The Latest Trends in Collaboration Technologies

Episode Notes

Transcript

The Kennedy-Mighell Report

The Latest Trends in Collaboration Technologies

02/14/2021

 

[Music]

 

Advertisement:  Web 2.0. Innovation, trend, collaboration. Got the world turning as fast as it can? Here 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 LegalTalk Network.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  And welcome to episode 280 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 welcome and give a big TKMR thank you to our brand new sponsor NODA powered by M&T Bank. Noda is banking built for lawyers and provide smart, no-cost, IOLTA account management. Visit trustnoda.com/legal to learn more. Terms and conditions may apply.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  Next 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 and we want to mention that Tom and I are available to speak to your organization about the topic of this podcast or any of the other topics we’ve covered in our podcast. We also want to mention that this podcast will soon be celebrating the 15th anniversary of its launch. Anniversary gifts are of course welcome. In our last episode, we looked into the growth of niche social media tools and what that might mean for you. Since then, one of them Clubhouse has taken off and we are already seeing the expected everyone should use it — no one should use it debate and uproar. We recommend listening to our take on that topic in the last episode. In this episode, we’re approaching the end of the first year of the pandemic and thought that made it a good time to reflect on what new trends we are seeing in collaboration tools and technologies our favorite topic. Tom what’s on our agenda for this episode?

 

Tom Mighell:  Well, Dennis in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell report, we will indeed be stepping back and reflecting on some of the most interesting trends that we’re seeing in collaboration tools and technologies. In our second segment, we were going to talk about the growing problem of not being able to find where we said or sent you something but I’ve decided that we’re going take it in a different direction so stay tuned and hang on. As usual, we’ll be finishing 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 new trends in collaboration tools and technologies. As we’re moving into the second year of the pandemic one thing that Dennis and I have learned over the course of our last year working from home is that lawyers were finally forced to embrace something we’ve been talking about for literally 12 years and that’s collaboration technologies. No matter what got them to it, collaboration tech is all the rage now so we thought we’d do a quick review of where they stand right now and whether they’re any new trends that are worth mentioning. So, Dennis what about you? What’s the most common trend you hear about in legal tech and is it the one we should care about the most?

 

Dennis Kennedy:  You know Tom, I got to tell you if I hear one more time lawyer use of technology advanced 10 years and 10 months, I will scream. So, I think that —

 

Tom Mighell:  They’re proud of themselves Dennis — they’re all proud of it, very proud of themselves.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  So, I think that’s probably the trend you hear the most about but it’s — I think the one you should care the least although it is interesting because we go back to — Tom has to hear this for about the hundred time but one of my favorite William Gibson quotes “the future is already here” it’s just unevenly distributed, I think what we saw was a lot of — there were people who had to scramble, there were people had to do things in fresh ways in ways that were unexpected and other people just took it in stride and tom as you like to point out you especially been working from home for many years so everything kind of went the way that you would expect without that much of a hiccup other than like our whole lives being turned upside down so I think the thing that was interesting to me was to see the varying degrees that some of the collaboration tools were already in place and the lessons that — and that we’ll talk about that people learned because of their sort of where they were on the timeline. So, not — and I think that means in why I object to the 10 years and 10 months is there’s a tendency to treat technology in the legal profession as a sort of monolithic topic where everybody is the same in doing the same things with the same reluctance and nobody’s innovative or that sort of things but people are at all different — different places and I think that was one of the things for me in 2020 was seeing the wide range of where people were and how readily they could respond to what was happening.

 

00:05:22

 

Tom Mighell:  Okay so I’m going to be the curmudgeon again here or maybe the bitter one I’m not sure what the right terminology is for this but I you know, I’m still going to be the skeptic. I take this a little bit more personally, to me it’s just so crazy to hear you know, now that you’re working from home take advantage of these new collaboration tools as if they were just now discovered during the pandemic and so I find it really hard to believe that that there are people who are ahead of the curve now I mean there are — I think there are laggards who are trying to catch up but I don’t know if it’s desperately trying to catch up because let’s face it, if you say that all — that lawyers are collaborating more than ever before and you say okay what does that mean? It comes down to one word and that is Zoom. Everybody is talking about Zoom most lawyers are just — that’s what collaboration means is we’re having meetings on zoom. Now to be fair, there are probably some lawyers who are doing more than that but let’s be honest about the majority that that’s all that collaboration really means these days and so I say let’s applaud people who discover that you can actually hold a video — video meeting on the internet but I still think we got a long way to go.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  Digital signatures is too Tom but a lot of people touting that as a big advance. So, I think you’re right that we will definitely see more coming and we’re going to see that gap between the people who take advantage of different tools and some of the the other things that are out there and those people who say at least kind of got the Zoom stuff down so I feel like I’m up to date. That gap will continue to widen but I want to go to the real trends that I’m seeing and I think the one that we’ve talked about in our book a lot and whenever we talk about collaboration, I think that’s the one that really came home to me and that’s what we’ve called the co-evolution of collaboration strategies or sometimes co-collaboration is that what we find is that — what we do always impacts and is affected by the people we are collaborating with. So, one of the things that I noticed is that you could start out saying I don’t want to do Zoom and when your clients tell you there’s going to be a zoom meeting you’re doing Zoom you know, and if somebody else says you’re doing Teams you’re going like oh no I’m a Zoom shop, no you’re doing Teams too and so I think as you evolve and work on your collaboration strategy I think we really saw the impact of how everyone that you’re working with can shape the tools that you pick and the approaches you take and I mean everyone and so that’s family, that’s friends, that’s work, that’s the organizations you’re involved in. All are going to have an impact on the tools you use and how you do things.

 

Tom Mighell:  Well you know, it’s funny I have two anecdotes to talk about with that because — and one of them literally happened this week with a client we use — we’ve been using Teams forever and we primarily use Teams with most of our clients. We set up Teams meetings all the time and no problems and then this past week I was requested for a special call with a client and the client said all right, let’s get it straight from here. No more Team meetings, Teams are horrible. We’re using Zoom from now on. Zoom is so much better than Teams and we’re not using it and I’m like okay I’m not going to be able to convince you otherwise, you sound pretty straight forward on that so we’ll be using Zoom from now on. So, it’s it really is true that you’re going to use what your clients want to use because sometimes you really don’t have a choice. on the other hand, I found working with one of the charity groups that I work with, I thought that it would be great to use Basecamp as a task manager and to keep everybody on track for a project that we were working on and when I talked about uploading all this stuff, two of the — I will say older generation in my group said no, no, no, not that basecamp stuff just send it to me by email. Email is so much easier I don’t want to have to deal with the Basecamp. So, I once again found myself collaborating the way that my co-collaborators wanted but I will tell you in both of those instances they were not ideal compromises to be made and so I will say that your collaborators don’t always have the best intentions in mind when they think about collaborating.

 

00:10:03

 

So, if you are one on the right side of collaboration tools you know, figure out ways in which to spread enlightenment and to let people know that there are better more interesting, more innovative, more efficient, more productive solutions out there that people might be trying and not just to stick around with what they think is — is the thing that is the least friction and the easiest for them to use.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  So, one of the strategies there is to really focus on what’s popular and what’s standard and kind of move away from this notion of like what’s the best tool you know, people say like oh this is the best for that and they’ll base that on like you’re saying Tom on some feature that you know, makes sense to them and to no one else and so I — as I — as I think about putting together the tools I use for collaboration, I want to say okay what’s out there that everybody’s going to have and what are they going to use, what are we not going to run into problems with somebody’s I.T. Department or you know, policies that they have that they can’t use and I think that it does move you toward the Microsoft 365 line of products, pushes you a bit toward Teams, I think Zoom is you know, just so many people use it that’s something you have and you’re looking– I think — for things like that and kind of moving away from the notion of some conceptual idea of what’s best.

 

Tom Mighell:  And again, that reminds me of another anecdote around this whole charity thing. It feels like that this charity thing was the — was the poster child for bad collaboration experiences because during that we needed — we were recording videos of each other of ourselves and we were uploading them to a central location and I was like all right let’s get some good file sharing collaboration tools in there and the guy who volunteered and said I don’t believe any of that stuff, I’ve got — I’ve got one that I keep on my own computer at home and it’s more secure and it’s so much better than those Dropbox and Box and OneDrive. It’s so much better than those tools and oh my gosh the amount of trouble that we had, we kept hitting errors the files got uploaded and they were corrupted. There were all sorts of problems and so I totally recommend saying — sometimes the best tool is the one that works for everybody, it might not be the tool that you prefer the most but it’s the tool that everybody can use and get on and not have a problem with, which is why I don’t have a problem using Zoom with that client.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah and then I would say that the other thing — another thing is part of your strategy, you want to put together your toolbox that has a number of different tools for the different things that you would do. So, you have options and you can give people options. So, you’re not the problem and sometimes Tom’s giving you a couple examples but I have an another one where you know as part of a group where somebody insisted they absolutely had to use one of — I’d say the lesser used online video tools because it had certain features that Zoom and Teams did not and they were totally insistent about that and they were wrong frankly but they couldn’t be convinced on that so you know, that gets added to the toolbox so I think the more that you’re able to say like I’m aware that there are things that are out there. You can’t use Dropbox because your I.T Department won’t let you. We could use something else, we could use OneDrive, we can use Google Drive, we can do some different things. So, I think that the toolbox approach is a really good one because I think in the collaboration and if you’re the lawyer so you’re you know, you’re the service provider. If you’re telling a client that you can’t adapt to what they need it’s just a bad look and as a client, I would not be happy with that at all and probably you would be on a short leash and probably I would be looking for alternatives.

 

Tom Mighell:  Well, I think — I think having that toolbox and what I hear you saying is that it’s not enough to just say — to say I’ve chosen my collaboration tools and that is I am going to use Google Docs for my documents and I’m going to use Zoom for my meetings and I’m going to use this to schedule calls but nothing else because that’s where you get into trouble it’s all well and good that you’ve chosen collaboration tools, that’s great you’re ahead of most people and that’s wonderful but if you can’t be able to pivot and say hey, look this isn’t working out, let’s try this because this service has the feature that maybe the other one doesn’t have and this won’t cause us the same problem that you’re having.

 

00:15:13

 

You’re not solving the problem for the client or for whoever you’re trying to collaborate with, forget clients it’s just whoever you’re trying to work with, collaboration should be about solving the problem and that’s why at least knowing about the tools is a good idea. We’ll talk about tech competence in a little bit I think.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah and that pivot thing is important, you may have to change so in the — the university settings I was in — there were some major changes in the — in the tools that we use that are you know, I would call it the teaching/student tools that are collaboration tools I mean it’s where you put the assignments where students upload assignments where you do the grading. All that sort of thing, those changed over the — over the last year so you got to be ready to move so that pivoting notion is great and I think that one of the things that can cause a pivot time and is kind of next on our list is mobile considering the mobile interface which I think is a huge trend as people use different tools from different platforms and a lot of times it’s a mobile platform.

 

Tom Mighell:  Yeah, so here’s the cynic I’m going to come back to the pivot thing real quick and talk about the fact that some things have changed but in general — in the past what two years since two, three years since we wrote the last edition of the book, the tools that we talk about in the book have not changed tremendously Google Docs still is Google Docs, Dropbox and OneDrive and SharePoint, they’re all still the same tools, they may have more bells and whistles, they may have more features but they’re the same tools and what I’m finding because I pay a lot of attention to new collaboration tools entering the space to see what’s good and what’s not. They’re all variations on a theme. This is like Dropbox but for this and this is like OneDrive but for this this is like Google Drive– Google Docs but for creatives. So, I sort of feel comforted by that frankly, is that the choices are out there but they’re not so overwhelming because they’re constantly changing that’s I think a good thing. I think that it’s important to keep up with how certain technologies evolve the way Dennis described them but I also think it’s good to know that of the general types of collaboration tools the categories — the main players out there haven’t really changed that much, that’s a good thing.

 

I also argue Dennis that the importance of mobile hasn’t changed over the past three years either. I would say that they’ve enhanced their features, they’ve made it easier to share from a phone. I can’t tell you — I can’t tell you how easy it is to just share things from my phone to wherever I want to share to, to Twitter, to Teams to anywhere to a text message literally two clicks and I can instantly share. So, I would say that both Apple and Android and Google are making that experience so much better. So, that’s one I think a good impact of mobile but I think it’s nice to see that mobile is being considered in the collaboration area because everybody’s well — everybody’s less mobile than they were before but I think that — I think that as we start to get out more, the ability to collaborate — the ability to take your Zoom call from a phone is tremendously important.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah and I think if you — if there is a bad — if somebody doesn’t have a great app — mobile app that goes along with the tool, that is going to be a problem for adoption of that and the use of that and I actually had a conversation with somebody yesterday about — I think one of the tougher areas still in the collaboration space is the mind mapping or white boarding tools and we just had a conversation — I had this conversation yesterday with somebody how — one of them in particular is just super difficult to use on a a phone and first I was talking — they said they actually got dizzy trying to use it on a phone. So, that’s one — you do run into some of those things. I guess if I want to be known for anything in reflecting on this time period it’s my observation that the home office or my home office in particular but I think a lot of people have actually become a visual studio that you do work in and not just a home office. So, I think that is a big trend that they’re in collaboration you’re looking at this especially video but also audio production. So, the collaboration — the collaboration hardware is actually turning into lighting microphone video that sort of thing and I think that’s probably a very significant change and we never really associated collaboration that much with hardware but I think definitely saw more of that in the past year and obviously the other hardware piece time is the really big monitors as well — as people work from home.

 

00:20:22

 

So, the other thing Tom that people talked about is Zoom fatigue and other things like that which are sort of the consequence of always being at work and always being on in some ways. I really think of that in terms of boundaries and limits and one of the things I’ve always noticed about working from home is it’s a lot easier to work longer hours at home than you expect. You don’t have like the sort of five o’clock everybody’s leaving kind of thing to tell you your day is over. So, I think that it’s — I think an impact we really started to see from the last year I think it you know, it fits into the collaboration notion but how do we set boundaries, how do we set limits and then how don’t we go over other people’s boundaries and limits.

 

Tom Mighell:  That’s always been part of the asynchronous nature of collaboration is we can communicate with somebody with not necessarily an expectation that they’re going to respond to us. So, I think that’s one of the benefits of collaboration tools and that they don’t demand — they don’t demand immediate response. They don’t demand that you be 24/7. So, you know, aside from — aside from Zoom fatigue and I think frankly that’s a boundary right now because everybody’s forced to use it, everybody is forced to have that type of thing right now as we start to come out of this you know, now that we know this is a viable part of our tool kit, we can start to make good judgments and good decisions on the best time to use those tools and when they make sense. I don’t expect that we’re all going to be Zoom all the time once people are going back to the office and things start to resume some sense of normalcy I think that we’re hopefully going to be able to find the right balance for that but I agree Dennis, I think that the ability to respond to collaboration tools on your time allows you to set those boundaries appropriately. I’ll tell you, that’s part of the thing that’s saved me over the past year is turning off at you know five o’clock or 5:30 every day if possible and saying okay no more work until x time tomorrow morning and the rest of my — and I just don’t — even I may get notifications but I don’t pay attention to them, I try and stay away from them, I think those are good boundaries and limits that you need to set whether we’re in a pandemic or not I don’t think it makes a difference.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  The other trend that I really like and I was writing a bit about this today is that the tools — the work collaboration tools I think have crossed the boundary line into our personal lives and vice versa and I think in some really good ways. So, if you say well I’m doing these online meetings for work it’s just a simple step to say like this is a great way to have you know, I can’t travel, I can’t see people so let’s have family gatherings. Let’s have class reunions, let’s have the organizational meetings and stuff we do as Zoom that’s really opening somethings up as ways to work together. People are sharing calendars, they’re sharing project plans you know, and a lot of really useful ways using the collaboration tools that at least conceptually have been related to work in the home and then sometimes even home tools and you know, which is like how you schedule your family and those sorts of things and maybe alerts and reminders starting to pull those concepts into your work in more useful ways. So, I think that’s actually a really fascinating trend.

 

Tom Mighell:  I think actually to me that’s almost a bigger trend than anything we’ve talked about before and the reason is that you’re used to spending time with friends and family in person you know, outside of a pandemic and when you’re forced to not — when you’re forced to do something face to face, I have found that friends and family have been more receptive and open to using tools to connect with each other than your co-workers would be or than your colleagues would be and it could — because none of them are lawyers I don’t know I’m not going to put the blame on lawyers here but I will say that it’s easier I think to collaborate with family and friends because they feel the need for connection and it makes a lot of — it makes a lot of sense to me and I see that– I see that only grows stronger after the pandemic is done. I think that people see the ways that they can keep in contact even though I may see them in person, I can still share a calendar with you or i can still have access to that photo album so I can see pictures of how you’re dealing with the snow and I see that that’s something that’s only going to get better.

 

00:25:09

 

Dennis Kennedy:  Another one I like is what I call the collaboration golden rule. So, we’re all under a lot of stress, there’s a lot of things happening and so I think we have an appreciation for the struggles that people have and so my notion is you should collaborate with others as you would like to have them collaborate with you, right? the golden rule and so I think that over the past year, we’ve started to appreciate those things like we understand why somebody might want — not want to be on video. We have a better understanding of why people on the west coast do not want to have meetings scheduled at 6:00 a.m. you know just because it’s convenient to have a meeting at 9:00 o’clock in New York and so I think that that sort of notion to say hey, there’s a lot of things that I need to think about, does somebody want to Zoom call? Do they want a phone call? Are they going to be viewing this what we’re doing on a phone? Is it going to be on a big monitor? What is it because I may tailor what I’m doing and how we work together in the tools we use for that experience and I think as we get more global that really those kinds of things start to come into play, I mean I’ve had a couple calls in the last few weeks with people in Australia and it is really hard to schedule a time that that works for everybody but I think it’s kind of made us think more about what’s happening at the other end and you know and how we can be helpful to people like not scheduling things when they have to put kids to bed or you know, those sorts of things can be — can be really helpful. So, I think that’s a positive trend, it’s partly boundaries but I think it’s actually better — it’s like a very positive thing that’s starting to happen.

 

Tom Mighell:  You’re not actually suggesting that collaboration tools might lead lawyers to be more collegial towards the people that they work with, their opposing parties, you’re not actually suggesting that aren’t you?

 

Dennis Kennedy:  I’m a dreamer — I’m a dreamer, optimist, glass half full you know me Tom.

 

Tom Mighell:  I do.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  So, when I heard recently — I’m just going to hit a couple things real quickly because I know we want to wrap up and then I’ll let you get give a mention to the tech confidence rule. When I heard recently it was called collaboration environment neglect which I thought was a great term but it describes how and this goes back to your early point Tom is that collaboration — we’re sort of thinking really simple way of sharing documents that sort of thing and so this says if we really think about collaboration in the whole environment then, we’re really moving from sharing excel spreadsheets as attachments or shared documents to where we’re actually moving what we’re doing to shared collaborative platforms. We could do work track projects that sort of — that sort of thing and I think that’s the exciting area of collaboration tools. We’ve clearly seen the need this year for gaining necessary skills levels which to me has really brought up the value of YouTube videos on a lot of things, you can learn a lot about collaboration tools with people who’ve done YouTube videos and a big one that Tom — you and I have mentioned for years — I think people are starting to get the hang of it a little better but it’s like when you’re in these shared environments, everybody is responsible for cyber security and the problems that one person creates can spread through a whole bunch of different people and we’ve — we’ve already seen that happen and it just puts an even greater emphasis on — emphasis on cyber security than we’ve ever had before and there are approaches out there, I don’t think the legal profession is doing enough yet but it’s hard for everybody whether you’re a lawyer or not as we sort of get you know, different levels of collaboration, different platforms, and a whole lot of different players on each of the platforms.

 

Tom Mighell:  I have nothing to add to that except to say to our listeners that stick around for a couple of months and you might actually see something that we write on this subject. So, stay tuned we’ll be back to talk about the subject a little bit later but before we move on to our next segment let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.

 

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00:30:32

 

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

 

Dennis Kennedy:  And I’m Dennis Kennedy and I had a fabulous topic for the best segment but Tom saw something recently that’s so upsetting — upset him that he wanted to bring back a segment we used to call Tom’s rant where Tom just went off on something that really, really aggravated him. I have an idea what it is but I’ll turn it over to Tom to rant.

 

Tom Mighell:  Come on, this is going to aggravate you too Dennis. I mean and you know, this is something that I thought in our blog post about, do I send it — do a tweet thread with 50 different threads on it which would just really annoy the heck out of people and I decided you know what I’m going to get it all out of my system here in the b-segment of this podcast and it’s about the recent backlash towards Clubhouse. Now, don’t get me wrong don’t think Clubhouse is the second coming of the latest social media tool that we all need to get but it’s interesting after we talked about it in the last podcast, we have seen — I would say huge groups of lawyers moving toward Clubhouse. We are not going to take credit for it although we could but lots of lawyers are moving toward it and suddenly it’s kind of a darling in legal tech circles and we see people talking about it all the time and over the past week or so I’ve seen at least two publications talk about how lawyers should never even attempt to use Clubhouse sight unseen. Sight without even trying it just because of things they’ve heard about it, things they’ve read about it, and giving that type of advice really concerned me, it really dismayed me frankly and I just want to say shame on the people who wrote this because — because they are legal technologists writing this and whether a tool is good or not good if it’s something that lawyers should or should not be using, I don’t think it’s for any of us to say don’t use it I mean, I’m — if I find out that there’s a tool that literally is taking all of your information and selling it to the Chinese government then I’m going to make that comment but if I don’t know that if I just have things like privacy is a problem well guess what? privacy is a problem with every single social media platform that’s out there.

 

Everyone, there’s not a single one that doesn’t want to suck up all your contacts and deal with them that way there’s — you know, they say that the people on the Clubhouse are — it’s all you know, it’s racially insensitive. Well, that’s wrong you don’t really know what’s going on. There’s all sorts of different arguments that people make without really thinking about it and what makes me upset about this is that if we’re in a legal tech world, we owe ourselves to commit our — commit our thinking to the possibilities of what it could be, we may dismiss it, we may decide you know what this isn’t for me, lawyers may decide it’s not working for them and they may decide not to use it but we can’t just dismiss these types of things out of hand, I think it’s a mistake and that’s why I wanted to rant about it as I say come on, can we just — let’s have a little — let’s not be so critical of the people who want to try and use these things because I feel like we’re slipping into our old familiar role as the curmudgeon lawyers who are never willing to try new tools. I don’t want to say that this is just a new shiny and we’re just looking for something that’s new and shiny but it’s the possibilities that might come around with a tool like this and is there something there? Is there something coming in the future? What if we could make it better just by looking at it. I know I’m ranting and going on like this forever and ever so I’m going to stop for a minute just say hey guys we can be better than this, we can actually be thinking reasonably about the way these kinds of tools can be used. Dennis shut me up now and take us out of this segment.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah Tom, I mean it’s — I read these things and it’s almost like the swallows or whatever it is returning every fall or spring I mean, it’s just like no matter what the new technology is from blogs to whatever you’re going to see lawyers writing this article usually by somebody who hasn’t used them or read them about how they’re — the worst thing possible. The irony is usually in about a year these same people who write those articles are big proponents of the social media or blogging or podcasting or whatever.

 

00:35:07

 

You just see them, I kind of laugh the Clubhouse one sort of cracked me up because there was you know, one of the big things that I saw was on LinkedIn and there was this big discussion people complaining about how Clubhouse had your contact information. On LinkedIn come on think about it — contacts LinkedIn. So, I see that it always makes me want to go back and say what technology has revealed more confidences you know, allowed for more bad things to happen in lawyer-client relationships than anything. Any other technology it’s a telephone, there’s no way that lawyers would be allowed to use telephones if they came out now.

 

Tom Mighell:  Or email.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  So, yeah — so let’s you know, and they’re this same sort of articles were written about email of course we could — we could go find those. So, I look at it and I say hey, look some people want to — want to have some fun there’s you know and they like to try new things and I just don’t like people being like prescriptive, proscriptive, and saying no lawyer can do this because lawyers are — it’s a monolithic profession. Every lawyer is like every other one. We all do the same things and so I — by not looking at this, I am the one true lawyer who could reveal the one truth path and nobody else should try anything. We also have this tech confidence real time if it relates to a matter you’re working on. If it’s essential to your client or if it’s some real world technology you need to know, I think you have an ethical obligation there and this idea of saying like hey, I’m not even going to look at it and not only am I not going to look at it but no other lawyer should be doing this — it’s just the craziest thing you know, it’s like one of those things as you say when you talk to people who aren’t lawyers you tell them this they just shake their heads and I’m shaking my head on this one as well. So maybe I’m ranting like you a little bit Tom. Now it’s time for that — our parting shots that one tip website or observation you use — you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom take it away.

 

Tom Mighell:  So, I’m going to take a step back and do a non-tech parting shots and they’re two related parting shots. I’m going to give an update on my ember mug that I talked about a while back. Important announcement, important warning for people who either thinking about or who’ve already purchased an ember mug. Do not use a metal spoon on the ember mug. There’s ceramic on the bottom and when you stir it, that ceramic comes off if you use a metal spoon. It probably was there somewhere in the instructions, I never paid attention to it and never needless to say, I have a new mug coming to me but they recommended a rubber or wooden or plastic spoon to use for it where comes my next recommendation which is a website called getting it right or GIR for short, they make silicon utensils and one of the things that they have is a mini spoon in about 10 different colors, I bought four of them they’ve already arrived. I — they came — before the mug came, I can’t wait to use them. They’re awesome silicon, they’re really cool to use, they’re safe up to 550 degrees. I’ve used their spatulas for a while, they’re really, really, well-made tools and they’ve got a bunch of different things out there for the kitchen. They’re also making masks which make me nervous a silicon mask feels a little warm to me but I think that the getting it right side has got some really cool tools. So, take a look at it, I’m loving my spoon and I haven’t even had a chance to use it yet.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  You know Tom, I have this recollection that when I looked at the ember mug site, they said something pretty clearly about the spoons but it was a few months ago and I looked at that. So, I have two things. So, one is the ABA legal Technology Resource Center 2021 list of women of legal tech just came out and there is the women of legal tech summit in March which I highly recommend. Great list, it should be a great uh great event and a great cause in a lot of ways. So, I’m proud to be able to announce that and played a small part in that. The other thing is something new that I’ve launched with a couple partners. It is an online course called getting exponential the essentials, it pulls together a whole process and path and a lot of things you need to work your way from idea to a productized legal service. You can find that at www.exponential.legal. Put a lot of work into it, there’s a lot of wisdom in there and people are really liking it so far. So, I’m going to plug it in this segment

 

00:40:21

 

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 page for the show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our show in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site where you can find archives of all of our previous shows along with transcripts. If you’d like to get in touch with us. You can always reach out to us on LinkedIn. If you’d like to respond to my rant today, maybe give a rebuttal or a rejoinder. Please leave us a voicemail 720-441-6820. So, until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

 

Dennis Kennedy:  And I am 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. We’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy-Mighell report on the Legal Talk Network.

 

Advertisement:  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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