Does it Take 10,000 Hours to Become a Legal Tech Expert?

Episode Notes

Transcript

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Intro: Web 2.0. Innovation, trends, collaboration, software as a service, metadata… Got the world turning as fast as it can? Hear how technology can help. Legally speaking, with two of the top legal technology experts, authors, and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to The Kennedy-Mighell Report, here on the Legal Talk Network.

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Dennis Kennedy: Welcome to episode 291 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.

Dennis Kennedy: And that means first of all, we would like to thank our sponsor Nota powered by M&T Bank. Nota is 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.

Tom Mighell: 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.

Dennis Kennedy: 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 servenow.com to learn more.

Tom Mighell: And with so many new podcasts announcing their very first show these days, we are rapidly approaching our 300th podcast. We’re very close, which means we do like to mention that at 15 years and counting, this is the longest continuously running legal tech podcast out there.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode, we took a look at the growing phenomenon of forcing people to come back into the office. In this episode, we answer a question that we often get from people. Are there good ways to develop your knowledge and expertise about legal technology that don’t take much time or effort? You know the answer to that one. However, we want to share some strategies for creating a good personalized learning plan to get you some expertise on the legal technology topics that you care about. 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 talking about making a plan to dramatically raise the level of your legal tech game. In our second segment, we’re going to talk about the latest technology entering the hype cycle, audio, video, asynchronous communication 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, how to make yourself a legal tech expert. If you listen to this podcast enough, you know we talk a lot about the lawyer’s general obligation of technical competence. Well, this and what we’re talking about today is not exactly that. What if you want to be more than just competent? What if you’re looking for a career in legal technology? What if you want to write more about it? What if you are looking for something deeper? In this episode, we’re going to throw around some ideas about how to accomplish that, how to develop a learning plan but where I think what we’re going to figure out is, is that this is not something that you can just do on nights and weekends necessarily. If you don’t have a lot of time, Dennis, how do you like to answer people who ask you what it takes to become a legal tech expert quickly?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, sometimes people like to say I would like to be a legal tech expert like you and how can I do that quickly and I want to go like, “I’ve been doing this for a long time, you do realize.” I think it does go back to the — we’re all familiar with the 10,000-hour rule to really become an expert or to become really great at anything and a lot of people talk about being 10 or 20- or 30-year overnight successes in in certain things.

I think there is an appreciable time commitment that you need to do and I think it really does come down to if you want to become an expert and get good at it and you want to do it even relatively quickly, it really takes tremendous motivation and tremendous commitment to do that. And it’s doable especially in newer technology. I think you can get up to a higher level more quickly but I think if you take a look at people who’ve been doing this for a long time and to say, “Oh, I want to be as good as this person is. You’re downplaying the experience and expertise and all the work that they’ve put into it.

So it’s like I was just listening to somebody on a podcast today talk about if you want to play basketball like Kobe Bryant, you kind of have to prepare in a way that Kobe Bryant did to get to that level. I’m not saying that you and I Tom or maybe at that level but it’s like anything else. You got to put some time and effort into it and to have a plan.

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Tom Mighell: Well, I think that, I mean we’re going to talk about this in a lot more detail but I think that what you need to be considering when if you decide you want to do this is how do you want your legal technology to play out. Do you want this to be broad and shallow or do you want it to be narrow and deep? And I think that the answer to that question is going to drive how you do it. I mean, I think that if you’re going to be broad and shallow or well, in either one, you can do some things relatively quickly but like Dennis mentioned, I think that in order to have kind of that broad general expertise, it’s going to take a while. It is that sitting at the foul line and shooting 30,000 foul shots to become the expert. You’ve got to take the time to do it. You can’t just become that overnight success. It’s going to take a little bit of work but I think you really need to decide how you want to approach it. Do you want to become a general expert across the whole thing or do you want to dive in deep on a couple of different topics?

Dennis Kennedy: Also, I think for me, two really different approaches. I sometimes think that Tom, you and I are kind of exceptions in a way. We love technology in this application to law and we’ve done that for a long time and we’re also both really good explainers and that we write and speak about this. So we’re able to communicate about technology and so, you might not necessarily want to have sitting over your shoulder, telling you exactly how to correct something or how to do something but you probably do want to have me explain something. So that’s one approach that you can take.

The other I think is really, my friend Amani Smathers is known for this in law but the t-shaped approach I think is a much better way to go where you say, “Hey, there’s going to be a number of areas in technology that I would like to have some knowledge about and there’s some stuff that are fairly standard that people would expect me to know about and I’ll have sort of like a good enough level of that or sort of the shallow top of the T, but they’re going to be some areas that I really care about or I’m super interested in that I want to go deep on.” And so, my approach to technology is going to be t-shaped which I would not describe, tom, you or I to really have a t-shaped approach. We’re much more universalists.

Tom Mighell: I think that’s right and so, to post a big disclaimer at the front of this, I think that one of the benefits that I’ve had is having been an observer of technology as long as I have been. I think that my strengths tend to be I can explain it well and I can — most of the technologies that I tend to use, I can use well so I’m able to explain it. Where I regret, my big regret in not having worked in the legal industry now for over 13 years is that I don’t consider myself to be the type of “legal tech expert” that we’re talking about here. I think that the field of legal technology tools is so large and so vast that I’m never going to catch up. Even if I decided to get back into it these days, there are just so many things to think about and if I was planning to do that at this point, if I was kind of getting back into the legal industry and legal technology, I would really take that t-shaped approach.

I would say, “All right. There needs to be something I want to focus on, something that I want to be all in on and learn about and become an expert on but I need to be aware of all these other different areas at least in some way to understand how they work, why they work, how they fit in to the legal industry and market and how they can work together,” because I do think that all of that is important. I guess really what we haven’t talked about here also is what’s your goal. You say you want to become a legal tech expert, what’s the goal for becoming that expert. Is it just for self-satisfaction, you just want to be that expert? Are you looking for a new career? Are you looking to help people? Are you going to be a consultant? What’s the purpose of all of this knowledge?

For us, it helps us write content, do podcasts give speeches and presentations and things like that. Dennis is making a lot more out of it than I am, but I think you also need to be figuring out what is it that you plan on doing with this newfound expertise that you have.

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Dennis Kennedy: And I think you’re right, Tom, that legal tech is now a very big ocean and if you feel it’s overwhelming to understand it all, it’s because it really is. I’ve never felt that it’s harder than it is right now to keep up with all the different things and so, I basically shifted to focusing on the things that interest me the most and that leads to what I think is a really key point which is that law practice and legal tech aren’t really monolithic. My interest and my expertise changed a lot because I was working as an in-house counsel. I’ve never been a litigator. I’m good at explaining e-discovery and stuff like that but it’s not really an interest of mine. And so, what I’ve done is to kind of pull back and say, okay, what makes the most sense for me to do going forward and one piece of that, Tom, is frankly that I think that the whole topic of innovation as the wrapper around what I think of where legal tech fits is much more comfortable for me now.

You do want to kind of step back and say, so what is it that I really want or I think even better, what is it that I need to learn and why do I want to accomplish that and so, depending on your goal, some of that is going to change and then I think it’s some of the things we’ve talked about is like okay, so let’s do some design thinking approaches, let’s brainstorm some ideas, let’s see what I care about, what might I use, what am I trying to accomplish, all those sorts of things and then I think it comes down to creating that big list and then narrowing it down to the stuff that didn’t interest you. Does that seem right to you, Tom?

Tom Mighell: It does but I think that we need to maybe help out a little bit when it comes to figuring out what that big list is because they’re not going to just draw it from thin air. They need to understand what the universe of that big list is and so, I would probably recommend the site that Dennis recommended as his parting shot in the last podcast and that’s the legal technology hub from Nikki Shaver because there, you can get an idea of the landscape and I’m just going to read the list right now because it’s long. It’s a long list.

It includes app development. This is all legal technology. App development, automation, contract management, data management, drafting tools, IP management, legal operation tools, legal point solutions, litigation management, platforms, practice management, project management, research, security, transaction management, and each one of those items has several sub items that go to it. And so, this is not something that you’re just going to say I want to be a legal tech expert and I want to do all of this. I agree that this is going to take some sitting down. It’s going to look at some of the areas. It’s going to be about really understanding what these areas involve and what each one includes and then come to some decision on where do I want to spend my time, where do I want to focus and learn a little bit more about.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. And so, I wrote down a list, Tom, of five items which is probably some examples I would think seriously about. Number one for me these days is cyber security. I think if you’re going to develop any kind of legal tech expertise, it would be in cyber security. I think document automation because it leads to productization and other things that you can do is really interesting depending on the type of practice you have. Practice management software is another place that you might decide that you want to specialize in. I think it’s like follow the money. There’s a lot of money going into the practice management software companies.

Everything in the collaboration tool space not surprisingly I think is important. And I do think it’s really useful if you want to know something about tech as it relates to the practice of law. I think just knowing some of the basics of computer forensics could be really helpful. I do a thing that every year I try to identify like a new tech skill or topic I want to learn well, doesn’t mean that I actually accomplish but that’s sort of the discipline I’ve tried to develop over the years. I guess, Tom, like once you do some identifications, then it does come to some time commitment and I think you just need to be realistic about that. Do you have like a — or to be unrealistic just because you love this stuff but in terms of realistic, what are you thinking? Is that like a couple of hours a week that people should put into it?

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Tom Mighell: I want to actually take a step back real quick because I think I have a little bit of a different approach to the examples that you bring and this kind of raises to me a question that came up at I forget if it was at Tech Show, if it was after Tech Show, a couple of years ago where I got in a Twitter conversation/argument/discussion about what actually constitutes legal technology because a lot of the things that you put on your list, cybersecurity, collaboration tools, computer forensics, not necessarily legal technology but there are those out there maybe some of you, maybe you’re listening to this podcast who believes that just the fact that a lawyer is using technology makes it legal. So that means that Microsoft Word in the hands of a lawyer is legal technology. I don’t agree with that.

I think legal technology is software that is designed for law practice, for accomplishing a legal activity because otherwise, then Microsoft Word is legal tech and it’s fintech and it’s ad tech and it’s all sorts, it’s agriculture tech, it’s all of those things and I think we get into a problem with that. To me, those are good areas for a general understanding of technology.

I would say that of that list that I listed, the one that I think is red hot right now to learn about what companies are doing is contract management. That to me is one of the big areas where and maybe it’s over hyped, maybe it’s red hot because it’s over hyped right now but the number of companies that I work with where their legal departments don’t have a good way to deal with contracts and then the fact that there are so many companies out there trying to help you with your contracts suggest that it’s an area that I think from a legal standpoint, from a true legal technology standpoint, I think it’s something that’s definitely worth.

If I were to dive deep, that might be where I would go right now just to understand more about it and become more of an expert because it is so I think at least top of mind for lots of law departments these days.

Now, let me get back to your other question. I think and Dennis and I were talking before this podcast about setting habits. I would say that in order to learn something, you have to set up a routine and whether that routine is a couple of hours a day, a couple of hours a week, whatever it is, you have to say I want to learn about it this long and you have to add it to your task list every day or every three weeks and say today on my list, I’m going to spend an hour learning about this topic and we could spend a whole episode talking about setting habits and goals and making things routines but I think that the only way to do that and we could also talk a little bit about the idea of taking good notes, this is kind of our second brain thing, how do you retain what you learn about legal technology. Taking good notes, keeping it in a second brain, that spaced repetition where you go back and revisit it several times to learn what you’ve been learning, all of those I think are important steps to start learning more about a particular legal technology area.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, there’s a lot there in what you said, Tom, some of which not surprisingly of I don’t totally agree with but I want to go back to this commitment notion and to use the Kobe Bryant example again because I say if you can’t put a couple hours a week consistently into something, you’re just not going to be very good and I think it shows that you’re not committed and think of like whoever you admire as an expert or very skilled in any category and imagine them putting two or three hours a week into something, they’re not going to be anywhere near as good. You want to do that level of commitment and here’s the trick and I think the best idea to learning all of this stuff is to create a project where you have to force yourself to learn it.

If I want to learn document automation, then I figure out some documents to automate. If I want to learn practice management, then I set up some new clients to do that so I’m forced to learn it because I have to do that. So if I’m learning to use the tools to create products out of legal services, I have a list right now of potential products to create and that’s how I’m going to learn the tools. I think that having that product instead of trying to learn the stuff in the abstract makes a gigantic difference.

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This is how you learn like people say like how did you learn social media or doing websites? I just went and did it. I gave myself a project. I knew something that I wanted to accomplish and I learned the tools because I wanted to get there and so, that’s a great way to learn and then I also think that you’re going to find that there are ways that you learn best and we’re in the golden age of learning because almost any way that you want to learn things, whether it’s reading about it, listening about it, watching it, they’re all available now.

Tom Mighell: Here’s the thing that I find is really interesting about learning legal technology is I think that the amount of resources are actually incredibly small compared to what other areas might offer for training. I mean when I was out there looking at options for how to actually learn, there’s not a lot out there. If I wanted to go learn about contract management software, there’s not a ton of sources that would “teach me how to do it.” I would have to learn in different ways and I think that when you’re learning legal technology, learning in different ways here, you’re not going to find a course on legal technology. Even the courses that law schools are teaching on legal technology are broader survey courses than deep dives on anything.

I find that most podcasts, videos, those are going to be your best ways to do it but most of these are going to cover legal technology kind of in one-off ways. They’re not going to have a series on a specific type or area of legal technology, at least not in my experience but I would say that if I needed to, I’m going to put these in the show notes, I would say I think that there are several podcasts that cover legal technology on a regular basis like the actual legal technology tools and that’s why I am bringing this up because I think it’s important and then also some videos.

Here’s a couple for you, I’ll include them in the show notes. I think the LawNext podcast does a great job of bringing on legal technology, owners and founders and to talk about their product. The Geek in Review does a good job of this. The Modern Lawyer is a podcast that does that. Technically Legal. I’m hesitant about talking about ILTA podcasts because ILTA doesn’t really talk about the tools. They talk a lot more about the skills that their members need, which might be useful to you but take a look at what they have. They’ve got a slightly different take on that.

When it comes to videos, probably the one legal tech YouTube channel that I know about where someone is regularly talking to legal tech owners and founders is Nick Rishwain’s LegalTechLIVE, which I think is a good site to learn about these things but frankly, when it comes to something like YouTube, I think that if you just go to YouTube and you say search for contract management software demo, I found 50 different demos of different products by doing that and it would show me how all these contract management software tools worked. I think that there are things that are out there. I think that it’s going to be a slightly different way of learning about it than you would learn on any other subject just because I don’t think that there’s a really organized way of having this information out there and nobody’s really putting a body or a collection of knowledge together on this topic. And so, it’s something that you’re going to have to hunt for and find and come across and it won’t necessarily be something that comes easy to find depending on what it is you actually want to learn about.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. I mean, a lot of times, my preferred method is probably is for you is I just like to call Adriana Linares to learn how to do things. So sometimes, there are some go-to people out there. I also think what’s become problematic and this is why we disagree a little bit on the contract management approach because I think it’s a great example of if you go to the websites and there’s a number of the legal tech categories that are like this, what you find is everything is driven to you reaching out to them to schedule a demo. And so, the websites actually aren’t very useful to give you an idea.

I was looking at a whole category of tools and going through the websites and basically was incredibly difficult for me even though I’m knowledgeable to tell the difference between one product or another because they were all driving me to provide an email address and have somebody call me. Sometimes, you have to consider that as well.

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There are going to be a number of approaches but I think it’s all doable I mean, to me, I think that there’s a number of learning techniques. We did a podcast with Kelly Palmer on the Degreed platform. You can use smart goals. Tom and I were talking about ‘Atomic Habits’ the book, there’s like a bunch of different ways that you can do that and then I think that then ultimately you figure out how you are you going to test yourself as to what you know and I think you prove what you’ve learned by teaching, by speaking, by writing and those things and then that kind of gives you the battle testing you need to really do that.

The other thing is as I say, I’m just big on finding a project to work on because if you if you learn enough to complete a project and the project works in a good way, that is the proof of what you learned and then to go back to one just real quickly to something that Tom mentioned, you didn’t need to decide whether the technology is something you’re going to do yourself or you’re going to be a decision maker or an evaluator or those kinds of things because what you need to learn is actually quite a bit different depending on the role that you play.

Tom Mighell: We got just a few more minutes in this segment. I’m going to let Dennis wrap this up. Do you have any closing thoughts that you haven’t mentioned about learning about legal technology?

Dennis Kennedy: I think that the thing I just mentioned, which is kind of it goes back to our old notion of jobs to be done and so, why am I learning this? What’s the point and if I’m buying something for my practice, then I need to know things at one level. If I’m trying to understand the whole category of things or I want to learn about a topic, say like cybersecurity, then it’s different and do I need to present it, do I need to write about it? All those things come into play.

And so, I think for Tom and I, our best known skills are being able to write and speak about tech in ways that lawyers understand and that’s surprisingly difficult and it’s like one of those things that I think we both take for granted but it’s actually a fairly rare thing and some of that, we learned, some of it is just the way that we communicate. So I think that kind of taking that look to say, “Okay, what’s the point of all this?” “Do I want a new career?” Well then, if you want a new career in e-discovery, then you’re going to have to learn one of the e-discovery tools really well or you’re going to have to figure out how you’re going to — or do you want to be a manager, which is a little different.

And then I guess my last point, Tom, is that I just feel that people learned a whole hell of a lot during the pandemic especially on collaboration tools, Zoom, all those things and so, we understand that we can learn this and I think we just need to look at that and say, how do we take what’s the best of what we learned from the pandemic and how can we keep moving that forward? What worked? What didn’t work and how can we do that better?

The bottom line is you’re not going to learn this like in a couple weeks in your spare time but if you want to commit to this, I actually think that you can, in a year, in some cases two years, especially if you’re in areas of technology that are quite new or there’s not many people talking about at the moment, you can develop a decent level expertise within a year, I would say but in some of the other categories, it’s going to take a lot longer than that and there’s also tons of consolidation, other things happening in the industry, so it’s a commitment.

So you got to be motivated, you got to be committed and there’s plenty of room for you and we’re looking for new voices, new perspectives, new approaches in this field.

Tom Mighell: And before we move on to our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.

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

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy and it’s time for a new segment we call Hot or Not. Actually, it’s not so new these days but we like it. So we pick something people are talking about and argue whether we think it is hot or not. I guess we could have uh picked contract management because that was probably the one thing in the last segment that Tom and I have a slightly different perspective on to put it mildly. We might agree but odds are that we won’t, so let’s get started.

Tom messaged me by text, I’ll note, last week about audio video asynchronous communication tools and how using these tools to leave short asynchronous messages will, some people claim, do away with both meetings and email. Tom, very laudable goals but are people really serious about what these tools can do?

Tom Mighell: All right, so Dennis basically just copied my message to him to introduce this whole topic and I will say that over the past week, I have listened to several podcasts and seen a lot of news that caught my ear because of those two exact things where people were claiming that they were using tools that either had the capability of both eliminating email and meetings entirely, not just partially, but entirely.

And so, two of the tools I’ll talk about. One of them is called Voxeri. We’ll put a link in the show notes. Voxer is, I guess for lack of a better word, they call it real-time voice messaging. I call it kind of a walkie-talkie tool a little bit and one of the podcasts that I was listening to, the guest was saying that he now uses this instead of email. He, in fact, refuses to communicate via email. He refuses to have conversations by phone. He only will talk in small bits of information. He has a coaching business and his coaching business now, he leaves small messages for his clients and then they leave messages for him and he’s done away with both email and meetings entirely just by leaving messages.

And all I can say really frankly, my gut reaction is I feel sorry for his social life because he really clearly prefers to just have conversations by himself and not actually talk or interact with anybody individually. The other one comes from the guy who invented Evernote. Love Evernote, don’t use it anymore but love Evernote but he’s moved on. He has a new product called mmHmm which he named mmHmm because he always wanted to name a product mmHmm and has nothing to do with the product. He just enjoyed that name.

What’s interesting is that what he believes mmHmm can do, it doesn’t actually do right now. Right now, it’s a tool that enhances your meetings with backgrounds, with effects, you can do a newscaster effect, but he envisions that the tool is going to eliminate update meetings so that a user can record their portion of a meeting for colleagues to watch when it suits them and you can even speed it up so you don’t have to listen to your colleagues talking at regular speed. You can speed it up if you want to get through it quickly.

I’ll say, will the colleagues actually even watch it? And to me, I would think doesn’t a meeting force you to pay attention where you don’t have to pay attention to notes that come in from your colleagues and all I want to say is these tools rely on asynchronous communication. So I think it’s fair to say that asynchronous is having a moment and it’s definitely a hot technology. So I think that hot in terms of now that we are working from home, now that collaboration is important, we are finding ways to make asynchronous communication a valuable part of the process.

(00:35:10)

But when I come back to will these tools eliminate email or meetings, I frankly think it’s crazy because I want to have if I’m coaching someone, I want to have that interaction with the person that I’m coaching or if I’m being coached, I want to have that interaction and not just listen to them on voicemail. Meetings have value to them occasionally. I don’t want to say never. We don’t want to eliminate meetings. We don’t want to eliminate email. We want to find good and reasonable tools to use the right tool at the right time for the right thing.

And so, while I would want to reduce email in meetings, I just don’t see that these types of tools ever eliminate them entirely and I guess that probably I could call this not really a hot or not segment but more a Tom’s rant segment because it kind of got me going. Dennis, what do you think about this whole brouhaha?

Dennis Kennedy: It kind of got me going too although I think that I would love it if I had a competitor for a coaching opportunity who took the approach that this guy did because I think it would give me an awesome competitive advantage to say, “Hey look, I’ll actually talk to you and I won’t dictate you the only ways that you can communicate with me.”

So I think this is really not hot. I think that people are kind of this is like we’ve been in the Zoom world and email world for a while now and people are just starting to get a little stir crazy, so I like asynchronous messages for things that deserve to be asynchronous but I think that we have this and I would say this this notion of the universal message box where your voicemail was transcribed you could access these messages in different ways. I think that’s a laudable notion but there’s like a ton of different ways to do that now like if I pick up my phone and there’s a voicemail, it’s transcribed for me. I don’t know what I’m gaining here and then I think people just forget that a lot of this stuff just plays to the weak link.

So somebody’s going to leave me this voice message and it’s the only thing I get and it’s like a walkie-talkie and so, if I can’t understand what they’re saying because the recording’s not good because they went with the cheap microphone, then I’m stuck with that and then the mmHmm thing which people are putting a lot of money into could be an interesting supplemental tool if you want to do something a little creative on Zoom but I don’t know that it takes the place of anything else.

And then it comes down to, Tom, when we write our book about collaboration tools, what we’re talking about is like how do you communicate with people in ways that are best for them and understand what their situation is and so, like why in the world would you force people into things that may not work for them? It’s better to give people more options. So you’re saying like, “Oh, let me do this where it’s video only and people don’t have access to cameras to do videos or they don’t have good microphones or they’re traveling or all these other things.” And so, I think it’s just this this sort of like we’re stir crazy over Zoom and those things so I got to put it in that category.

But now, it’s time for our parting shots. That one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: I mentioned several times on the podcast that I recently purchased a standing desk. I love it to death. I probably don’t stand as much as I should but I noticed that whenever I do stand, I can’t stand up for very long because I’m uncomfortable, so it came with a mat. I didn’t really like the mat a lot so I went out and I looked for something and I found a mat called the CubeFit TerraMat. It’s a little bigger than I expected. It’s kind of big. It’s not something that can easily fit under your desk when you’re gone. You might need to put it up somewhere because it’s kind of big but it is truly an amazing mat. It is extremely comfortable. It’s thick, rubber, in fact, I don’t really want to wear shoes on it. I just want to do it barefoot, but it is also kind of a balance/massage/comfort mat where you can rub your feet, you can get a good foot massage in if you need to, there are parts on there that have bumps on them so it can really help out your feet, but it is a very comfortable way to stand and it allowed me to stand a lot longer than I expected.

(00:40:11)

I found myself constantly using the massage thing because it felt so good to use it but I’m very thankful that I have it. I’m using it a lot. It’s about 100 bucks on Amazon. CubeFit TerraMat.

Dennis Kennedy: Cool. Well I would mention quickly two things that I’ve touch on, two areas I’ve been thinking a lot about. One is actually a recommendation from you or actually something where you use it to me, Tom, like I can’t believe you don’t know about this and aren’t using it and that’s YouTube watchlist and I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole read it later category of things. What happens when I find videos and I decide that are too long or I’m not at a place I can watch them? Well, the YouTube watchlist is like a bookmarking tool and it’s just really useful for that so you can actually have videos in a queue, not necessarily a queue, but a list that you can watch when you have the time to do that. So I think that’s a really helpful thing in a lot of cases.

The other thing is I’m very interested in the creator economy and what we can do with our content and can we create multiple small streams of revenue. And so, I’ve been looking at something called Gum Road. So that’s gumroad.com as in chewing gum plus the road you drive on. It’s an example of an integrated content platform where you can sell things and that payments are integrated into it, deliveries integrated into it and people can find things. So, say that you had some forms, some presentations, some other things that you had done and you thought people might pay something for it, like a small amount for it, you could put it on Gum Road and as I say, it could be the equivalent of finding a $5 bill on the on the ground or it could be the equivalent of finding a $5,000 dollar bill on the on the ground if you hit it but it just makes it really simple to take things that you’ve created and to offer them for sale.

We’re seeing more and more examples of this but Gum Road is the one I’m going to be experimenting with in over the next few weeks.

Tom Mighell: I have used Gum Road several times to download some inexpensive but well-done templates for Notion. And so, if any of you ever got interested in using Notion from our second brain discussions, there are a lot of Notion creators who have templates up there that if you need some inspiration or some ideas on how to put things together, Gum Road is a great place to look for those.

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 podcasts along with transcripts.

If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can reach out to us on LinkedIn or Twitter or remember, we still love getting those voicemails. We haven’t gotten one in a while so please make our day and leave a voicemail at 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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