Blog? Law Review? Something Else? — Publishing Options for Legal Scholars

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro: 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.

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to Episode 286 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 Nota powered by M&T Bank. Nota is banking built for lawyers and provides smart, no-cost IOLTA account management. Visit trustnota.com/legal to learn more. That’s N-O-T-A, Nota. 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.

Tom Mighell: And we’d 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 serve-now.com to learn more.

Dennis Kennedy: And with so many new podcasts announcing their very first podcast these days, we occasionally like to mention that at 15 years and counting, this is the longest continuously running legal tech podcast out there. In our last episode, we looked at the many new options for alternative legal careers and reflected on our own career paths. If you aren’t sure what you want or if you still want to be a traditional lawyer, there are plenty ideas for you in that show. In this episode, we wanted to discuss a conversation started by our friend, Kevin O’Keefe about law review articles versus blogs and explore the current state of legal publishing options. There are definitely more than two. 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 talking about the current state of legal publishing opportunities in the broadest sense of the term. In our second segment, we’re going to do another

round of our new hot or not segment 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, the current state of legal lawyer publishing, not sure how we want to call, how we want to frame that, our friend Kevin O’Keefe raised the question recently about whether blogs or law journals are the best place to publish legal commentary. As we will get into more in just a minute, I’m not sure that’s the right question to be asking, but we still thought that it would give us an opportunity to open up on the topic and discuss what we think might be kind of an update on what might be the best ways lawyers can publish content today. Dennis, when it comes back to that original question, are you in the blog camp or are you in the law journal camp?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think everybody probably knows my answer on that one but I agree with you, Tom. The question is not really that simple and I think that to me when you look at law journals or law reviews in any kind of print publication, it comes down to what are you trying to accomplish and who do you want to read what you’ve written and do you want to ensure that anybody reads what you’ve written whether there’s another purpose that’s more important than readership. So, if you gave me the two choices for how many years, 17-18 years, my answer would have been blog and still is but I agree with you, Tom. I don’t think the question is quite so simple.

Tom Mighell: So, I want to get this out of the way to start with because I don’t think this is really the issue that we want to be talking about on this episode but Kevin wrote a blog post, we’ll put a link to the blog post in there. In it, he quotes in New York Times article that I think makes a good argument that law reviews are broken that the model that what they’re doing there, they quote a bunch of judges

saying we never look at law reviews and we never cite them as authority for anything so what’s the point of having them. And I think that they complain that the same reason why we don’t want the New England Journal of Medicine edited by medical students, law reviews, the argument goes. It should not be edited by law students. It’s the similar thing but I think that’s a very different point from saying that blogs are a better place to publish legal commentary because law review is not just legal commentary law, law review is often legal scholarship like the New England Journal of Medicine

(00:05:12)

It’s new thinking on legal issues, it’s not just law students submitting things, it’s professors, it’s lawyers submitting things but it is one of the places where legal scholarship has an opportunity to be published and if not law review or a law journal, where do you publish legal scholarship? Medical research isn’t published on Dr. Jim’s

Blog. I mean, that’s not how that works. I don’t disagree that law review is broken and we can have a whole discussion about that some other time but I don’t think that’s really the point here. I think you have to fix law reviews with blind screening with peer review, with experienced attorney editors. If I’m blogging something that is legal scholarship, what controls do I have that what I’m saying is accurate? I mean, anybody can — we’ve talked about this before, anybody and their dog can publish a blog on anything they want to with no guarantee as to accuracy. So, that’s my kind of my rant saying. I really don’t think that blogs are the right place for what previously is in law review. I really just don’t think that that’s correct but let’s get maybe back to our point which is our blogs proper for anything these days and I think that you kind of raise a point is anybody really reading anything to begin with, are they reading blogs?

Dennis Kennedy: So, I think there’s — ask me on any given day whether, I think people are actually reading anything this blog versus tweeting a link to it or pointing people to something or grabbing something out of the headline but I think that’s the way we are in sort of every kind of publication these days and that’s something to really think about but I want to go take one step back to say like I’m not sure that when we think of publication and publishing that — and this is my original objection to this question was I think there’s so many more ways to publish these days and I think that publishing actually means something quite different than it used to. So, you make some good points about the purpose of law reviews and law journals and I would say that as long as publication in law journals is a requirement for getting tenure then I think that you publish in those journals if you want to get tenure and that is the purpose or the primary purpose of that but I think of publishing is just so much broader and you have to kind of factor in how you want to use each of the different media that’s out there and I think that’s what we’ll dive into a bit but with the law review side of thing, I come back to what I do with any print publication is it takes so long from the time you write something to it’s actually published and then on print these days in the era of COVID, I don’t know that you can count on any readership at all. I mean, actual readership because if something comes to in the mail, I think it’s pretty unusual that people are actually reading magazines that are in print or other things like that and there is this big delay.

So, every time I write something for print which is very rare these days, my concern is that what I wrote that’s kind of original and covering something current by the time months later, it actually appears in print somebody else has already written about it or it’s out of date or whatever and that’s why I start to think like there are these different modes of publications and we’ll talk a bit about timeliness but that sort of from the time that you actually finish something to the point people can read it that is a big factor for me.

Tom Mighell: So, let’s be fair. I mean, most law journals are online these days. They’re not all print publications. So, they had the ability or the capacity to be published immediately whatever happens to the paper version of it. I mean, my thinking on this is whatever gets published in a law review or a law journal is something that people are going to want to read for reference. I am a lawyer and I am getting ready to talk about. I’m defending a qui tam case and I want to see the latest thinking about what they’re talking about.

(00:10:00)

There might be a law review article that covers a new theory on qui tam and here’s the problem with having it on a blog versus having it in a law journal and I recognize that we may not have what I’m about to describe fully but this would be my best of all possible worlds. I’d want to be able to go out there and search a centralized area where I could search for law review articles. If I’m doing that on Lexis or Westlaw, I want to be able to search for a law review but if say Jim the qui tam lawyer wrote a blog post that has all the stuff about it, how am I going to find that? Is it going to be Google? Do I just go out on Google and pray that Jim the qui tam lawyer has good search engine optimization and I’m able to find his blog post? I’d rather go to a place where I know here is where the corpus of information is that I need to find and search that rather than search something else. So, that’s the benefit to me of having it in a in a law journal. I would prefer it to be electronic. I totally agree it’s the same argument we’ve had this whole time about print publications, takes forever to get books published, takes forever to get magazines published. Having it online is better that may be one way to fix these things but I still think having them in a centralized place is better than have them decentralized on everybody’s blog.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. So, you mentioned the term centralization. So, I want to kind of take you back to one of your favorite topics, Tom which is the hub-and-spoke model of how individuals publish and maybe it’s time to revisit that and to say maybe we look at, is a blog still the hub with spokes? The spokes around it. Would we say if I write an article in a law review then that’s some kind of hub and then I repurpose that article in different ways with spokes around it. Going back to our kind of age-old topic of hub-and-spoke, how do you look at that these days?

Tom Mighell: So, I’ll talk about how I looked at hub-and-spoke and then I’m actually going to talk about what I think is the hot new hub-and-spoke trend or maybe the hot new trend of kind of the hub-and-spoke model that lawyers aren’t doing yet but should lawyers be doing it. So, the traditional model that we’ve talked about many times on this podcast is that your hub is your blog, the blog is your home base, it’s the place where you publish all of your content, it’s a place where again there are multiple benefits to doing that. You own it, you publish it, it’s accessible, you don’t worry about it going away or being deleted by another website, you’ve got it all the time and it’s your content. But, again, just like we talked about with law review article, if you publish something on your blog and people really know that it’s out there which is why it’s important to have a number of spokes that help you publicize to bring people back to your blog to bring you back to your content and so that spoke might be Twitter, it might be Facebook, it might be LinkedIn, it’s any place that you are able to go out and say, “hey, look, I wrote something on qui tam law or family law” or whatever “I wrote something here. Go back and take a look at it.” And so it’s the many different places where you can let people know what you’re doing, you can talk about all those things that you talk about but it’s also just a place to make announcements and say, “hey, look, come back to the blog because ultimately what you want is you want your visitors visiting your hub and becoming subscribers of your hub and long time members of your hub without having to just get what you what you say in little bits and pieces out on various social media.” I’m going to pause for a minute and say Dennis do you want to add to that then I have a theory for what is a hotter version of that today.

Dennis Kennedy: No, I definitely want to hear the hotter version.

Tom Mighell: Okay. So, here’s what I think is what I’m seeing more people doing because I’m going to make the argument that newsletters are the new blogs that I’m going to say that so many people are moving now to newsletters and if we use something like Substack as an example. Substack in form doesn’t look any different from a blog for the most part. If you go to my Substack page, which is my newsletter that I did and I admit I haven’t done it in a while but if you go to that page, it is in reverse chronological order and you can click on each one and you read what I had in that newsletter and that is no different from reading a blog post. It is like a listing a blog post that you can read right there. People are beginning to publish their content on a newsletter site like Substack. We’re going to start to see that happen in more different places as we’re recording today. Twitter is starting to make some moves in that direction. Facebook wants to be all about that sort of thing.

(00:15:00)

So, we’re seeing lots of areas for newsletters and other those kinds of contact but what I’m seeing people do is saying subscribe to my newsletter and so this is where it’s not free but they’re saying subscribe to my newsletter and in addition, you get a link to my discord channel. So, I’ve set up a discord page where every week I have a conversation, come join a conversation and talk to me. If we’re talking about audio is the new social that clubhouse and all these other sites are interesting. One of my very favorite journalists on social media and the digital culture, he has a newsletter, he has a discord channel and every week, he has — he had Mark Zuckerberg on two weeks ago. He brings people in, he talks to them on his discord channel and anybody can join if you’re a member can join in and listen and participate to that. So, now it’s interactive. Now it’s not just you getting the information from Twitter and learning about the people that you’re writing about, it’s where people can interact with you and this is where I see where it’s going is saying I have one place where I’m publishing my content that could be a newsletter but I’m also offering another place where people can interact with me and that tends to be something like voice, that could be clubhouse, it could be discord. I’m very intrigued by this because I’m seeing now all the journalists who started their own newsletters, they all have their own discord channels and they’re getting great people on to listen to it. I’m almost wanting to subscribe to a bunch of them just so I can go and listen to what’s going on on these pages but I am very intrigued by this model and I’m interested to see how well it survives.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. And I think we’re going to circle back to this but I think that there’s no one hub that works best for everybody and I think people are kind of revisiting that and that’s why I invite people to do as they listen to some of the discussion here. I have this notion called #blogfirst where I feel that if I’m doing what I would traditionally done as an article, I’ll put it on my blog first and push it out to that audience and then what I would call the spokes around that so I publicize the social media and do other things like that and then my idea is if somebody wants to actually publish it in a print or online publication, then they can reach out to me and we’ll figure out a deal to how they can do that and that gives me control and you can go back to my blog post actually about blog first but a lot of it had to deal with — I had all this content and what I thought were publications that were going to be around for a long time and do a good job and all the links were broken and that was unacceptable to me and I’m like, well, I just need to know that there is a version of my articles in one place and for me, the blog is okay but I think that I look at other places where I would say, maybe the hub is something else and maybe it’s where I figure out that I have the most audience or the most important of my audience and that’s where I make sure that I do the focus and then kind of spiral out there today. So, I guess, Tom when we publish these today and think about it, how do we make the calculation these days on what medium we’re going to use or what combination of media we want to use?

Tom Mighell: Well, I think there’s a bunch of different factors that go into that. I mean, I think that the first thing is going to be how comfortable you are with the medium. If I’m using the example that I have just used now, do you like working in the blog medium, are you comfortable making blog posts? Is it easier for you to write a newsletter in word and upload it into a newsletter thing? So, it’s going to 

depend on how comfortable you are with what you’re working in because I would say it’s good to have a stretch on technology but don’t kill yourself if it’s going to prevent you from contributing. I think that the other factors are going to be who do you want to reach out to and do any of these different platforms have better odds of getting to the audiences that you want to reach and so I think you’re going to have to think about that as well to figure out what is the best place for you and your content to be. Those are kind of the two major things that I think about. Let me think some more about that but, Dennis what are you thinking in terms of the medium?

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Dennis Kennedy:  I always think of like what’s the target audience and then what’s the most effective medium to reach that and give that a lot of thought and then sometimes you say there may not be one medium so I may have to do this in a number of ways. I really focus on timeliness and you know, Tom and I, we sometimes joke about people who post things where they say exclusive in all caps. If you’re writing something then it’s not going to be published for a couple months, you can’t kind of say exclusive whereas if you’re doing a blog post or a tweet or something you can do that. For example, I could say — right now I can say exclusive, Dennis has no idea what qui tam means and it has that immediacy and then I think it does come down to what is your goal like what do I want to accomplish with this which is partially audience but kind of what do I hope to accomplish. Like I said if your goal is tenure then you’re going to do a law review if you’re saying like I want to influence people then you would say I might blog it, I might turn it into a video, I might do an op-ed in a newspaper or some other thing where I get it an audience, I might cut a video, I might do a podcast, I might try to get interviewed about my article on somebody else’s podcast and so you look at that and then I also say that you need to figure out like where are the pay walls and what other barriers are there to people reading it because if somebody has to subscribe to a site or pay something, your readership is going to drop because most people won’t go through the hoops on that.

Tom Mighell: I will disagree to an extent with that because there are — I think that there are some pay walls that people will not pay for but there are — I’ll just use Substack as an example. I think Substack makes it so simple to subscribe to a newsletter that it’s very easy and what’s nice about Substack is if you get a link let’s say to a newsletter or an article on Substack that you want to read, it’ll actually let you go and read that article, it’s not going to prevent you and say, “oh, it’s behind a

paywall.” I think in most cases. I could be wrong about that but usually you can — with Substack it gives you the ability to say show me the content before I decide whether to subscribe which is personally how I prefer to handle that but I really think that if I only paid two or three dollars a month for content that I really, really liked maybe more money per month to do that. I’m turning around a little bit on the free versus subscription slowly but surely but in general, I agree, I would prefer not to because I think that there are so many good content providers out there you could wind up spending quite a bit of money if you decide — if everybody else decided just to charge a subscription fee all at once.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. I probably wouldn’t pay anything for qui tam content myself but that’s –

Tom Mighell: All right. Qui tam means whistleblower lawsuit and it’s relevant right now because I’m working in my non-legal job with a client who has had a qui tam case going on for the last 16 years and so I’m fascinated with the idea of whistleblower lawsuits and then just the term qui tam is a fascinating term for me.

Dennis Kennedy: And so, I want to go back to this what I call the reality of readership. So, as you kind of track your audience and readership in different channels, I think that in the last year, it’s really tough to figure out like who’s actually reading what you’re doing versus like I say linking in it or saying attaboy about it or whatever and so when you want stuff to be read – yes, we have short attention spans and all of that. You kind of need to think through that in fact on my — this week’s weekly poll on my mighty network site, I’m asking like how many email, newsletters that you subscribe to, you actually read in each week and I’m expecting to see that other people are like me and it’s going to be an extraordinary low number and a very low percentage. So, you’re trying to say if I put things out then I either need to grab people’s attention by saying in all caps exclusive or something to draw their attention which you can only do so much.

(00:25:02)

Or I need to kind of repurpose and move in front of people in different ways and so I think now more than ever promoting your own content is essential. I think this notion of repurposing to say can I take what I’ve done and there might be a long version, there might be a short version, there might be a blog post, there might be a LinkedIn article, there might be a LinkedIn post, there might be a tweet, there might be a video, there might be audio, I might get interviewed for a podcast, I can do a bunch of things but I probably need to do all of that and then for me, I just keep looking more and more of saying I want to put my hub maybe into the mighty networks community I’ve created the Kennedy Idea Propulsion Laboratory Community and say that might be the hub but I’m not sure I can make that move yet and so I still sort of feel the blog is the hub but I think it’s going to change. And I’m not totally convinced that the email newsletter as you say is the new hub for everyone. I think there’s a calculation you have to make and as you said there’s a lot of factors there but I think comfort with the medium where your audience is and what your goals are are going to help you decide where your hub is and then you’re going to radiate out into other channels that also push people back to the main hub.

Tom Mighell: I only want to come back and say very quickly that I need to go and answer your survey on your mighty network so that I can say that I read every single newsletter that I receive because the deal should be you should only subscribe to newsletters that you are excited and interested to read and if you find you’re not reading it either because of time or whatever reason you’re not reading it, unsubscribe to that newsletter, just let it go. I read every newsletter that I get even though sometimes it takes me a while, sometimes I skim them just to see what’s in them. I read them all. Anyway, that said, I think it’s time to wrap up this topic. I feel like we’ve been talking about blogs for so long and I think that blogs still have value but I really think that with things like mighty networks and communities coming up and the newsletter coming back into prominence and tools like with audio where you can have conversations, I think that it is a great time to re-evaluate what your content strategy needs to be and how you want to publish yourself to the audience that you want to reach and I just think it’s an exciting time to start thinking about that because there are so many different options out there and so many different variables to be successful.

Dennis Kennedy: Right. And it could be that your YouTube channel and video is going to be a much better central place for you that hub than a blog would ever be and it’s just comfort with blogs work for people who are writers and I think people sometimes forget that but yeah I just think there’s so many opportunities now and so many ways to get them to interact with each other and to really reach the audiences that you want. I mean, it’s difficult because of COVID and people’s attention spans but there are more options than ever.

Tom Mighell: 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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(00:30:02)

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

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy. It’s time for a new segment we call hot or not. We pick something people are talking about and argue whether we think it is hot or not. We might agree but odds are that we won’t and we want your feedback on the segment. Let’s get started. Tom, forcing lawyers and staff back into the office this summer.

Tom Mighell: Okay. Now, you just added this summer to the script and it wasn’t there before. So, that changes my answer somewhat. You use the loaded word forcing. So, I’m tempted to say not but to be honest, I’ve got to tell you I’m looking out there and I’m not seeing a ton of evidence of firms forcing anyone back into the office and certainly not this summer at least big firms. Now, I am sure that there are businesses that are already back in the office. I am sure that there are other firms where we’re not seeing it widely reported on smaller firms so of course it’s possible that some are already back in the office. There is a recent law.com article that lists 12 big law firms. Some are not still not requiring anybody to return in 2021. They’re letting people come back in 2022. Some are adopting hybrid workplace working models. Some are requiring employees to be vaccinated before they come back. Most of the law firms that I see these days are looking now at Labor Day. Labor Day seems to be a magic day and frankly for a lot of my clients, too. A lot of companies are looking at Labor Day as the time when people are going to start to come back but I have to say I don’t see a lot of forcing going on. I know that one firm quoted everyone will be expected to work for at least some of the week in the office and so if you could call that forcing maybe it’s forcing. I’m sure there’s a lot of law firms out there that aren’t big enough that are doing this to cover but I don’t know the bigger firms seemed to be thoughtful about going back and you may have some examples differently but I would really like for law firms to the extent that they’re not doing this.

To start looking at companies outside of the law for inspiration and there was a recent article that I’m going to put in the show notes from Google. Now google is should not be the example for everyone. They have bajillions of dollars to do whatever they want to do but I what I love is they can afford tons of experiments and they’re doing a ton of experiments on how to come back to work but what they’re doing is they’re looking at three trends that really apply to all companies, it doesn’t matter if you’re a rich company, a poor company, a big company, a small company, a law firm, there are three trends that I think apply to all companies. One is work can happen anywhere and not just in the office. This is the pandemic proved that that was possible that we could actually work other places beside the office. Second trend, what employees need from the workplace is now changing constantly and we as lawyers have not been good about recognizing that. I think that is another trend and then finally, workplaces need to be more than desks meeting rooms and amenities. They have to be more than just a place where meetings and those types of things take place. They are more than that. I’ve included the article on Google’s plan for the future of work it has some really cool ideas that law firms will never ever adopt but I like the fact that people are thinking about this. We’ve heard this overused phrase that legal technology has come 10 years in the past year. I think that legitimately the same might be said about workspace when we’re done with this, I think that we’re finding new ways to make it happen. I will have to say I don’t see the forcing back into the office this summer. I see that it will become harder to avoid going into the office later in the year but forcing is not what I would use right now.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, Tom, in fairness and this is a reflection on the earlier segment. I only read the headlines but a couple reports this week of law firms saying that in July and big law firms saying everybody has to be back in the office and so I think it actually is in the warming up category because once — law firms act together especially the big law firms. So, once a couple do it a lot of them are going to do it. 

And so, it puzzles me because we’ve learned a lot over the last year or so and one of the things we’ve learned is that the people can work unsupervised and they can work at home and they have built a lot of hours, done a lot of work over this year in exceptionally difficult circumstances without being in the office and that to say if I worked at a firm and they said you have to be in the office on July 1st because despite all that you’ve done in the last year, we don’t really trust you enough that you can still do this on your own.

(00:35:04)

We need to have you back in the office and by the way we’re going to have a dress code, we’re going to have all this and I’m going to go after a year and Tom, you know me well so you know what my reaction is going to be like, “hey, I’m not in kindergarten anymore.” And if you think I’m going to be back in the office and I come in there and every single partner and managing partner is not there then the first day that it happens I’m working from home from then on and fine fire me because I think what happens is that great quote I’ve been reading lately called the best talent always has options and I think at this point we’re already seeing things where people are trying to mandate people back in the office and people are saying no, I want to work from home and I want to do the way that I work best and I don’t want to do commutes and I don’t want to go through trying to figure out how to go up in an elevator two people at a time and all of this. I’m way more productive at home and so I think the some of the best, the most creative talent will just look to go somewhere else. So, I think it’s the lukewarm and warming up but it’s actually very troubling to me that in a profession where one of the things you like is that you can work on supervising, you have a lot of independence in your work and a lot of creativity, that you’re going back to this really kind of micromanaged way of forcing people to go back to the old normal so concerning trend for me but I think we could see a lot more of it. So, now, it’s time for our parting shots at one tip website or observation. You can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: Okay. It only took an entire year of the pandemic for me to finally outfit my office the way that I wanted to. I finally got the standing desk I ordered a while back, I got it set up two weeks ago, I love, love, love, it and I have as my parting shot two accessories that I purchased for it that are both incredibly useful to me and I love them both. The first one is called the Rode, R-O-D-E PSA1 swivel mount studio microphone boom arm. Dennis and I record the podcast. Occasionally, I will want to use a real a professional microphone when I have calls or video meetings or things like that but I hate having the microphone on a stand on the desk it gets in the way and I have to disconnect it and put it away every time that I use it. I really hate that. I’ve attached a boom arm to the side of the desk by a clamp and I just push it out of the way when I’m done with this podcast and then I bring it back whenever, it is so convenient and easy, it works so well, I love it to death, I think the one I got is about $100, $110, $120 boom mic. There are a number of them out there, this one gets a lot of good reviews. The other one, a little bit pricier but also very worth it is after years of having plastic desk mats underneath that crack after time and get old, I splurged and I went for a glass chair mask it’s by a company called the Vitrazza, V-I-T-R-A-Z-Z-A. It’s a glass mat, it is so nice, it is solid, don’t have to worry about it wearing out or anything, it’s just a beautiful mat, a little pricey this one that I got is a little bit bigger that’s more expensive depending on the size. Mine was somewhere in the range of $300 but there are those that are smaller

depending on the size. I love them both and can recommend both of them if you’re looking for these items for your home office, Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: So, I’m literally looking at Tom’s microphone boom arm and I can tell you that he totally loves it.

Tom Mighell: I do. I love it.

Dennis Kennedy: It’s very obvious to me. So, one of the projects I’m doing is something called Exponential Legal which is an online course about productizing legal services and www.exponential.legal and so I like the course obviously because I helped create it but as people kind of look into the notion these days of what can I do to kind of turn what I’m doing as a lawyer into not just this service that I do over and over again but some kind of product that I can sell or license or generate revenue without my personal time involvement. I saw this thing from after pattern which is one of the tools that you might use actually to create a productized service. It’s called, ‘The Ultimate Guide:  How to Build Legal Products’ and I think it’s a great intro and overview to some of the types of products and then also some of the tools 

that you might use to create those products.

(00:40:09)

So, to me, it’s like you read this article and if it interests you then I would encourage you to take our course but this will give you a good overview and a lot of times people say I think I might have a product idea but I don’t know exactly how I would do it. This is really good to give you a sense of the tools and software out there.

Tom Mighell: 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 the show. 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 along with transcripts. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn or send us a voicemail.  We’d love to answer your question in a B segment. That number is 720-441-6820. So, until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy-Mighell report. A podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. If you like what you heard today, please rate 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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Podcast transcription by Tech-Synergy.com

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