No, This Podcast Could Not Have Been an Email

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dennis Kennedy:  Before we get started, we’d like to thank our sponsors; Clio, Colonial Surety Company, and Posh Virtual Receptionists.

[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 310 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor. And I’m Tom Mighell Dallas. In our last episode, we visited the wild world at NFTs and what lawyers need to understand about NFTs and their impact. Will Tom and I be meeting an NFT for our podcast?

Tom Mighell:  No.

Dennis Kennedy:  That’s a big question.

Tom Mighell:  No.

Dennis Kennedy:  Tom says no. In this episode, we turned some of our recent learnings about collaboration tools from the last two years and some of the things we learned while writing the new version of our ‘Collaboration Tools and Technologies’ book which is in a page proof stage, and share some learnings about asynchronous and synchronous approaches. So, 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 something that we’re going to be calling collaboration modalities and what we’ve learned about when it’s right to use asynchronous communication and when it’s right to use synchronous communication. In our second segment, we’re going to look at how to improve your virtual reality experience if you happen to wear prescription eye glasses 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, asynchronous versus synchronous communications and why this podcast is better served as an asynchronous format. During the past two years, I think many of us have learned different ways of communicating with colleagues and clients whether we wanted to learn it or not, we were forced to do so. And most of the learnings have come down to the pros and cons of two different types of what we’re calling collaboration modalities; asynchronous and synchronous communication. So we thought we’d spend some time talking about these two types of communication, what they are, what we’ve learned over the past two years, whether we have any recommendations over when it’s right to use one versus the other. Dennis, does the comment this Zoom call should have been an email sum up one of your biggest learnings from these pandemic times?

Dennis Kennedy:  Well, it’s a popular thing, but remember the original comment people were making was this meeting should have been an email. So we felt this about all meetings for a long time, but I do think it really focuses the question on do we have the right type of modality as we’re calling? Have we chosen the right vehicle for the communication and collaboration that we want to have and generally, that is divided into these two pieces or two descriptions; one asynchronous, which means that not everybody is there at the same time and in synchronous, which means that everybody is there at the same time. And so you have this sort of communication that’s happening in real time versus communication that can be kind of scattered out throughout the day or through a number of days.

So, Tom, that’s my crack at explaining asynchronous and synchronous, and maybe everybody understands that, but maybe you can clarify a little bit or maybe give us some examples just to make sure that everybody is on the same page.

Tom Mighell:  So I don’t really know that I have anything to add to the definition because I think it’s pretty standard. Synchronous is existing are occurring at the same time, and asynchronous is not. Synchronous is scheduled or planned. Asynchronous is unscheduled, but we can’t necessarily say that it’s unplanned because sometimes there’s a plan for asynchronous communication. So we’ll talk about that more later. The examples I think of synchronous communications are meetings. They are video meetings, in-person meetings, phone calls. Those types of things are what we would consider to be synchronous communications, whereas asynchronous tends to be things like email, chat messages, text messages, video recordings. Those types of things. Kind of quickly what I think could be the pros and cons of each approach. So let’s go to synchronous, things that are scheduled or planned. The pros of that approach are one, they tend to be faster, they tend to happen–

(00:05:00)

–you get it over with quicker than sometimes lengthy drawn out asynchronous communications. They can be more dynamic because they ‘rehappening all at once and in-person. They are good for participation and active discussion, and they’re good for real time resolution of issues.

The disadvantages to them are they disrupt your focus, they disrupt a person’s workflow. You’re working throughout the day and someone wants you to join a meeting. That can disrupt your workflow. Synchronous communication is harder when you work with a team that is in different time zones. So especially if you work with people another time zones, that can be an issue.

On the other hand, the benefits of asynchronous communication are it’s more flexible. There’s no scheduling. You go at your own pace. It’s good if you’re working in different time zones. There’s no barrier to that. The disadvantages to asynchronous communication is there’s no sense of immediacy. That may not be an issue, but if itis, you want to think about something different. We’ll talk about that more later. It takes longer to reach a decision, so sometimes decision making is better synchronous and asynchronous. And then I think one of the bigger ones is when you are synchronous and you’re talking directly to a person, you don’t have to be quite as precise in your communication. There needs to be a precision in what you’re talking about so there’s no disconnect in the communication because this is really the only chance you get and we talked in the past about how emails can be misinterpreted by not knowing what humor was or things like that. It’s the same thing with asynchronous communications. If you don’t communicate what you are trying to do, then you lose the value of being able to talk asynchronously.

I’ve been talking a long time, Dennis, anything you want to add to that or move on to the next part of our discussion?

Dennis Kennedy:  No, I think we’ll pick up on some of those points a little bit and I will say that this is definitely one of my learnings as we research the new version of our book which as I mentioned is now in the page proof form. So our phase so it should be out soon. But I think it comes down to some really simple things is that what we found and what research found was that when you have a mismatch on modalities to the communication or collaboration that needs to be done, then you can have it at best and in annoyance and at worst like a big problem. And then on the other hand, if you match the communication to the right modalities, that can be a great thing. And so over pandemic there are some basic learnings, nothing totally unexpected, but not everything needs to be on Zoom because everything doesn’t need to be a meeting. And on the other hand, not everything can be done by messages or email as much as we would like to so that this meeting could have been an email. Sometimes it’s the opposite that people rely on messaging which doesn’t have the nuance, doesn’t have the subtleties, we can’t read body language. Those sorts of things, and so we can go long ways on the asynchronous mode by messaging or email and then realize that we have to have a meeting to get everybody onto the right pager onto the same page and get things going.

And then, as we all know, the flip of that is that Zoom meetings with a lot of people on it are often unproductive and waste a ton of time. So I think that’s some of the learning and the other thing that was interesting to me was there’s just a general sense out there that especially during the pandemic, we start to rely too much on messaging. So, I don’t know how to say it, to resonate with you.

Tom Mighell:  It does. I mean that when we talked about a mismatch or modalities or matching them correctly, I think that the different way of saying that is, is there’s a good time for synchronous and there’s a good time for asynchronous. What is interesting to me is that I’m seeing more and more productivity experts and remote work experts and people talking about working from home and things like that saying that the future is in more, more, more, more, more asynchronous communication. The more of that, the better because you’re letting your knowledge workers do things. You’re giving the more power by not forcing them to attend meeting. And I’m going to disagree with that. I don’t think that that’s right. I think that synchronous can be very successful if it’s done right. When look at, this meeting could have been an email, I honestly can’t think of the last meeting that I was in where I came away thinking about that.

(00:10:07)

I’ve been in lots of meetings where it was a slog and it was painful, but it was necessary and we had to meet and talk to things in person. But I will say that I have multiple meetings with clients during the week, and I email them the day of the meeting and saying, “Hey, if there’s nothing to discuss, let’s cover it in email and let’s cancel it.”  And we do that. We frequently say, “Nothing to discuss cancel a meeting.”  But on the other hand, I have consultants that I rather than text them 20 times during the week to figure out how different projects are going. I have a 30-minute one on one with each one of them. I go through each of the projects. If there’s nothing to discuss, we move on. If there’s issues to discuss, we talk about them, and that’s it for the week. So I think there’s a right and a wrong time to use it and you have to get a good sense of that in order to, as Dennis puts it, match the modalities to where they need to be.

Dennis Kennedy:  And also, I think there are a couple of these formats and texting or messaging is to me, the best example of this where it can effectively be both modalities. So you can say I text somebody because I’m not sure where they’re going to be there with a message or something they can look at. If they happen to be online and available, then we actually have the conversation, so we flip to synchronous and then we might flip back to asynchronous at some point.

Tom Mighell:  The good thing there is, let’s say you’re doing that and you’re in something like Teams, but you’re like, “Okay, we’ve gone back and forth in some synchronous communication, but we’re not resolving it.”  I can hit the phone button in Teams and I can talk to them within two minutes, we resolve it and we’re done.

Dennis Kennedy:  Then as you look to the future, and I don’t think people are really comfortable with this yet, but you could say one of the things that worries me about a secret is communication is you don’t have body language, you don’t have nuance and you say, “Well, I could just cut the equivalent of a TikTok video,” and I post that in Teams or whatever, and then somebody can look at me saying what I have to say, and maybe even when I’m showing like a PowerPoint slide or something, and then they get the nuance and all this. I just don’t think that that’s how we’re used to communicating, but I could see that see more of that happening in the future.

Tom Mighell:  Well, it’s the same thing as if somebody in your office or somebody in your business doesn’t know how to do something with the technology that you have. How do we go about finding this document or how do we go about filing it in a specific way? I’m just coming up with bad examples here, but maybe it makes sense rather than to call somebody and say, “Please tell me how to do this” and take up their time. Maybe it’s a good idea to record a short video that demonstrates to them how it actually works and leave it in a library where people can go look for it, which I think is another way of having things asynchronously available to individuals and not wasting people’s time. 

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah and I’ve had people say, “Oh, I just want to show you something I’ve been working on” and so I just shared my screen on Zoom and I cut this video and I sent you the link to the video and you can look at it when you want because I’m taking 10 minutes to show you sort of like the next iteration of what we’ve done or things like that. So there’s definitely some sort of creative ways, I think is we’re still trying to work this out. As we were working on this podcast time, I was thinking that this kind of comes down to and maybe these days I just see mapping as the solution for everything. But it almost seems like what I want to do is figure out like, “Hey, here are each of these media for communication” and I kind of want to map out what they’re best for and then who I communicate in those areas and how I would want to share almost like have this map to say, “Okay, here’s where I fit on this and here’s the tool that I want to use,” and it may change as I understand better and better what the people I’m collaborating with either want or they need or prefer to use.

So it’s almost like a mapping or we sometimes use the idea of auditing how itis that we use these different modalities, but I think that mapping that out is a really good first step these days as we start to think about how we improve the way we use these tools.

Tom Mighell:  Yeah, I sort of think that way, but I also will say that I like to know what’s in my toolkit of asynchronous or messaging tools, so that when I get to a particular client, I can decide once I meet with them which of these tools is going to be most effective.

(00:15:02)

So I’m going to say I use this and this with some clients, but I can already tell that this client would rather use this instead. And so I think that my map would be organized a little bit differently because I would kind of have that whole toolkit out there and then I would be making decisions kind of on an audience by audience basis as to which one makes the most sense.

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah and then I think there was this preference piece and we were talking before the podcast about how one thing people who know me know that I hate phone calls, especially unscheduled spontaneous phone calls, which are spontaneous, of course, for the person calling me, but not so much, but feel interruptive to me. So there is, I think a big difference between scheduled synchronous communication versus unscheduled synchronous. And I think that the unscheduled sort of spontaneous phone call is partially because of spammers and spam phone call and all the stuff we get, but I think we’re moving away from that sort of unscheduled synchronous approach. So that’s one development, but that brings us to the problem, I think, of the asynchronous means and especially I see this with email is that asynchronous has this inherent difficulty if we want to do something that needs a fast response where you say like, “Oh, I’m just going to send a quick email to somebody to get an answer,” and then you don’t hear from them and you get kind of annoyed with them and you don’t realize that they’re in meetings or in their office and they’re not answering emails. So I think we’re evolving in both ways, and probably we’re seeing people push the envelope in a way of how these different modalities get used.

Tom Mighell:  And I think that part of the solution to that is in figuring out the right tool to use there. Usually when I need a quick answer to something, it’s not from a client, usually it’s from a colleague, usually it’s from somebody that I work with. So I wouldn’t send an email anyway. I would send a message by chat to get that message there and then what comes in handy is the fact that you can set your status within there to whether you’re away from your computer, whether you’re in a meeting, and Teams will even show when you’re presenting your screen, which I think is pretty cool, but what that helps me do is that helps set my expectations depending on what I see where they are, that gives me some idea of what I can expect to hear from them. So I think that in addition to you being a good asynchronous communicator, you want hopefully for the people you communicate with to be good at and considerate at doing that. And I think that’s one way of doing it is to let people know when and if you’re available to communicate with them because I think that’s kind of the challenge of this type of asynchronous communication is on the one hand, you don’t want to have a meeting for it, but on the other hand, you want an answer, like within five minutes because you’re trying to get work done.

So there’s a little bit of, they’re butting up against each other. And I think that you kind of have to develop a good rhythm with your colleagues and the people you work with in order to make sure that people aren’t saying, “Well, why don’t we just schedule a meeting to talk about this instead of you bothering me all the time in chat messages.”

Dennis Kennedy:  I think that moves us to the Holy grail of these collaboration approaches, which it was just sort of Slack and I think Teams more so than Slack seems like Slack has been one of the tools that’s really kind of diminished over the pandemic period of the last couple of years. So they offer this ability to use a number of different forms all in the same tool and to also have record of all that. So you can go to one place, you can see the history, you have logs, you can jump onto a video meeting, you can do an audio, you can do all sorts of things. And so the idea of having this collaboration platform becomes really attractive as you look at like, I’m just looking at my screen Tom, and I realize, like, “Here there’s some people that I communicate through Twitter direct messages, there’s some people through Team, there are some people through iMessage, some people are email and it’d be nice to have them all in one place and that sort of seems like, “Oh, that’s the beauty of Teams because we kind of evolved beyond where all the communications were in email and email is I think a diminishing fraction of where communications take place and it’s starting to hard to find things because you don’t know where they’re at.

(00:20:01)

If I can just pull everything into Teams or something similar, that would be awesome. And so I’ll turn over to you, Tom, because I know that you love Teams and its potential.

Tom Mighell:  I have thoughts on this, yes. I would not say that Slack has diminished. I think that Salesforce buying Slack was a brilliant move because it did the same thing that Microsoft did when it turned on Teams, because when they offered Teams to their hundreds of millions of users nationwide or worldwide, they ultimately got market domination just because they gave it to all of their users. Slack didn’t have a chance because even though millions and millions of people still use Slack, they were automatically dwarfed because if you have a choice between something you’ve never used before versus something that comes for free and something you already have, people are going to use Teams. I still know that Slack is widely used in the tech community and lots of solo and small firms still use Slack and are very comfortable with it, but I think that Teams really is for most law firms, starting to be that tool, whatever it is, I think there needs to be some kind of basic communications tool like Slack, like Teams, where you can have that basic chat function. The fact that it comes with other features is great, but that is really the benefit is you have the synchronous communications where you can set up a meeting, you have the asynchronous with chat. It’s all together in one thing.

But when I did some research, there are a ton of new tools that can do asynchronous in different ways. I’m going to put all of these in the show notes, but here are the different kind of categories. You can leave video and voice messages. We talked about this on a podcast a couple of months ago where we talked about would you ever want to be leaving voice messages for someone and just volume back and forth a voice message rather than having a meeting? I’m not really sold on that, but there are tools like Loom and Yak, which you can record videos or voice messages asynchronous communications. We are starting to see a lot more what they call meeting management software, as well as stand up and check in tools. And so it’s trying to make the idea of asynchronous meetings, which I’m still trying to wrap my brain around what an asynchronous meeting is, but essentially it’s a longer drawn-out meeting that happens virtually in a document online. And so there are tools like Hugo and Fellow and Hypercontext and Docket that will centralize your meeting notes. You can share agendas, you can manage action items from the meetings, and then there are others, which I’ve said a minute ago, I prefer having my one on ones by phone.

Some of these are intriguing to me there are stand-up or check-in apps like Range stand-up lead. There’s a tool called Geekbot where you can do standup meetings in Slack and Teams. You can just send a message out and say, “Please tell me what you’re working on.”  I like it because it’s built into Teams. DailyBot, Gel, those types of things. Don’t forget Wikis and Knowledge Management. That’s another way to asynchronously communicate if I want to know how to do something, we can set-up a Wiki that provides that information. So confluence. We talk about Notion a lot. Notion can be used for that purpose as well. And then, interestingly enough, project management software is becoming more and more a place to put asynchronous communication. You can talk about what you’re doing on a particular project, which I think is interesting. So a lot of different ways to do asynchronous in addition to Teams and Slack, and I think it makes sense to look at some of these because they are good options for getting things done in different ways.

Dennis Kennedy:  So two things I think are really interesting in this area. So one is the aggregation. So, Tom, you ran through this whole list. I was thinking, “Yeah, Notion is amazing in its way of doing this as well”, but how do we ideally go to one place and see everything? So how do we aggregate and make sure that we see everything and that we don’t miss things? So I think that’s important and then there’s this other notion which we do talk about in the new book of ‘Co-collaboration,’ which is do we really understand what the preferred or even necessary modality is for the people that we’re working with? My favorite example is I have a friend who manages a nightclub and he’s always posting on Facebook, like why do people call me and leave voicemails? Just text me. Just think about where I work and why do you think it makes any sense at all to call him on the phone rather than texting?

(00:25:05)

And so I think that when you say you look at it, you go like, “Oh, let me think about what people are doing, what their situation is, what tools they have.”  This co-collaboration thing will help to shape what we’re doing. And then I still go back, Tom, I think to this idea of like, why don’t we map out what we have, what they are and then try to figure out in a certain sense to go back to my usual point of the jobs to be done and say, “Okay, which of these modalities make the most sense for what I need to do?”

And then to take a closer look, especially the modalities that are causing you stress and I would say predictable failures and say, can I minimize those and find better ways to do things? So those are my thoughts, Tom.

Tom Mighell:  I think those are good closing thoughts frankly. I mean, I don’t really have anything to add to that other than I think we asked the question, where is email and all of that these days, because seeing that this meeting could have been an email, I sort of feel like that’s not the answer anymore because frankly, on my Team, we use email as little as possible. We are basically chatting back and forth and taking care of that, so there’s not a lot of email going back and forth. So I sort of have the opinion that if you are doing asynchronous communication correctly or if you’re matching your modalities, if you’re doing both async and synchronous communication correctly, then the only people that you’re really emailing are people outside of your business that you’re emailing clients, you’re emailing others where you need to communicate with them or maybe you’re doing something more formal that needs to be captured and it makes sense to be captured in an email instead of just a random chat message somewhere.

So I am seeing that, well, email is still Dennis, you keep the saying is email dead yet and it’s not. It’s very far from dead, but I see these tools have a good opportunity and a good chance to reduce the number of emails that live in this world, at least hopefully into the future.

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Dennis Kennedy:  And now let’s get back to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy.

Tom Mighell:  And I’m Tom Mighell. We are taking a break from the hot or not format this episode to follow-up on something we talked about in our recent episode on the Metaverse. The difficulty of using VR goggles like the Oculus Quest 2, when you wear prescription eyeglasses especially if you wear eyeglasses with progressive lenses, which kind of adds new meaning to that term VR glasses. Dennis, I think you recently went to your ophthalmologist and talked with him about the issue. I have done some research on it. We both wear progressive lenses. We both have this issue and we kind of wanted to report back to you with our findings what we’re doing or what we’re going to do or thinking about doing. Dennis, two questions, how shocked was your doctor when you brought up this question? And two, what did you learn?

Dennis Kennedy:  Well, he did say I was the first person who ever asked him this question, but I think it’s an older demographic in this office, but it was an interesting conversation because I described to him like what the VR glasses were and how they worked and what the problems I was finding.

(00:30:12)

And he was able to translate it really quickly, and what was kind of interesting to me was he understood like, “Oh, this is why you get the 3D effect from talking how the glasses work without using them.”  So it’s kind of interesting how I learned at that moment that they’re using some of the science behind how we actually see. So what he said was that basically when you have the progressive lenses, you have sort of far and near vision. In the research I had done on Google for medical information, as we all do, it said the focus area would be like about two meters away from you, which I learned from talking to the doctor is in the eyeglass world the same as infinitely away from you. So you’re just basically looking for those of us who wear progressive lenses, you’re just looking for the far Vishy glasses. The difficulty I found with the Oculus Quest was the glasses that I wear are just a little bit too big and a little bit too far away from my eyes and how they sit on my face, that made it uncomfortable for me inside the goggles.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go out and buy the cheapest single vision glasses I can for my prescription, which my ophthalmologist gave to me, and I’m going to get a smaller set of glasses that’s closer to my face, and I’m going to try that as like the cheapest way to go. And that was the suggestion of my ophthalmologist, and it makes good sense, the science sounded great to me, the price sounded great to me, and it seemed pretty easy to do compared to some of the other options. So that’s my report from the doctor’s office Tom.

Tom Mighell:  You know, it’s funny because I went to the eye doctor too, a couple of weeks ago, and I entirely meant to ask about this, and I completely forgot about it. So I do not have a similar story to report for my eye doctor, but I had been researching the issue both before and after that. And what I think is interesting is that there is a certain size glass, certain size of frames that will fit nicely within an Oculus 2 and that’s why while we’re talking about that, let’s say we’re talking primarily about the Oculus Quest 2 or the Meta Quest 2, because that’s what we both use. There are lots of VR headsets out there, but there are also a lot of VR headsets out there that won’t let you wear glasses, period. So at least in this regard, the Quest 2 is I think, a good tool because it does allow for you to wear glasses if you want to. The nice thing about the Quest 2 is it comes with a pair with a set of what they call glasses extenders. It’s not very big, but it’s enough. What it’s designed to do is it’s designed to make sure that your glasses do not scratch the lenses of the headset because if your glasses get to close to it, then you will scratch the lenses. And so having that, I think is critical. Having those extenders, I’m going to put a link in the show notes to something called XL Spacers. It’s a spacer that’s a little bit wider and a little bit deeper than the ones that come with the Quest 2. So they give you a little bit more room, make things a little bit more comfortable. The bad thing about these spacers is that there are other accessories for VR headsets that provide extra padding, make it more comfortable for you to wear it, and none of them work with the spacers. I don’t think. There may be in and if you’re aware of one, let me know. I couldn’t find any.

It seems to me that you can either wear glasses or you can be comfortable, but you can’t do both. So here’s what I actually am going to look at doing. There are a number of companies out there that will actually create prescription lenses for you to wear. I’m a little confused about — I understand in principle how not needing to worry about close-up works, but I will tell you that when I was using my Quest, I was looking down at the control panel that I was using to where the settings were and where the apps were, and I was using my close vision to see that. So I’m going to be interested to see exactly how it works when I buy some of these lenses. There are a number of vendors out there. I will put those names in the show notes. There are things like VR Lens Lab, Widmo VR, Virtue Clear, VR Wave, VR Optician. They all do approximately the same thing.

(00:35:00)

They will make a custom pair of lenses for you based on your vision and all you need is a prescription. You put in your prescription numbers. I think you have to send the prescription to them so they know that they’ve got an official document they’re looking at. The only thing you don’t put in is your close vision. So if you’ve got something that says that you need readers or something like that, you don’t put that in there because you don’t need them for those lenses.

In all the pricing that I did, I priced a couple of them out. They range in cost from somewhere between $80 to $100, $110 for those lenses, which is not terrible. So I’m going to try one maybe Dennis and I can report back once we’ve tried our various options and see where we get with our solutions to video being able to see appropriately in our virtual reality glasses.

Dennis Kennedy:  And this strikes me as one of those we don’t usually do the begging thing on this podcast Tom, but this strikes me as one of these things where if there’s a vendor who has a solution they think would work for us, we’re happy to give that a try and talk about that.

Tom Mighell:  Absolutely.

Dennis Kennedy:  Now it’s time for a parting chat that one tip website or observation that you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell:  Well, my tip this week is short and simple, and part of the reason that I’m mentioning it is because I’m so glad that it’s happening and the other is I’m not aware that this is happening on any other platform, but this is something that the Google Assistant is finally offering, which is when I use Google Assistant to set an alarm, so I wake up in the morning, I use Google Assistant to set timers in the kitchen when I’m cooking, and there’s nothing more annoying that when the timer goes off or the alarm goes off, I have to say, “Hey, G” I’m not going to set off my stuff in my house, “Hey G, stop the alarm” or “stop the timer.”  I don’t want to say all of that stuff. And now Google makes that easier, so when an alarm or timer goes off, all you have to say is stop, and it automatically stops. And as far as I can tell, Alexa doesn’t do that. Siri doesn’t do that. And it was the best thing to be able to wake up in the morning and just say stop than to have my sleep addled brain have to remember to say, “Okay, G, stop.”  So I’m happy for this update, and I’m glad that Google did it, Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:  And I wonder if, like the TV, if there’s somebody on the show who says stop that will turn off your alarm, but I guess that’s an experiment.

Tom Mighell:  Well, there is voice recognition, so hopefully not, but you never know.

Dennis Kennedy:  So I have two quick ones this time and so I was on a podcast with a great guy, Chris Jollys, and this is like one of these things that happens to you through social media. But he has a podcast called Coffee with the Freight Coach, and it’s podcast number 160. I’m the guest and it’s Chris Jolly. And this is a really cool podcast where he’s talking about supply chain and he’s in the trucking business and we ended up being introduced by Michigan State Law alumni, and we just had a great time talking. So he had me on the show and we ended up talking about supply chain, law and how you got trucks into Ukraine and all sorts of other stuff and it’s really fun. And so Tom will put that in the show notes, but if you want to hear me talking about something other than what you usually hear me talk about, this is a really fun podcast, and I think you’ll enjoy how much fun the two of us had and we talked about tome some really interesting things.

The other thing was that I noticed the other day that I left a teacup in the flip of white ring on the table, so I could say my parting shot is to use a sort of even mixture of baking soda and water and that will take those out, but the real thing was that I decided to get some coasters and I got these (00:39:13) stone coasters and I’m using the thirstystone brand desert sand coaster and it looks really nice and they just do a really great job as a coaster, absorbing the water from a cup and hopefully prevent those white rings but just totally enjoyable coaster experience, like who would have thought?

Tom Mighell:  And so that wraps up of this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on this podcast. You can find show notes for the episode on the Legal Target Network’s page for the show. If you’d 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 like to get in touch with us, you know where and how to find us, we’re on LinkedIn, we’re on Twitter and don’t forget, we love to get voicemails from you, please leave a message at 720-441-6820. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

(00:40:09)

Dennis Kennedy:  And I’m Dennis Kennedy. And you have been listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology within 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 with 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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