Practicing Productization

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 295 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 like to thank our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy: First of all, we like to thank Nota powered by M&T Bank.  Nota is banking built for lawyers who provide 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 like to thank Colonial Surety Company Bonds and Insurance for brining you this podcast.  Whatever court bonds you need, get a quote and purchase online at colonialsurety.com/podcast.

Dennis Kennedy: And we like to thank ServeNow.  A nation-wide network of trusted pre-screen process servers.  Work with the most professional process servers who have experience with high volume serves in brisk technology and understand the litigation process.  Visit servenow.com to learn more.

Tom Mighell: And with so many new podcasts announcing their debut in first podcast these days as we rapidly approach our 300th episode, we occasionally like to mention in 15 years and counting, this is the longest, continuously running legal tech podcast out there.  Speaking of our 300th episode, if you have ideas for it that you’d like for us to consider or if you’ve got a question that we can answer in the B segment because we really would love to spend our B segment of our 300th episode connecting with our fans, connecting with listeners, connecting with people who have questions.  Remember, we have a voice mailbox, that very high-tech voice mailbox for you.  The number is there is (720) 441-6820.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode, we had a great conversation with our friend, Debbie Foster of Affinity Consulting about what is actually happening on the ground at legal tech as we reached the 18-month point in the pandemic.  In this episode, we want to do a follow-up on Episode 293 where we discuss Document Automation.  For me, Document Automation leads you directly to productization of legal services and that’s what we want to talk about in this show.  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 the productization of legal services and because this is something you happen to know a little about, I will be interviewing you about the topic.  In our second segment, we’re going to take a look at what we’ve heard about he recent ILTA Hybrid Conference and we’re going to take generally, the temperature of legal tech conferences; hybrid, or not.  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, productization of legal services.  As Dennis mentioned, we see this is a follow-up to our show on Document Automation.  Dennis does so much in this area that I just wanted to interview him and ask him some questions.  To me, thinking logically, productization sounds like you’re turning legal services into actual products.  Dennis, is it that simple, or is there a better definition that you want to give to get us started?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think the concept is there and another way to think it is you’re taking — something that you’re doing is providing legal services and turning it from a one-to-one experience to a one-to-many experience for you.  So, it’s almost like you’re doing something once and you’re making it reusable many, many times and that you may be able to package that as a product that you charge people for, you may be able to package as enhanced service that you give away to people; but it’s really sort of taking a service approach and we’ll give some examples, but you’re taking something you do as a service that you’re probably doing over and over again and saying “There are clients who can use this and they would be willing to pay for a product or usage of something that they see as applicant product rather than paying me thousands of dollars to have a meeting and provide information and get the same deliverable out of it.  So, Document Automation is that classic example where somebody can answer a set of question sand then produce a document, a filled-out form, other things and then you can charge people for that as the service.

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So, that’s how I typically think of productization.

Tom Mighell: So, why are we suddenly talking about this?  To be honest, when I think of the term productize and productization, this is not words that I’d heard until the last year or two, maybe a couple of years; and I try to look up the origin of the words to figure out how long they’ve been there; and to be honest, there’s not a lot out there except to hear that these are – yeah, so, I want to say made up business terms, but they seem like they’ve been made up for that purpose.  So, I mean, where did this come from, and why are we just kind of – why is it kind of now either the hot thing or the thing people seem to be talking about?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I’m guessing since the – not being critical of anyone, but since the ABA website lost the (00:05:55) 2014 article on Productization of legal services, you might not have found it in your Google search, but I’ve read about it before and I think you saw some of it definitely in the late 90s where people were saying “Can we do something that allows clients or consumers to do something online to provide data and then produce something out of it?”  Like I said, either a document or filing, so classic example in the late 90sm in the UK, non-contested divorces you could do by going online and filling out the information and generating the form.  So, I think it’s been around for a while, I think the reason you don’t hear that much about it is because you know, try saying productization three or four times in a row and you realize what an unwieldy and awkward word it is.  But I think it’s been around – I think there’s more focus on it now because people think – and a better way to think about it is sort of this is just an awkward – as awkward of a word, but appification of legal services, so can we create an app?  And now that we’re in a world where it’s so much easier to create apps, I think people will think in terms of products and you’re just starting to see more examples from something that helps with somebody on evictions, to simple family matters to more complex business filings.  So, you see a fair amount of it and that’s why I think you’re hearing more about it but I think it’s a sort of thing where people are saying “If I do products as opposed to services and potentially somebody will fund my efforts.”  So, that’s one piece about it.  So, I think you’re right; it is something that you want to describe what you’re doing in kind of a business way that’s attractive to the market right now.

Tom Mighell: So, I want to come back to what I think are kind of the connotations of the word appification in a minute.  But I want to ask to follow up something that you were just saying; you were kind of giving a few examples of kinds of products that might be created; what are the main areas of law that sort of lend themselves to this?  And what are the areas that productization would be Especially useful too?  I think Document Automation is clearly one of them, but what else do we need to keep in mind?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, some of the aeras where you’ve seen the efforts happen are estate planning, family law, small business – a small business practice where you’re doing like standard corporate forms and documents.  Seen a fair amount in what I call the general access to justice area but you miss the immigration, the eviction – what’s going on with evictions now is another thing.  You see some things that are sort of responsive to what people are doing.  So, there’s need for a lot of people to do things, and they’re not – that sophisticated legal work and people don’t want to spend thousands of dollars and lawyers can’t generate the volume.  So, there was the PPP Program with COVID for example; where people could do filings and now you can get forgiveness and that’s – apparently, 52% of business have not done the paperwork needed to get that forgiven.  That’s a place where you say “All right, can you create this online app that allows people to complete the forms and gather the information” and put everything together to do that and I might put that up there for free; sometimes in the excess – just a space where I might say “Hey, it’s $25 to do this or $50 to do this” and if you get several hundred people doing that, it’s actually a very worthwhile project; plus, it helps a lot of people.

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Tom Mighell: So, I’m a lawyer, I have a service that I provide to a client or a couple of clients, I want to think about productizing that service.  What are the steps?  How do I get started?  What do I need to think about first and then next?

Dennis Kennedy: To me there’s a couple tipoff factors.  So, one is where am I doing a lot of volume of repetitive work?  Second, I think is really important, is where I am writing off time already?  So, you say, “I’m doing this stuff for people, but I don’t really charge for it, I don’t feel like I’m charging them for a simple corporate document” or “I can’t justify charging two hours a time for like a simple will or a Durable Power of Attorney” and you say “It’s actually a very standard document and if I could price it at a low rate, or even give it away free, then I can provide a different form of service that people are more willing to pay for” because actually, a lot of clients believe that lawyers just press a button and spit out automated forms, they’re just only slightly customized.  So, I think you’re looking – you need both volume, and something that’s not profitable for you, then something that you would say “Oh, I would like to – I think a lot of people would be interested in this but it doesn’t scale for me if I deliver it in-person.  So, I can’t do like, 10,000 Durable Powers of Attorney in a year if I have – because I can’ get 10,000 clients, but if I put it up on a website and say people can pay $50 and generate their powers of attorney, then potentially, I could have 10,000 customers.  So, those are sort of the thing, so it’s a sort of what standard – very standardized whereas there’s a lot of volume and where people might be willing to pay small amounts of money, but they’re not willing to pay you for sort of the full frate legal services that’s going to run like I said, probably several thousand dollars’ worth of time.

Tom Mighell: Okay.  So, we got a listener out there who has got an idea, they’ve got a service, they – it’s an area, they kind of are ready to get started, can they do it on their own?  Are there tools out there that help them do this?  What are the – you’ve kind of gone through the process that needs to happen, are there any tools or services out there that can help somebody walk through the process?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, when you go back to the last episode Tom, when you were saying they’re like more than a hundred document automation tools out there.  So, there’s plenty of tools.

Tom Mighell: Some of those tools will help you create your own tools.  So, I guess that’s maybe what you’re talking about as the services that allow you, when they do the no-code-create-your-own-type service, but not all of them do that.  I mean, a lot of them are just their own discrete “We provide document assembly services and it’s still our proprietary technology that you’re using to create a document”, right?  I mean, it’s not all stuff that you can productize your own stuff with, right?

Dennis Kennedy: What you’re typically looking at is, — yeah.  So, let me kind of answer the other side of that.  So, there’s a bunch of tools out there, you’d have to do due diligence there or some standard tools, some of the other ones we talked about on the earlier podcast.  But you’re sort of looking at something that there’s a flow to it, so you have a process that you can map out.  So, it’s kind of like first this step, this step, if you make this choice, then these things happen or you have blanks that you need to fill.  But something you can map out.  So, it’s almost like, if you can map out this process, so you’d say for example, you say “If I want to get – and I don’t know the details on this, but say it takes six steps to do a name change and you have to collect different information; then you would say “If I can map that out, I understand that process, then I can create — and it has a deliverable at the end, something gets filed with the court, then I actually create an app where I will typically get through like a guided interview, ask people to give me the information; answers out of questions, and at the end, it will spit out the form that they need to take to the court to get that name change.

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So, you’re looking at things also where there’s a process or it’s just a simple filling-in in the blanks.  And so, what I look for these days is not to give away something that I’m working on, but I will sort of is that people are dying with cryptocurrency and sometimes that’s held by third parties and people just don’t know it.  So, anybody who’s an executor now, won’t know what to do with that.  Well, in the case of one of the crypto third-party holders, they actually have like a six or seven-part process.  So, you could envision an app that walks people through those steps and then generates the email that they need to send to this third-party service provider that will get the transfer to the cryptocurrency done.  And that’s a nice app because you’d say “It’s really simple, it helps people out.”  They don’t know what to do otherwise.  I mean, nobody knows what to do with this stuff and if you say “Hey, for $50, this will give you the email that you need to send and do that first before you hire a lawyer in case you run into any trouble.”  That’s an example to me of an app where there’s like a nice workflow process that you can follow and basically take people through.  So, the frontend is sometimes described as a structured interview, or a guided interview that’s designed to get your client or your customer to provide the information rather than to spend an hour talking with you as a lawyer who’s taking notes and trying to get names spelled right and those kinds of things.  So, those are some of the things I look at as well and then it just becomes like “Well, what’s a great tool for mapping out flow and we could be a piece of paper and a ruler; or if you’re a good drawer, it could be that.  And then once you have that, then you move to the document automation tools and say “Oh, I can learn one of these and there’s things like contacts who had been around forever and there’s also some newer tools; and some of the newer tools that are cloud-based will actually host your application so you could – your product could be a web-based application from day one.

Tom Mighell: Someone asked what maybe – maybe a conte versional question, maybe it’s not controversy at all.  But as I was preparing this, as I was kind of reading through the things you wanted to talk about as part of this, one of the things that came to mind was a website that I follow called Product Hunt.  It is a site where developers can launch their new app or service and it gets tons of attention, it’s a place for start up apps to go and literally hundreds of new products launch there every single week and you can vote them up or vote them down, and the ones that are most popular get the most votes.  I like to keep up with new stuff so I tried to go through them every week and as I go through a lot of them, there are just a lot of garbage new apps that are out there.  They’re not well thought out, it’s clear they don’t have support behind them, they’re sloppy.  If they were legal apps, they would not give the client a lot of confidence as to the quality of the person who put them together and whether you’re getting a truly high-quality legal product.  And so, I’m wondering, we haven’t really talked about all of the benefits of creating the apps, but I’m wondering if the notion of productization is going to lead to a flood of crappy legal apps that will flood the market that people are going to say, “Hey, I’ve got this idea for an app” and everybody starts putting these things out.  And so, I guess, the question is how do you prevent that?  It’s one thing to have a crappy online to-do list that Product Hunt has, it’s another one to have an app that’s crappy that could have potential ethical implications, is that something we worry about?  Or is that, and you know, would somebody say “That’s just the cost of innovation that we’ve failed fast and we want people to try, we’ll never know until we have a thousand crappy apps out there that there are good ones?”  I mean, how do we avoid that sort of thing from happening?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I mean, it’s one of those compared to what issues, for me.  It’s like when you look at these apps, people are always comparing it to the mythical, perfect lawyer who if you talk to people who deal with lawyers or other lawyers, you think that there’s probably not even one competent lawyer out there because everybody is saying “Oh, the person who did this before was terrible.”  So, I think that you have to say “Okay, so realistically, all lawyers are not perfect.”  So, that’s going to be one thing.

(00:20:03)

You’re also, — I think in the product world, you’re looking at things that are very limited applications.  So, it’s not a to-do list, you’re saying “Here’s something that allows you to produce the form that you need to file”, or give you a simple type of agreement or stripe the company – payments company has a great set of tools that allows new corporations to do standard corporate agreements and you say, “Well, that’s working.”  On the other hand, so you have lawyers who people might not able to afford, who’s quality is unknown, but what people are doing is their going on in the internet and finding something that’s called the same name and treating it as a template.  Like, “Oh, here’s this lease agreement, I’ll use that.”  And anybody who’s worked with a contractor, like a house contractor or something, you look at the agreement they use and they say “I found this on the internet”, and you just want to go like “No, this is not – terms aren’t even close to being in your favor.”  So, I think you say “We’re living in this world, we got 80% people trying to do stuff on their own without knowing what they’re doing or they can’t afford a lawyer.”  So, if I’m doing something that says “Here are these kind of simple applications that are in a part of – that help people do some things that probably lawyers cannot do for people either profitably or they would charge something that would just make a client faint, those are the areas that you’re looking for, and there’s also an area I call the legal adjacent or pre-legal; or you could say “If I’m an app that allows people to gather information in one place and answer a set of questions before they go talk to a lawyer or before they do something else, maybe that’s not even – I’m not even touching on the area of practice of law, it’s just really kind of a preparation application.  That’s an interesting area to me.  But I think once we – once you start to think about that 80%, or I’ve recently heard it’s even 86% of people who can afford legal services are going to have to do it on their own, I think we just have to look at apps as actually a really interesting option and that’s why you’re seeing more of them developed in the access to justice area lately.

Tom Mighell: So, that’s the first question that you haven’t really answered for me; which is yes, we’re seeing these apps, but there’s no guarantee that they’re – I mean, just because it’s about a simple issue, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to be a crappy app.  I mean, we’re giving people with not very great technical skills, even though these tools are simple, there’s no guarantee that they won’t design a crappy app and what I’m hearing is, it’s better than the alternative.  We’re just going to agree to disagree on that particular issue there.  I’m concerned about that potential.  Now, the other on the other hand —

Dennis Kennedy: I will say that a lot of the online Document Automation tools do produce a nice interface and a professional looking product, but I think you’re right.  If you structure it wrong, you don’t answer to the right questions, your logic flow is messed up, it’s not going to be a good app.

Tom Mighell: I think you’re right.  If you’re going with a company that has already developed a framework for you to work in and that you’re really just adding your knowledge to that, that’s one thing.  But I hear you saying that the appification or the productization could also be “Hey, I’m a lawyer but guess what?  This site lets me become my own coder.  I’m going to code my own app and do it on my own.”  That’s included too, that’s what I’m worried about.  I’m worried about that sort of thing happen too.

Dennis Kennedy: I would say the same thing because that to me seems crazy.  If I can do a no-code approach using a tool like Afterpattern or Brighter or one of these things, and I limit what I’m doing because back – we talked about Sephorra(ph) 30 years ago and I was like this close to coding as you get as a lawyer, it will snap like a great use of time and their results aren’t the same as you could get now.  So, I would say like if you’re thinking about coding an app, it makes no sense to me.

Tom Mighell: So, let’s be clear.  This is trying not to offend our listeners with this, but you hear me and Dennis talking all the time about how far behind lawyers are on learning technology.  I mean, you’re about to tell me that anybody can become an instant genius using Brighter; I disagree with that.  I’m not sure that that everybody can use it the same way that you could use it or that I could use it or that — I would say, I’m not even talking about doing the type of coding that you were doing 30 years ago.  I mean, using these tools I’m skeptical about.

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I’m going to move on from that because we’re going to run out of time.  I got kind of two questions to end this.  I want to say one, what we haven’t really talked about too much is how does this benefit the lawyer?  What are the things that can happen for lawyers who choose to productize some of their services?  Yeah, I guess I’ll just start there.  What are some of the ways and reasons why this is a good thing that lawyers should be doing despite the fact that the clients will benefit, how does this benefit the lawyer? 

Dennis Kennedy: So, I think as a lawyer, there are really significant benefits.  And so, one is diversification your revenue streams.  So, you’re adding additional streams of revenue.  So, if you’re doing some apps and they generate let’s say 10,000 to 20,000 a year and you’re doing a number of them, that can make the difference between surviving in some cases it can make your retirement more possible, there are those things.  With a product, you do enter the world of making money while you sleep because on some of the platforms you will literally get an email saying like “this money has been deposited to your bank account” you know, overnight and that’s great.  The other thing is it gives you the ability to deliver your expertise and assistance to more people than you can by hours.  See, it’s like “I’m really knowledgeable on this, I’d like to help more people but I can’t if I’m charging for hours.”  I can do one person and serve many more clients, help more people and then really interesting aspect for me is that you can continue your professional legacy.  So, you can say like “I had this expertise, I created this, and when I retire, if all I have is my law practice in my time approach, when I retire, it’s kind of over; but if I’ve created these apps, it’s potentially a nice retirement annuity and I can build these things out and once you figure out how to do one app, next ones you do get easier and you may have customers say “Oh, you’ve provided this app that allowed me to change my name with the court, can you now help me do the thing that I need to do to get the name change for Social Security Office and other things?” and you go “Oh, that’s another app” and I charge somebody $5 bucks for that $10 bucks for that.  And so, I think those are the things where you’re saying like, “If all I have is time and my only income is coming from services, in this current world, I’m in the worst possible place because I have undiversified income and I’m just trying to create these kinds of multiple streams of revenue and products become one part potentially for some people portfolio as paid speaking or other things might be for other lawyers and that’s where it becomes interesting especially for lawyers who have a lot of specialized expertise who are looking to wind down their career.  So, all of those areas are interesting and I also see it with new lawyers as well where they can say “I can do some kind of app and maybe it’s the difference between me being able to hire a paralegal or something else, it just gives me just like one more thing that will bring in income if times get tough.

Tom Mighell: And I think that’s a good place to wrap up a zany.  Thanks, Dennis, for teaching me and everybody about productization, look forward to hearing more about that over the next few episodes.  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 segment we call Hot or Not.  We pick something people are talking about and argue whether we take it is a hot topic that you need to pay attention to or it’s not so hot.  We might agree, but the odds are that we won’t.  So, let’s get started.  Tom, so much talk the last week or so about what worked and didn’t work about the annual ILTA Legal Tech Conference that was held partly in person in Las Vegas and partly online in a hybrid format.  Now that we are starting to get some actual data on these hybrid conferences or are hybrid conferences hot or not?

Tom Mighell: I think the answer from my standpoint is neither.  Hybrid conferences are a reality whether or not they might be hot.  And although I think this conversation could devolve quickly into a discussion about what it would take to end a pandemic, the fact is, I think hybrid conferences are to borrow I would say an overused phrase going to be the new normal for a while, if not, for the long-haul.  I think something about the past two years have changed the ways that some of us want to interact with the rest of the world.  Some people will prefer to never travel to a conference again if they can get a meaningful experience online.  And I think conferences are going to continue to offer a hybrid option at least until in-person numbers give them excuse to tell their virtual audiences “Sorry, we’re not going to do it”, I’m still not sure that they’re even going to do that after the fact.  But let’s talk briefly about ILTA.  This is really the First Legal Tech Conference to have an in-person component in the past 18 months and I’m glad that they did it.  Whether or not it was financially successful for them, that was a good test of what people would do and I applaud them for having done it.  I think from what I’ve heard, they had all the right precautions in place, they required vaccinations, it turn out my company, we had – one of my colleagues was speaking and they wound up not letting him speak because he only recently got vaccinated and he hadn’t had his vaccines long enough to qualify.  So, we had to put someone else in his place on the panel to do it.  So, they had the right precautions in place, I heard that one of the vendors might have been using, and I don’t know if it was ILTA or the vendors, I heard a rumor that they were using red, yellow and green bracelets to signify how comfortable you were with being close to people at the conference.  Green means “Bring it on, give me a hug”, yellow means “Ask me before you shake hands” and red means “Stay off, I want to socially distance from you” which, I like that.  I think that’s a great idea.  We are all living in a different version of reality here.  I don’t think everybody saw the bracelets though that I keep hearing about.  So, I don’t know if they were there.  But I think it’s a great innovative way to deal with a newly-sensitive issue that’s never been an issue in the past.  I think the reported in-person attendance was somewhere in the 800s but frankly, all conferences count their attendees in different ways; and I’ve heard that actual non-vendor, non-staff paying attendees was much less than that.  I mean, the session that my colleagues spoke in, there were only 15 people in the audience although there were a lot more online.  I’ve heard multiple accounts that the vendor floors were fairly empty most of the time, I’ve heard varying accounts of how that affected the vendors, but I don’t think the vendors should be all that surprised about it.  I mean, these conferences are going to be tough on vendors for a while, and I think that’s just the unfortunate truth and none of that surprises me.  People I think just aren’t ready to be in-person yet, it is what it is.  But I’m glad ILTA did it, I think it gives the rest of the legal tech world some idea of how to move forward on the idea of conferences so I am glad that this kind of happened; I think it needed to happen.  Dennis, what are your thoughts?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah.  I struggle with where to rate this.  I have a number of concerns from what I’m seeing and I’ll talk about that in a second.  I think that there was this approach kind of before delta really took route that a lot of this is going to be more possible.  I’ve been on like a number of calls for people like “I can’t wait until we’re in-person at the next meeting” and then things really happened in a negative way over the summer.  So, on a conference you have to commit to this stuff.

(00:35:01)

And so, it was I think probably in the spring, maybe even early summer, it was not a bad approach; and so, it’s worth trying it and we get some data from the experiment.  So, what I notice is that I think that the approach that we’re taking to the hybrid format is what I feel is not hot.  So, I think say “Let’s rethink conferences and what hybrid means and what in-person means and what the value is really is, I’m afraid that we might be missing some important things.  So, I just started teaching a class in-person first time and well over a year and a half and I told the students I said “Hey, if we’re going to be here in-person, then the idea of me lecturing to you the whole time or this standard approach doesn’t make sense; we need to – and I’m going to try this, to actively flip the classroom so that what we do is way more groupwork, lots more discussion and minimize the lecture.  And so, he puts the emphasis on preparing ahead of time.  So, what I saw in the hybrid – some of the hybrid things I’ve seen is that the hybrid is basically one camera capturing a panel conversation.  So, like the first thing I saw, ILTA was a panel and there was somebody introducing it in a tuxedo.  And I was like “Oh my god, if I pay thousands of dollars to go back to a standard panel discussion, that would be a problem.”  We’re not taking advantage of anything that we learned from the online world and some of the things that we can do.  So, I’m struggling with this, I think that we’re going to end up at a good place in a mixed approach.  I just think that right now, people so much want to get back to in-person and the way it was that were maybe; going back to some of the worst of things before and not taking advantages of the way that we could move forward.  So, now it’s time for our parting chats, that one tip website or observation, you can use a second this podcast ends; Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: We continue to talk about Document Automation and there was a tip that from our earlier episode we completely missed which I would say is kind of the most basic of Document Automation tools and it’s something that I actually don’t use which is why I didn’t mention it, but it was pointed to me since we did the last podcast and that is the Windows V command.  When you hit Windows V, that will bring up your entire clipboard history; and so, the recommendation was to save several things in there that are part of automation.  Put a signature line, put a paragraph in there, and you’ve got a list of your history.  You just select an item in your history to paste it and it goes down to capture the last 20, 30 different things that you happened to copy and it’s all right there in the Windows V.  So, the easiest way to automate things is to just go back to what you’ve got in your copy history and hit the Windows/V key.  The Windows key plus a lot of things brings magic to your Windows world.

Dennis Kennedy: You did like a whole tip session just on the Windows approach and the similar thing in Apple as well.  In the ancient days of document assembly, that needs to be referred to as the point and shoot approach.  You’re just like grabbing something you need and popping it in through one or two keystrokes.  So, I have two things, so one is related to what we just talked about, productization which is a new project I’m working on called exponential.legal and it’s www.exponential.legal where with a couple of partners we’ve put together our complete approach to developing applications and products based on legal services from idea to the actual product launch and we’ve done that as a course.  If that’s something that interest you, we’re proud of what we’ve done and I think it’s really useful.  It’ll give you a completely different way of looking through all the aspects of creating a product.  So, take a look at that.  The other thing is that last semester I did, and my research assistants in Michigan State did a number of online webinars, interview shows, other things and I have the videos now up on the Michigan State Center for Law Technology and Innovation Video Resources page and so, there’s a full three-hour webinar on virtual reality in the practice of law and several great interviews and the URL will be on the show notes but I think some really, really great stuff are in there.

(00:40:29)

So, if you like watching videos or interested in some of the topics, I highly recommend that and we’ll be doing even more of it going forward.

Tom Mighell: And so, that warps 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 shows along with transcripts.  If you like to get in touch with us, you can reach out to us on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and remember, like I said at the top of the episode, you can please leave us 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.

Outro: Thanks for listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report.  Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, “The Lawyers 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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