now, if you’re talking to a serious coder who does Java, Python, see all those things, they’re just going to laugh at you with that. But I think it leads us towards no-code/low-code because even the people who would say that’s not coding, these things really kind of point us to what low-code/no-code is. So I don’t know, Tom, you have an interesting background and there’s one thing I know you’re going to talk about that you did that I thought you really kind of mastered a really cool programming approach that’s no longer with us.
Tom Mighell: Well, I think I mastered two programming approaches that are no longer with us. The first one, frankly, I hadn’t even forgotten about until we were talking about it earlier tonight, which is when I first started out my blog back in 2002, I forget what year it was that I started the blog, there weren’t a lot of options out there for bloggers and I wanted something that was powerful and could be infinitely customizable, I could customize my blog and these days, you would say WordPress and WordPress is really the definition of low-code or no-code for those of you using it today. I used a tool called P-machine, which I really was getting in and getting under the hood and granted it’s not pure coding, it’s not programming, it’s not software development, but compared to WordPress, it was full-on coding. I built my blog out of that and of course, then P-machine went away and I had to completely start over again when I rebuilt the blog and P-machine was obsolete.
But I think, Dennis, what you’re talking about is one of the things that I thought was truly revolutionary in its time was Yahoo! Pipes and I know that we used Yahoo! Pipes as part of our ABA experience. We would do it to try and get feeds aggregated but you know what’s funny about Yahoo! Pipes is that I really think, as you say, that it’s a precursor to the low-code and no-code web application building. I think it’s kind of got a little bit of Zapier, a little bit of IFTTT and Power Automate all mixed in in it and it was frankly a web application itself, which provided for you to connect different data sources and aggregate them in a single web page. I didn’t have experience in RSS feeds or other things like that and this seemed to be a way that someone with little to no knowledge could put together data sources and actually create something useful. Now, of course, it’s gone like all these other tools are gone and we’re seeing new things but I think that that really was sort of the one of the starting points of what we would now think of as low-code and no-code.
Dennis Kennedy: Okay, so now I think we’re ready to do a definition and I am looking at a webpage on one of my favorite sites, techtarget.com, which has this great definition in front of me and it says a low-code/no-code development platform is a visual software development environment that allows this great term they use called citizen developers, which means people who don’t really identify as developers or wouldn’t be considered traditional developers. So it allows these citizen developers to drag and drop application components, connect them together, and create a mobile or web application.
(00:09:59)
So it’s a modular approach and I think it’s important in two senses. So one is for people who aren’t traditional coders to do mock-ups and to actually put together apps in a very modular way drag and drop things together and then have it all kind of be assembled for them, as Tom said, without going under the hood. The other thing that I think it’s important for is it allows the professional developers to quickly build things because they don’t have to do a lot of stuff. They can use these components and not write code line by line so you have these reusable components instead and I think just as important, they can kind of offload some of the really standard things that can be done in this no-code/low-code way while they concentrate on the more difficult codes.
So it’s a really interesting environment that kind of lets a lot of the work be done for you and assemble in a way that’s visually pleasing and drag and drop and then you get results at the end as you work through logic and other parts and then the true code kind of stays underneath. I like this definition. So, Tom, you probably want to unpack that a little bit and explain it in a different way than I do but that’s how I think of low-code/no-code.
Tom Mighell: So probably the testament to how long we’ve been doing this podcast is that the definition that I have is almost word for word exactly the definition that you have. I don’t really have any unpacking to do with it. I think that you’ve described it in a good way. It is a platform that allows people with very little programming experience to take various parts of an application, drag and drop, arrange them into an interface that connects the parts together and creates a mobile or web application.
I think that that’s exactly kind of the way you described it. I think we say that no-code applications require what we say no-code. Low-code does require some coding but a lot less than traditional programming would require. I will say in researching for this episode, I learned that this is not a new concept. There’s a paper back in the ’80s that was talking about application development without programmers. So it’s a concept that has been discussed for 30 years and it’s even been a thing for longer than we’ve been talking about it, which is Gartner added it to its I guess groups of products that they rate and monitor and analyze. They did this in 2014, so they’ve been talking about it for six years now. I think that these types of tools really kind of became more on the market within the past two to three years maybe. The legal market has discovered them I think in the last one to two years more than anything else. Gartner is predicting that by 2024, low-code and no-code applications will account for 65% of all app development. So there is a trend and I think that part of that is because of what Dennis described because of the ease of putting these together, the speed at which can happen. So I kind of looked at the benefits of this as being, one, increased development speed faster to product; two, easier to maintain, these are component parts that have been tested and tried so they’re easier to maintain; three, because they’re component parts, there are reduced cost in creating them; and four, fewer coding errors. I think those are the primary benefits of these types of applications.
Any other benefits I’m missing, Dennis?
Dennis Kennedy: No, I think those are the big ones. So there’s probably a cost element in there obviously that people look at speed to development. When you were talking and kind of going back to the past, I remember the first time and this was a long time ago that I first saw a demo of object-oriented programming where you could kind of just take these visual pieces and drag and drop them into place and all the underlying code just went with it and it’s just a really amazing thing.
I think that when you look at low-code/no-code, the benefits that you see are this truly friendly graphical user interface, the components and then we talked about APIs a lot here but the ability to connect into other things through APIs and then hook them together, test them and then have a quick result. All those things come together. I was also thinking of another example time in SharePoint. There are these web parts that you’re just grabbing and you say, “Oh, I like to have a calendar on my page. I would like to have this on my page. I would like to have a wiki and you just throw them in there.
(00:15:02)
I think that’s part of that notion that you can just grab these things together and once you use APIs, you go like, “Oh, if somebody puts in their address, I would like to have them have a map,” and then you can use the Google Maps API and then your application would have map functionality in there.
Those things work and then I think the other big thing is you don’t have to find developers or you can get by with a very small number of developers who are kind of supervising like the regular business owners and other people who work and know what the application is going to be to do some of these component parts while the developers focus on more important or higher value things to them.
Tom Mighell: So let’s be sure to consider the fact that as many advantages as there are to low-code or no-code apps, there are also challenges, there are also drawbacks or the things we need to consider because it’s not all sunshine and roses. Here are three of the challenges that I think probably affect those who want to develop these types of tools. One, there is platform lock-in. If you decide you want to move to a different platform, you’ve got to redevelop the whole thing in most cases now. In the future, this may change but there is some possibility of kind of being locked into the app that you’ve created and if you want to do something more advanced in the future, you’ve got to start over or tear it down considerably.
There is some argument that low-code and no-code applications have higher data vulnerability. I was listening to a podcast that approached this issue and said, “Well, okay, let’s accept the fact that some of these may be less secure but let’s compare that with how lawyers are currently treating their information completely less secure. So, these low-code apps are at least the same as what they’re currently doing, which to me is not a great argument for a low-code/no-code. I wouldn’t really say it’s no worse than what they’re doing now. I think that it’s something that needs to be considered if lawyers are going to be developing applications, chances are there’s going to be client information or confidential data somewhere in these applications so ensuring security is going to have to be an important aspect or these applications are going to have to live without that information. They’re going to have to find ways to deal with it in a certain way.
And then finally I think the third challenge is you just can’t really develop an advanced solution. If you’ve got a complex algorithm, if you’ve got something — at least today’s low-code/no-code doesn’t allow you to do that. If you want to do something truly advanced, then it becomes harder to develop those advanced solutions now. Of course, there are some AI tools that are out there that may put the lie to that and we may be changing that all the time but I think that that has, over the past couple of years, been a challenge to developing these tools or a limitation I guess is probably the better word to developing some of the tools.
Dennis, anything else that I didn’t mention?
Dennis Kennedy: There are some big ones. I think that you’re going to find the low-code/no-code is really useful in the sort of prototype pilot world and so you see a lot of it in the innovation world. What you run into and you’ve touched on a couple of these but one is going to be scalability. So you may pick a place that just won’t scale as you get bigger and you also have — it’s pretty easy to pick the wrong platform. So if something’s successful, you may need to re-platform and depending on what your users use or your customers use, if you’re building an app, you might find that you wish you something like Salesforce if you’re in a corporate environment, which is a low-code platform as well. That would be one thing where you say, “Oh, we’ve done this and now it won’t scale to the amount of volume that needs to run through it or whatever and we you chose the wrong platform because we chose the cheap and simple one and you need to move it to something else.”
It’s good to have an idea of what’s out there and what your customers are likely to use. Like I said in the corporate world especially when I talk to any legal tech company just talking about going to a lot of departments. I always say, “Have you considered doing this not as a mobile iOS, Android app but as a Salesforce app,” so a couple of things that will come up to think about.
So I don’t know, Tom, it sounds good. I feel like I want to dive in but I know that’s not the best thing and all these things, I always say, if you want to experiment with stuff you really have to have a project. Otherwise, it’s just kind of theoretical and you’ll kind of spin your wheels and not learn it and not appreciate the power of it. So I say, project first. How about you?
Tom Mighell: Well, I think project first and let’s maybe break down kind of quickly what that project entails because it’s not just a matter of, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea for an app, let’s go build it.” You’ve got to go through a process and I’m sure that there will be more steps than I’m mentioning to this but I think at a minimum, you need to gather requirements.
(00:20:13)
What are the objectives of the tool? You have to fully think out what do we want the tool to accomplish. Then you map out the processes. How is the application going to actually work and then there are some aspects that are no different to making any application and it’s traditionally called wireframing. Designing what you want the app to look like. What do you want the user experience to be?
I mean just because you’ve got the code taken care of doesn’t mean that the look and feel makes sense that you could have a very clunky product that no one wants to use or is very hard to use because just because it’s low-code doesn’t mean it doesn’t need some work. So I think no-code is easier but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy. There’s a lot of steps you’ve got to get through to get to that application.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. So I want to go into a few examples where I’m seeing this come into play and as I said, in the innovation world where there are innovation groups inside legal organizations definitely one, access to justice area is huge. I think that a lot of experimentation going on given the cost constraints there, the ability to roll out apps really quickly, you saw of some things really recently where laws changed or regs changed and people used a low-code approach at Suffolk University to roll out an app in one day. So really interesting things there and also in legal education to the extent that you’re seeing legal tech classes, they’re doing applications in the classroom that’s definitely using the no-code/low-code platform. Those are places to look.
I also think, Tom, that I think of low-code/no-code in connection with our Second Brain Project as well. That’s one of the things I’m looking for is like, “Hey, how can I connect things together? How can I automate processes? But I don’t want to have to code things. I just want to connect them.” So no-code low-code is part of my thinking on Second Brain.
I guess the last thing I’ll point out is from my experience and this is in the education access justice area is that as you start to use these tools, it allows you to kind of really focus on the extent of your understanding of the underlying process and how well you need to understand the underlying process and then translate it into the coding and the actual app that you do. I think the no-code low-code allows you to focus on that logic more so than coding logic and that I think is really important in what we do.
Tom Mighell: And let me mention a couple of examples that I like to think about and that actually my company is using to a certain extent. Dennis, when you talk about access to justice, I’m not sure that this 100% qualifies as low-code/no-code but it is application development, which is just looking at one example that I saw come up is Suffolk Laws, they came up with the CDC eviction moratorium assistant in in response to a specific law that there are specific regulations that the CDC passed. Literally within a day, they were able to roll out this tool where you could fill out a form, see if you’re covered by the moratorium. If you are, print out a declaration to show to your landlord. That kind of turnaround and that kind of — I mean it’s very simple. It’s very rudimentary but it serves a purpose and it gets that into the hands of people who can’t afford a lawyer or anybody to help them very quickly and easily. So that’s, to me, a huge example.
I am becoming a big fan of using Airtable. We’re starting to use it a little bit with our work but we’re seeing a lot of organizations use it. They just got a huge influx of cash and they introduced a bunch of loco tools that they’re basically calling IFTTT for Airtable where they have a lot of ways to connect applications to it to help make it more successful and then the one tool and Dennis, you may want to talk about this more too, I don’t know. One of the tools that we are actually using internally is Microsoft Power Apps. We are automating our retention schedules now so taking them out of spreadsheets, taking them out of SharePoint lists and we’re creating applications where we can take a couple of tables of information and rather than put them into an access database, we can link them all together into a Power App so that our clients can upload them. Essentially, it looks like a website, it acts like a web application, but it is very easy to link together, different tables so you can see what’s the citation for a particular record, where might it be located in my organization, what are the different record categories that I have to think about, and what are the retention periods, but a very simple use of Power Apps and I think my one kind of recommendation for getting started would be if you’re part of the Microsoft 365 team, take a look at Power Apps and see if there’s something there because it is a very straightforward pretty easy, few barriers to entry to try and get started with applications.
(00:25:14)
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I just wanted to wrap up. I just want to second that I think that probably a lot of listeners are going to be working at places that have Microsoft 365 business license that will have the Power Apps, Power Automate tools in there and that could be a good place to get introduced to this notion. I think that if this and that is another very gentle, easy way to get introduced to the concepts and then just do a little bit of research and like I said have a project that would be a good candidate for this that you can pilot.
That’s what I have on this topic, Tom, I think it’s a really exciting topic. We’ll change especially the speed that we can start to do things and that will just kind of lead us into a world of automation that I don’t think many lawyers expect and will happen quicker probably than they expect.
Tom Mighell: Yep and I think that we’ll probably have more to say about this in future episodes.
All right, before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.
[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. Tom, in his constant quest to purchase new devices to help you, our audience, learn about them that just coincidentally he would also like to own, recently bought a Surface Duo foldable phone. It’s harder to say it than you think. I must admit that I’m not seeing the benefits of foldability. We thought it’d be good to have Tom talk about foldability, this phone, and my assertion that this device kind of feels like a new category of devices on target. Tom, what are the advantages of a foldable phone?
Tom Mighell: Well, I saw your question when I was preparing for this and I’m thinking that’s not the right question to be asking. I’m going to change your question, Dennis. Let’s ask why would anybody want a folding phone because to be honest, folding phones are kind of having a moment right now. There are at least three brand new folding phones on the market and probably the biggest problem with them is the cost. They’re all very expensive. None of them are under $1,300 and they all do folding a little bit different.
There’s the Galaxy Z Flip which looks like your old school flip phone. I mean it opens just like a flip phone does but when you open it up, it’s a smartphone screen. When you close it, the front part of the flip phone is a smartphone screen that you can see text messages on or see who’s calling you. It’s a little tiny screen but it’s like having a flip phone but with the benefits of a smartphone.
The Galaxy Z Fold, these are both Samsung tools, it’s more like a traditional smartphone when you fold it up kind of tall and narrow but when you open it up, it expands into more of a wider tablet-like device so it’s like having a tablet as a phone.
And then the one Dennis talked about, the one that I have indeed purchased is Microsoft Surface Duo. They look at it a different way. They have a two-screen device. So it’s not a folding screen where you have to get a type of glass or type of plastic that folds. Here, it’s just two separate screens that fold together. It doesn’t really feel so much as a phone as a mini two-screen computer.
Here are the upsides to folding phones. One, multitasking is so much easier when you have more screen real estate. That’s just a fact. It’s just when you have more space to do stuff, you can do more multitasking. The other upside is I think depending on your definition of cool, these are cool devices. You will stand from the crowd and I think not in a bad way with any of these phones. The fact that those are really the two major upsides suggests whether you should buy one of these or not.
(00:30:00)
The downsides are, one, the cost obviously; and two, most apps are not really fully optimized yet for larger phones. Some of them are. I think frankly, one downside is that if you’re an iPhone user, Apple’s not making one so far, which means that if you want a foldable phone, you’re going to have to switch to the Android environment to do it.
I was intrigued by the Surface Duo the minute they announced it and it was one of those impulse purchases for me. I didn’t even wait for the review, which have been, I would say, mostly negative or more of an idea whose time is not quite ready yet. I think that’s fair. It’s a first-generation phone, first generation concept phones tend to have issues. They tend to not get the best reviews. Here’s my quick take on the Duo. Reading a Kindle book on a Surface Duo is amazing. It’s now actually what I use for my daily reading. It’s smaller than my iPad, it’s bigger than my phone and with two screens, it’s just like a real book. Kind of pricey for a Kindle, but I definitely love using it as a book.
Multitasking on work emails and documents is easy. It’s very intuitive I set my email up on one screen, I set the keyboard up on the other. I can look at documents while I’m typing. Being able to see things on both screens on a mobile device is something you can’t not do on your regular phone.
The downsides: Camera, really not very good. Don’t buy this for the camera. Software, some of it’s really buggy. Now, a lot of it was fixed in recent updates and I expect more to be fixed in more updates. This is something that can be fixed, so not really worried about it but to be honest, this makes a lot more sense for me as a tiny computer than as a phone. I’m just not sure that I see using it as a phone. But really, here’s where things I think get interesting. Will this catch on, will the other foldables catch on or are they kind of destined to become niche products?
If they’re a hit, I think that future versions will continue to improve. The Galaxy Z Fold is a version 2 and it improved a hundred times over the first version. So, expect that they will get better if they’re a hit. If they are not a hit, these may be relegated to the Newton and other devices that we never really took up. They’ll get cheaper, they’ll get easier to use, they’ll get less buggy. I am hoping and betting that they’re going to be a hit. I hope that that happens. I’d really love to see what a Surface Duo 2 looks like in a couple of years. I think that for most people, folding phones are not quite ready unless you want to spend some money and have kind of a cool little toy but I would really like to see what’s going to happen to them in the next couple years.
Dennis, did anything I’d say either convince you or make you think anything different than what you were thinking before I started talking?
Dennis Kennedy: Well, I was just thinking that if you’re in the device world where you just want to have the new cool thing to carry with you so people notice you, now that we’re not able to travel or anything, it’s kind of the incentives have been kind of twisted around. No, I mean I think that what I was thinking was as I just realized our devices and our technology is becoming so much more personal to us, so everything that you were talking about, I was thinking, you know, I think that for me on the phone aspect of this and phone obviously is changing because of Zoom and video calls, but I’m thinking I don’t know that — the foldable thing doesn’t make sense to me like the Apple Watch and AirPods as my phone makes sense and a tablet and then maybe if I want a bigger screen experience, then in a couple years will be like a glasses experience and I just don’t ever get to foldable, but that’s going to be a totally personal thing.
I just think the ongoing personalization is going to be a trend to watch out for that’s kind of my big reaction. But 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, so we’re all working at home. If you’re like me, you have begun to look around at your setup and think that it could use an upgrade and I have definitely been making upgrades. We’ve talked about the monitor. I’ve talked about other elements that I’ve upgraded. Well, Ars Technica is here to help you out with the ultimate buying guide to your home office setup and it really is nice because it covers everything. It covers monitors it covers lighting if you run in lighting. It covers web cameras. It covers tripods. It covers microphones. It covers headsets. It’s got a bunch of different options for all of these different categories and I think that the recommendations are pretty solid based on what I can tell.
If you’re still kind of working on your home office setup even though we’ve all been working from home for quite a while, take a look at this. There are some really good options that are available for your home office setup. Dennis?
(00:34:55)
Dennis Kennedy: So I’ve been working on video lately and we did a podcast a while back on personal quarterly off-sites and I actually took that concept and kind of added a lot to what you heard on the podcast that I talked about and turned it into an online course that I’ll be offering and so I did the video but part of what I needed to do was get the video up on YouTube, which I think is going to be a much more common thing that people do. So I found this great tips guide by Elsie Otachi, called “How to Upload a Video to YouTube Step-By-Step Guide,” and my gosh, that’s what it was. It’s step-by-step took me through everything I needed to do to get my videos up on YouTube so that I could make them available through the online course platform, which not surprisingly, if you remember our last show, it’s Mighty Networks, just very helpful way to do that and something I see that I’ll be doing more and more of and I suspect many of us will as we move to video.
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 podcasts along with transcripts.
If you’d like to get in touch with us, remember we still love to get questions for our B Segment. Please leave us a voicemail at 720-441-6820 or you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn. 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 like what you heard today, please write us in Apple Podcast 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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Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell talk the latest technology to improve services, client interactions, and workflow.