The Internet of Things is Watching You

Episode Notes

Transcript

Tom Mighell: Before we get started, we’d like to thank our sponsors Embroker, Clio and Posh Virtual Receptionists.

[Music]

Intro: Web 2.0 Innovation, Trends, Collaboration, Software, Metadata, Software Service, Podcasts, Virtual Law. 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: Welcome to episode 316 of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

Tom Mighell: I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas. 

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode, we took an up-to-date look at home offices, some new ideas and trends, and what works best these days. And that was before I learned I learned about Steel Case’s upcoming new line of Frank Lloyd Wright inspired office furniture. In this episode, we look at the rapidly growing Internet of things, especially what all these sensors are looking at and collecting and listening to, and why we might want to care more about what is being done with that data. 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 taking an updated look at connected devices and how they might affect you, whether it’s in your practice or whether just as a regular person. I think that’s more the case these days. In our second segment, we’re going to update you on what we’re doing and maybe some of our new projects and as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots. That one tip website or observation, you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, The Internet of things and what it’s up to these days. We first covered The Internet of Things 10 years ago. It is at least that old. Episode 97. So we hadn’t even made it to 100episodes when we first started covering this. We revisited it again about 4 years ago, episode 218 in 2018. And now it’s 4 years later, episode 316. We figured it was time for another check in. Dennis, this time around, are we only talking about things connected to the Internet?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I was thinking that it could be that 2018 episode we marked the crossing point or the crossover point where there were more devices connected to the Internet than the humans, because that happened a few years back. It’s a funny thing to use that term, to talk about Internet of things, because we are really talking about things that are connected to the Internet. It’s typically not laptops, not phones, but all the other stuff that’s connected and there is a lot of it. So I looked at some statistics and I was saying from 14 to 31 billion Internet of things devices these days, and they account for half to two thirds of all the devices connected to the Internet. So we’re talking about all those things other than the computers, the laptops, the phones, those sorts of things. And estimate is there are 20 devices in each home these days connected to the Internet, and you’re just seeing them all over the place from toothbrushes to scales that you’re weighing yourself to toasters to other things like that where things can be connected to the Internet, your Lexus and other devices, those kinds of things. It’s just really interesting to see how much there is these days and I’m not sure that 20 number seems like if you take a walk around your house and I know around your house, Tom, you probably get to 20 pretty quickly.

Tom Mighell: I did, and I’ll actually give you that number in just a second. What I find interesting is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of consensus on the number of IoT devices that are out there and the numbers vary widely. I found the number 14 billion, like you did, but I also found the number 48 billion, which doesn’t give me a lot of confidence with such a wide range there. What’s interesting is that back in 2018, we estimated that by 2020, there would be 20 billion devices connected. I’m actually going to be a little cynical and say that it is closer to the 14 than it is to the 48 and part of the reason for that is, over the past one or two years, we’ve had a big chip shortage issue. 

(00:05:00)

Chips are what go into connected devices. Chips are what go into the sensors that we’re going to be talking about. As a result, that has resulted in fewer devices being made. So I’m going to argue that it’s not the 48, it’s probably not the 30. It’s probably closer to the 14. Dennis, to your point, I looked at my Eero, by the way, if you are using an Eero or if you are using a mesh network in your home, you can see through your app how many devices are connected to your wireless network. As of yesterday, we had 29 devices connected to our wireless network and then it said that there might be another sixth that also were connected at some point in time. So 35 devices. Let me get two other fun facts. In 2021, there were an estimated 258 million smart homes. So homes that have smart equipment in them that are smart lights, door locks, plugs, sprinkler systems, things that are connected to the Internet and can work in an automated way for you. That is only 12% of the houses in the United States that is expected to grow or is that just a US?  I’m not sure if that’s the US or an international stat. Anyway, it’s expected to grow to 400 million by 2025 and I know you want to talk about this topic in just a minute, Dennis, but they are estimating that the amount of data generated by or collected by, generated by, whatever you want to think about it, by Internet of things devices is expected to reach 73.1 zettabytes by 2025. For reference, a zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes, so whole lot of data that’s going to be collected and I think that’s kind of where we’re going to focus a lot of our talk today.

Dennis Kennedy: Get your ticket right at e-discovery right away when you hear those kinds of numbers.

Tom Mighell: So much e-discovery.

Dennis Kennedy: I like to think of The Internet of things in terms of sensors. This is a weird thing these days that in some cases it’s actually easier to put the chips in, to put the mechanisms in there. So you have Internet connectivity then it’s easier to do that than not to do that at this point. It’s almost like it’s the default. And then also, I think it gets to be kind of hard to figure out how you do count these things. Like, is a car just one big Internet of things device or is it many Internet of things sensors that just happen to be housed in a car?  And the fact is that 90% of cars that are sold 130 million worldwide now have Internet connectivity. So there’s really a lot happening out there these days. I got thinking about this because our friend Sabrina Pacifici in her blog, beSpacific, linked to a popular science article about connected cars putting your privacy at risk and they talked about just the cars and how much data they collect and generate which they use the example of a 2018 Chevrolet Volt generated up to 25gb/hour of data across every category imaginable and they described this sort of new field, I guess, or new approach called Telematics just to describe this type of data collect, gathering and collection.

Tom Mighell: Well, I’m assuming that there are many of our listeners out there who have automobiles that are equipped with OnStar, with the OnStar system. My father’s car is connected to OnStar and every month he gets an email from OnStar that tells him, “Here’s the health of your car. The current pressure in your tire, all four tires. We’ve noticed that your oil is at 20%. You might think about going in for an oil change at this point.”  But also what kind of amazing to me is that if they notice anything at all emergent happening, he gets an immediate notification. An email saying, “Hey, we noticed an alarm just went off in your airbag on the passenger side. You might want to take it in and get it looked at.”  

(00:10:00) 

And so it is communicating regularly and I would say in a timely fashion and to an extent, that’s an awesome service. The ability to know all of that stuff. I want to know all that. I want to know everything that’s going on about my car in that way and being notified that way is great. I think, on the other hand, having all of that stuff is terrifying as well. I guess it depends. It kind of depends on what context you’re going to talk about. I think as we introduce this next set of topics, I’m going to have more to say about sort of the privacy implications of collecting all that information. But Dennis, where do you want to go from here?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think that I do want to talk about that kind of touch on some of the unique issues, when I say new issues that are coming up. And some of this is that once you start to have all this data and aggregate it and look at it, it actually can be a little frightening. So even back in 2013, there was a study in nature that said that if you looked at sort of GPS locations with four space and time points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of individuals when they were using a data set of 1.5 million people. So you’re worried about protecting the traditional personally identifiable information, and just from the GPS information, they were able to identify individuals 95% of the time. Obviously, there are many other devices out there that are collecting data. I think there’s a really interesting issue with the Internet of things, of the things that are constantly connected to the Internet versus the things that check into the Internet. They’re gathering information, and then when they’re actually able to connect to the Internet, that’s when it gets uploaded. I go back to Kevin Kelly’s book, ‘The Inevitable’ and I think he would say it’s inevitable that if data can be collected, it will be collected and the challenge is how we as a society let that data be used. We’re always starting to see this sort of socially and politically. So there’s a lot of discussion right now that with location information, other information that there are implications if Roe versus Wade is overturned and you’re looking at abortion and abortion, the providing of abortion, and how data collection has an impact on that potentially in terms of criminal law. I think the US and most of the world made a decision with COVID that we didn’t want to go into the depths of location and contact tracking that we might have gone. That data is out there to be collected and analyzed. The challenge, I think, is how are we as going to make a decision about how we actually do use that.

Tom Mighell: Well, let’s take it a little bit further and I want to introduce a new term to everyone or it may be new to you may not be and that is IoMT, the Internet of medical things. So kind of aligned with what Dennis was just talking about that continues to expand and just talking about consumer things. The Apple Watch that Dennis is wearing right now collect so much data. Now, of course, Apple will never do anything without, right?  They’re never going to do anything but you might have an aura ring. You might have a whoops band. I’ve been looking at that lately. It looks kind of like an awesome way to measure a bunch of things about your health, and it’s collecting a bunch of stuff. During the time of COVID. Lots of employers developed cameras to measure social distancing so that you can see what’s going on but there has been such a surge fueled by the COVID pandemic at wearable health monitoring to extend in home treatment to prevent and allow doctors to provide services without the risk of bringing sick people all into one place that it makes it easier to monitor. So devices that perform virtual office visits, my dad’s blood sugar monitor that every twice a day, I get a notification of what his blood sugar is. My blood pressure machine, my scales, wheelchairs, defibrillators, oxygen pumps, all of it is connected. It’s all taking personal information. This is all medical information. We’ve kind of moved from beyond whether my oil is 20% from getting — 

(00:15:00)

We need to get it replaced to what is my blood pressure, what is my blood sugar?  Do I have some kind of condition that an insurance company might be interested in?  It gets a lot more concerning, so there’s huge benefits to all this, but I think there are huge risks as well.

Dennis Kennedy: I think we can just keep coming back to what is the tradeoff that we’re willing to make, because there’s a lot of things that are possible. People are talking about you could have a built-in breathalyzer in your car that would keep you from even starting your car if your blood alcohol was too high. That sounds like a good thing, but is it?  And how does that compare to I think, Tom, you make a great point of knowing that you’re this close to an oil change or something. Breaking down in your car is one thing, but knowing health information about you could be something different and other information, like the speeds you’re driving or other things like that, that could have a legal implication, also become significant. So I think that’s the debate that we’ll see play out over the next few years.

Tom Mighell: All right, we’ve got a lot more to say, but first we need to take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.

Male Speaker: Being a lawyer can be stressful, especially if you juggle multiple systems to get your work done. That’s why over 150,000 legal professionals switched to Clio. With Clio’s cloud-based legal software, you can manage everything, from client intake to billing, from one secure platform. Plus, Clio integrates with your favorite tools like Outlook, Gmail and QuickBooks so you can get more done in one place. Learn more at clio.com. That’s C-L-I-O.com.

Tom Mighell: As a lawyer, insurance is one of the last parts of your job you want to spend unbillable hours on. That’s why thousands of lawyers have switched to Embroker. Embroker offers A-plus rated insurance for law firms that you can quote and buy instantly online. If you need help, they’ve got experts on standby. Go from sign up to purchase in just 15 minutes by visiting embroker.com/law. That’s embroker.com/law.

[Music]

Dennis Kennedy: So Tom, what the heck do we need to be doing if there is anything that we can do now?

Tom Mighell: I think that if there’s anything that we can do is kind of tough because I think that it is hard to know. I’m not sure we can ever really know all the devices that are tracking us. I can look at my list of what’s connected to my Eero network and I know those devices to some extent are tracking me. I have an idea of what I have in the house. I know that I just connected my refrigerator to my WiFi network so it could tell me when the ice ran out or when the filter needed replacing but what about it just every day around and about, when are you being monitored by sensors that you’re not aware of?  So I don’t know that it’s ever going to be possible to figure out how many devices are capable of tracking you. I think that the smarter move is just to understand that you are capable of being monitored in a multitude of places and ways and design your life accordingly and just decide, here’s how I plan to accept or not accept. I’ve mentioned multiple times how I’m the Google fanboy and I know that they collect a lot of information with me, and I’ve made peace about that from a certain perspective. I think that you have to go through sort of the same risk analysis as well as to understand what might be out there, what might be possible, because I don’t think it’s possible to learn about everything and decide with what amount of risk you’re willing to put up with.

Dennis Kennedy: I think, and I sort of challenge our listeners do this, to do what you did, Tom. It’s just like just on your own WiFi system in your house, figuring out how many devices are already attached to the Internet and just kind of figuring out how many devices at home, at work, in your car, the places you go are capable of tracking us. We were in AT&T store today, and the salesperson just made the comment. There are seven HD TV cameras on us, looking at us right now. You look up the ceiling, you go, “Oh yeah, I do see some of those.” 

(00:20:00)

I think more and more we’re going to find that we’re being videoed where there’s other things. I think, Tom, you point to the fact that the watch I’m accepting certain amount of information, but also phones are also really tracking a lot of information as well. So I sort of feel like it’s best to assume a device can track you in some way. It is tracking you in some way because it’s almost, like I said, harder to build the device and set it up in a way to not track you than it is to track you. And so then I think that takes you to the next step, which in its own way, in a personal way, Tom, I think it gets you into your world of information governance, is figuring out what’s being collected, and then how do we figure out how it can be used?  

Tom Mighell: There’s good news and bad news there, frankly, because if you’re really interested in learning more about what devices collect on you, the good news is there are more privacy laws being enacted that give you the right to seek that information. 

GDPR in Europe allows you to do this. California Consumer Protection Act does the same thing. Some of these others in Virginia and Colorado and I think Delaware and some other states that are getting ready to pass legislation. All have the ability to make a subject access request where you can understand what it is. But that’s probably going to be the only way that you can really find out exactly what information that they’re keeping on you. They probably, unless they are, unless you go to their website let’s back up. That’s the other way to do it is you can make a request or if they’re following the law, if they’re really complying, going to the owners of the sensors or the devices that are tracking you, they should be putting that information in their privacy notices. They should be putting it in their applicable information on the website, and they are violating certain privacy laws, if they do not do that.

Now, if you’re not a California resident or Virginia resident, they may not have any obligation to you to do that. But that information for the California resident is likely also applicable to me in Texas, because they’re probably not collecting any different information between the two states. That’s really, I think, one of the only ways to find it out. Look at the privacy statement or if you really want to dig in deep, make that subject request if you have the right to do so under a particular law.

The other challenge is that in my line of work, very few companies, other than the very biggest companies are actually prepared to do that. They’re not actually prepared to respond to those requests. They really have no idea how to track it down and find it and look for it and delete it if they need to do that. But I think for me, the best personal advice is know all the devices that can track you. Like I said, just do a survey of what you’ve got and try to generally understand what information they might be tracking and then dig in deep if it happens to be something that is sensitive that you really do have a concern about a loss of privacy on.

Dennis Kennedy: I would say the other thing is that some companies may be doing the best that they think they can, they just may not know what else is going on because of how these devices are put together. And then I think also as we look at the traditional data privacy laws, a lot of this information that’s being collected doesn’t really fit into the traditional personally identifiable information categories. And we do have these things where you say like if you aggregate or a few things and look at them together, you can learn more than maybe in those traditional PII categories. The other big thing, and we could probably do, probably do like a three-day seminar on all these issues, but cybersecurity on Internet of things is huge, right? We’ve talked, I think, in previous episodes about people breaking into networks by going through the aquarium filter and other things like that. So once you have something connected to the Internet, you’re opening up definitely insecurity vectors, and there’s tons of stories about that.

Tom Mighell: Well, a couple of statistics in that area. In 2021, just the first six months of 2021, there were estimated 1.5 billion attacks against IoT devices, and that’s 1.5 in the first six months that exceeded, I think the number was 900 million in all of 2020. So it’s increasing like you might expect. Gartner says that more than 25% of all cyberattacks against businesses involve IoT devices.

(00:25:04)

And then just think about attacks like Dennis talked about. That can happen if IoT devices are breached. Dennis just talked about the car being one big sensor. What if someone could get into the system for thousands of connected cars? What could they do all at once? Do they have the power to do that, or they just do that?

I like to read thriller books, and I’ve read more than one book where somebody’s got in the car and someone’s hacked into their brake system, and suddenly the brakes don’t work anymore. And that’s not just a pie in the sky type thing. That’s something that can happen. But the flip side of this, actually, is by collecting all of this data, it also helps the companies that are manufacturing these devices help at creating algorithms that predict and prevent the cyberattacks. So, it’s helping understanding how it’s being used, how it’s being looked at that can help prevent and help increase security as well. So, it’s a little bit of a good and bad to all of that.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. These cars, drones, the security implications of a hacked drone are pretty substantial as well. I think there’s lots of implications with this. And it’s easy, I think, for lawyers to look at all the negatives. I felt and this is one thing that I really tried to teach to my students is that with any new technologies in law that you can take up all these risks. And that’s what lawyers are known for. But it’s really important for the lawyers of today and tomorrow to understand the positives, because that’s where you can really give good advice to people and it changes your way of thinking about this.

Just a couple of examples that I was thinking about is that I watch all these detective shows, and the classic thing is like, “Okay, so where were you between 10:00 and 2:00 o’clock last night?” You go like, “I was home.” They go, “Is anybody with you who confirmed that?” And you go, “No, I was home by myself, or I was sleeping.” And they treated as if that’s no alibi at all and that person becomes a suspect if you go like, “Oh, I was wearing my watch, and my watch shows that I was asleep and I was in my bed.” Then all of a sudden you have the perfect alibi and it’s proved up, and you don’t have to try to figure out if your neighbor has to be looking through the window to see you sleeping.

Tom Mighell: Or, my ring doorbell captured me unlocking my apartment door and walking into my apartment at 10:00 o’clock and never leaving again.

Dennis Kennedy: Right. And then the other thing I ran into, which is not totally an Internet of things, but some of the stuff is just good as a memory aid. You just feel like, “Oh, how many times did I ride my bike last month?” Or, I was at the dentist and they said, we were talking about, when I had a crown put on. I go, “I don’t know. It’s like maybe a year or so ago,” and they looked and go, “Oh, it was like October.” And you go like, “Oh, that’s amazing that this data exists and it’s accessible.”

So I think some of these things where you could say, there are benefits and you gave a couple, and I just thought of like some simple ones. But I think some of the stuff actually, if we think about the positives, then we can say, “Oh, some of these could not be actually used in law practice or in representing clients as well.”

Tom Mighell: All right, Dennis, we’re running long on this segment. Any tips, recommendations, parting words for thoughts on the subject?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I think that this is a place where you’re thinking like, “Oh, maybe congress will pass some laws to protect us.” I don’t think that’s likely in the next few years. So I think you’re talking about self-help, you’re talking about due diligence, those sorts of things. I think this is an important thing. I think understanding what’s out there, getting a sense of what might be being collected about you, about when you see you have an option to buy like, a new electric toothbrush that has Internet connection or it doesn’t that you make a decision about. What are the pros and cons of that?

So I think just becoming sort of more aware and to say, the number of devices connected, the number of sensors, especially once we get past the chip shortages, we’re just going to see exponential increase in these things and the amount of data so that becomes important.

(00:30:01)

And I still think that for lawyers, this is really pushing us to the world where if you’re saying, “All we’re looking at our documents and email, we’re not looking at the most important evidence.”

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

Female: As a lawyer, ever wish you could be in two places at once. You could take a call when you’re in court, capture a lead during a meeting. That’s where Posh comes in. We’re live Virtual Receptionist who answer and transfer your calls so you never miss an opportunity. And the Posh app lets you control when your receptionist steps in. So if you can’t answer, Posh can. And if you’ve got it, Posh is just a tap away. With Posh, you can save as much as 40% off your current service provider’s rate. Start your free trial today 

at posh.com.

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

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy. So I was thinking the other day, Tom, that while longtime listeners know who we are, new listeners might not. And other than our upcoming new work-from-home edition of our collaboration tools and technologies book, some listeners might not know some of the new projects we’re involved in these days. So, I thought it was just like a good time at this point. Nothing magical to do, like a little bit of reintroduction of ourselves and where we are these days. I convinced Tom to go along with me. Tom, let’s start with you. Who the heck are you?

Tom Mighell: So, my name is Tom Mighell. I am chief operating officer of Contour. We are information governance consultants. Information governance is a discipline that probably in an earlier time was better known and maybe still known to most people as records management, but records management only describes a part of what we do. Information governance really talks about the lifecycle of information and managing information throughout an organization in all of the ways that it needs to be managed. So it’s not just records management. It’s not just making sure that things are stored in the right place and having a retention schedule and keeping information in a certain period of time. It’s about privacy. It’s about how do we protect that information that needs to be protected? It’s about information security. We’re protecting the privacy on the one hand, but we’re protecting the security on the other. They are two very distinct issues here, because you want to protect security of all sorts of information, but not all of that information you’re protecting is personal information. So they’re two separate but in very distinct concepts. And then finally, you want to talk about litigation and e-discovery, because how do we make sure that we are able to respond appropriately if we get sued, or if there’s a regulatory investigation, or if we have an internal investigation into something that we need to deal with.

So, I work a lot with organizations. We put together programs for them. We help them get better control over their information knowing that many of you are working at law firms. My guess is you’re keeping most of the documents you have permanently, forever. And while from a client standpoint, that may be a risk averse way to deal with it, we also find that the amount of what I call non records, or we like to refer to it as rot, the redundant, out-of-date and trivial information probably makes up 20% to 40% of all the documents you may have somewhere. It’s just a lot of copies, a lot of duplicates, a lot of old outdated things that you no longer need and we help organizations clean that stuff up and get better organized, which makes them more productive.

That’s kind of what I do day in and day out. I draft schedules, I create strategies. I do lots of e-discovery procedures for companies. We do implementations where we’re very heavily into Microsoft 365, because we do believe that it is the most cost-effective information governance tool that’s out there right now. Most organizations have it. So why not take advantage of the tools that it has rather than spend a million dollars on a standalone document management system. But that’s kind of my day-to-day work. I very much enjoy what I do. I like working. It allows me to work both with lawyers and legal department on process and risk-based issues, but also work in the field of technology implementing a lot of these tools. That gives me almost no time for projects.

So right now, there’s no projects for me. So I’m going to turn it over to you, Dennis, and say, “How about you?” Who are you, Dennis?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I will say for you that the big project is so close to done. We can almost taste it which is the new book.

Tom Mighell: Well, that’s right. I don’t really count that as a project because we are in such a home stretch that there’s not a lot left to do. Very excited about it and look forward. Everybody, stay tuned for more announcements and maybe more episodes on the topics in the book.

(00:35:07)

Dennis Kennedy: So, as people may know, I retired from Mastercard as an in-house council about four years ago and did a little adjunct teaching, and now find myself as the director of something called the Center for Law Technology and Innovation at Michigan State University and I teach a couple of classes there. I’m also teaching a class at Michigan Law School, which means I always have to be careful about which colors and logos I wear, depending on who my audience is.

So, sort of have the summer off and I’m doing a new thing. I’ll talk about in the parting shots that I call Legal Innovations of Service for law departments and I’m doing a number of projects that are all sorts of around the notion of innovation in law. What’s going to be a law department of focus because there’s a ton of people doing those stuff for law firm, so I just want to be in a place where no one else is. It’s I kind of design the path toward what looks like a more normal retirement.

And probably, one of my projects is working with the coach to help me do that. So that’s what I’m up to these days. It’s nice to be in the academic rhythm where you find that you have a couple of months of the summer off. Now, it’s time for a party shot that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: So back when I was in high school, I went through a brief phase where I was obsessed with the idea of speed reading and learning how to speed read, and I kind of grew out of that. I enjoy the notion of reading. I don’t read anywhere near as fast as Dennis reads. I’m not sure Dennis use speed reader, or just read naturally fast about things.

But I’ve not been a speed reader for many years. That’s why I was intrigued when I found this website called Bionic-Reading.com, which is operated on the premise that it guides the eyes through text with artificial fixation points. And what that means is that they highlight certain letters in a word, and that the reader focuses on those highlighted letters and lets the brain complete the word that might be around them. And as a result, it means that they are able to read faster and understand better and get it all done. I’m intrigued by the concept. I read through it. It felt like it was fast reading for me. They offer a Chrome extension so that you can put it in your browser and it will highlight the text on the page that you’re trying to read. There’s a reading converter where you can upload a document and it will convert it to this Bionic Reading format for you. There are also a few of the Read It Later apps or the RSS apps like Reader Five and Fiery Feeds have it available and built in.

So I think it’s intriguing if you want to upgrade your reading speed or comprehension. I’m not sure of the scientific success of this, but as someone who used to be obsessed with speed reading, I’m kind of vaguely curious and whether this is something that would work. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: I like all these things that are saying like, “How do we cope with information overload?” And sometimes the choke point is the speed that we read at. And so, I like those approaches. I think summarization is another approach that helps you speed read in a way. It’s like something that gets abstracted does summaries. There’s definitely this movement toward listening to audio at one and a half to double speed.

I talked to somebody the other day who looks at YouTube videos at one and a half to double speed. So people are sort of coping by saying, “Can we ease the choke point that our reading speed or that real time gives us, so we can do go through things faster and have the same comprehension. That’s a really interesting, one time off take a look at.

So, what I want to talk about my party shot is just a pitch and an explanation for the new thing I’m doing, which is legal innovation as a service, I call it. For law departments, you can find more about that on my website. It builds off of my book Successful Innovation Outcomes in Law.

(00:40:00)

I feel that there’s a lot of people who want to advise law departments. I’m not sure how well law departments listen to advice on innovation, but I think where I can help and my uniqueness and value is with law departments and what law departments are doing innovation. So, it’s quasi productized service, four different approaches, fixed price, just in time, just enough guidance on helping you have more successful innovation outcomes in a law department. I can’t wait to try it as an experiment. I’m in love with the idea, so it’s time to test it in the real world. So that’s what I’m going to be doing this summer, is putting that out there so you can see a lot more for me about this and innovation with the focus on law departments.

Tom Mighell: Very exciting. Can’t wait to hear more. And so that wraps 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 Networks page for the show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes on the Legal Talk Network site, where you can find archives of all of our previous podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to get in touch with us, reach out to us on LinkedIn. You can reach out to us on Twitter as well or leave us a voicemail. We’d love to get questions for our B segment. That number is 720-441-6820. So, until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy, and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an Internet focus. If you like what you heard today, please rate us in Apple podcast and we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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. Join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report only on the Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Adriana Linares: Are you looking for a podcast that was created for new solos? Then join me, Adriana Linares, each month on the New Solo Podcast. We talk to lawyers who built their own successful practices and share their insights to help you grow yours. You can find New Solo on the Legal Talk Network or anywhere you get your podcast.

Continue Reading