The Latest in Collaboration Tools & Technologies

Episode Notes

Transcript

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

[Music]

Intro:  Web 2.0, Innovation, Trend, Collaboration, Software, Metadata…  Got the world turning as fast as it can, here 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 #320 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I am Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

Tom Mighell:  And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:  In our last episode, we looked into the crystal ball or maybe it was the magic 8-ball about what’s happening in Web3.  It’s a must listen for those of you who want to get prepared for what is or is not coming in the world of Web3.  In this episode, we wanted to start the celebration of the publication of our new book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Work from Home Edition’ and talk about some of the new highlights in the book.  Remember, we are collaborating with others all the time and we’d best start getting good at it.  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 celebrating the release of our new book and talking about some of our biggest takeaways from writing it.  In our second segment, we’re going to return to our hot or not segment and debate the merits of folding smartphones.  And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots at one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over.  But first up, we are happy to announce the publication of a fabulous new book for anyone in law using technology and that’s just about everyone in the legal profession and everyone who interacts with someone in legal profession.  Dennis, the subtitle of our book, ‘Smart Ways to Work Together’, the best way to get this conversation started.

Dennis Kennedy:  You know Tom, I really think it is and there was a part of me that wondered just to make the title of the book because I think that all of us are working together all the time and there are smart ways to do it and then there’s the regular way to do it.  I think the book drives it, trying to make people better at collaborating, to make it easier to collaborate and really, I think just to be smarter about the ways that we work together.  So I think that is a good way to think about the book.  And I’ll ask you, why did we call it the work from home edition?

Tom Mighell:  We call it the work from home edition because really we started talking about writing the book during the pandemic and as a result of the pandemic, but not just about that but I think that it was the pandemic that sort of, I would say, ushered in a new world of collaboration or maybe the better way to put it in and what I think leading into your next set of topics you want to talk about is it opened people’s eyes to the necessity of collaboration tools as well as the fact that it brought a lot more adoption of collaboration tools because we were all a part, we were all forced to be a part.  And so what we did here was we took a little bit of a turn and we talked about the best ways to collaborate, not just when you’re in a law office, but when you happen to be anywhere, in most cases in your home, but it doesn’t really necessarily have to be your home.  It can be really anywhere in the world as long as you’ve got internet connection you can collaborate with anybody.

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah, and it’s such a better description than the back to the office edition which, you know, it’s kind of interesting because I think that as lawyers look to go back to the office, I think they’re going back to an earlier time and that this work from home stuff and, you know, Zoom and these other things aren’t going to be as important anymore.  But actually collaboration is here with us and it’s going to be a huge part of any law firm that goes back to the office.  So Tom, one of the things that we heard a lot over the last couple of years is that legal tech edgiest 10 years and 10 months in 2020.  Do we buy that?

Tom Mighell:  I don’t buy that.  Well, I’d say that I don’t buy that.  I think that some aspects of legal technology advanced a great deal and I think that 10 years and 10 months is a nifty catchphrase to use.

(00:05:03)

I’m not convinced that things moved all the that fast.  I mean, we’ll talk about some other technologies like e-signatures.  That sure advanced a ton.  People who didn’t realized that who weren’t doing e-signatures before certainly jumped on that bandwagon when they couldn’t show up in offices or send couriers to sign paper.  The fact that most of my clients are now largely paperless or at least are not creating new paper going forward.

I prefer a better catchphrase, which was I believe attributed to Winston Churchill, which and I think I’m paraphrasing, never let a good crisis go to waste.  And what I like about the last two years as heartbreaking as it may have been for some, as depressing as it may have been for some, many lawyers did not let the pandemic go to waste in terms of adopting and looking at the right technologies.  Some by necessity, some willingly and a lot of I think advancements were made in working remotely, finding ways to work with people even though you couldn’t be in an office together.  I would say that for those of you who did not catch up quite as fast, there is still time.  And so I think that there were a lot of people who did not let the crisis go to waste and that I think it was kudos to them and I think that has resulted in a lot of advances.  Maybe not 10 years and 10 months, but a lot of advances in how people work together.

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah, I think there’s a widespread distribution.  So I think that you know 10 years and 10 months is catchy.  You know, my phrase that on average legal tech advanced two and a half years in the last two and a half years is not a catchy phrase.  I think we saw there were some pockets where you saw things move forward rapidly, some areas where things didn’t move at all where you might have expected.  But I think overall, there was some movement forward but I don’t think we saw the big, big change that you might have expected early on in the pandemic.

Tom Mighell:  We are lawyers after all.

Dennis Kennedy:  Right.  But I will say, Tom, the one thing that we realized writing the book and talking to everybody we talked to is the collaboration just does seem more important now than ever and people realize that and they’re starting to think about how they actually do work together.  So I would say that the one thing that I still think we have ways to go Tom because I still have talked to lawyers recently who say that they don’t really understand this whole collaboration technologies and tools and the reason they don’t understand it because they just have their secretaries deal with other people.  And so, I think there’s still some education to go on this.  So I don’t know Tom, it’s not like everybody advanced forward, but I think there is some advance.  Are you still seeing some people just not even understanding the concept of collaboration?

Tom Mighell:  Well, my favorite story over the past, actually, this story is within the past three months, so it didn’t even wasn’t part of the last two years, is working with a group of lawyers, not on a legal matter, but on a volunteer matter, and I posted a shared Excel spreadsheet for people to access and all I needed them to do was to correct the information in there, leave notes and it was a shared document, everyone had access to the same document, it was something that was saved automatically to the Cloud and I got about  three of the lawyers in the group sent back saying, first of all they said, “This is my first time working with Excel,” which was kind of stunning to me that I don’t know how long Excels been around and this is the first time lawyers actually been using it.  And some of those people along with four or five other people downloaded the Excel spreadsheet and emailed it to me after they made their changes, despite the fact that they didn’t have to do any of that.  So, yes, my answer — that’s my long-winded way of saying, yes, there are still many lawyers who do not understand collaboration and so there are many opportunities there.

Dennis Kennedy:  And so the book is for them.  It’s for people who are considered themselves sort of, you know, average at collaboration and there’s plenty of stuff for the people who think they’re really good at collaboration.  We are going to make them think and show them some other things that they can do.

(00:09:56)

So Tom, we want to spend some time on this podcast kind of talking about our — sort of the things that we felt were new or the observations we had that we really saw as the highlights that we took from when we wrote the book and I’m going to start that off by saying, I just have the insight that the collaboration technology decisions are actually a lot easier now than they’ve ever been in my opinion.  But I think the culture and the priorities are actually harder to address than they ever have.

So, simple example, I think that most law firms these days have Microsoft 365.  I think that gets you maybe 90% of what you need with the collaboration platform and to do a lot of the things you need in a way that you can work with clients and others pretty easy.  And so just making that choice kind of gets you pretty well into the game.  I think that we’re in this, I sort of joked around about the back to the office thing.  But there is a huge emphasis on back to the office and that does have impact on whether people are saying like, oh, these tools that you are using and you get used to and Zoom and stuff like that, maybe we’re not going to support those as well, because you should be back in the office.  So that’s a cultural thing.  And then and then trying to figure out what your priorities are, you know, is it efficiency? Is it, you know, profitability? Is it, you know, client-focus?  All these different things and that’s where I think that what I like about our book is the forms and the templates including a client survey that we put in the book.  I hate to use the term, you know, is more than worth the price of the book, but in a way it is because I think that a big part of the book is helping people think through what they need to do on collaboration and to make those choices.  Tom, how about you, as your first highlight?

Tom Mighell:  So, my first highlight was that I think that the single biggest collaboration change we’ve seen over the last two years was learning how to meet with each other when you couldn’t meet in person and or how to communicate without meeting with each other.  I think those are two of the biggest, I think trends or movements, things that we saw a lot.  You know this is the time in the past two years that the word Zoom became both a noun and a verb.  It is part of everyone’s, “I’ve got a Zoom meeting today.”  Not anything about, “I’ve got a video meeting.”  “I have a Zoom meeting.”  It’s like Kleenex.  Microsoft Teams usage grew at an exponential rate because companies, law firms already had Microsoft 365.  It was easy to adapt to that type of tool.  Virtual backgrounds became the new office decoration.  That was a new thing.  “You’re on mute” or “Can everybody see my screen?” became new meeting catchphrases that we probably didn’t have before.  But now I think many people prefer to meet virtually rather than in person a 100% of the time.  It’s more convenient.  We are slowly adjusting to the problems inherent in online meetings I think that’s slowly but I think it’s safe to say that we aren’t going back to all the time in-person meetings ever again.  I mean there might be a priority on bringing people back to the office but I think that many people are still saying there is — instead of even though they might be bringing people back to the office, we’re still going to meet with clients virtually.  We may not travel to their town anymore to do it.  There is less hesitancy to meet virtually than there was before.  It just wasn’t something lawyers thought about before.

On the other hand, I think that we’re going to start seeing more use of being able to communicate without meeting with each other.  I think that that – I’ve seen so many people talk about, you know, this meeting could have been an email and these meetings are terrible and I — granted there are a lots of bad meetings, but one of the ways that people are dealing with it is in the area and we’ve talked about this on a podcast before, the area of what we call asynchronous communication, which is finding new ways to communicate with people and instead of, you know, having a meeting, it’s posting a 5-minute audio file or video to say, “Here are the things that I wanted to talk about in this meeting.  You all can review this on your own time and catch and get the information.” or instead of calling and have a meeting to discuss things, then recording small voice messages to go back and forth and have a discussion about things.

Having a conversation on your time rather than having to find a time that everybody is available to do it, I think is where we are starting to see the notions of meetings go and I think that’s a very interesting trend.  I think it’s more outside the legal community than it is inside right now.  I’ll be interested to see if that actually gets there in the next couple of years.  Dennis, what are you for your second highlight?

(00:15:07)

Dennis Kennedy:  Well, my second one is the word I’d sort of coined that you don’t like so much.

Tom Mighell:  I don’t.  I don’t like this.  No.

Dennis Kennedy:  Which is co-collaboration, but the concept is that what I see is that we’re now deciding or seeing that the collaboration choices that we make don’t take place in a vacuum and often you can’t dictate what tools or platforms you’re going to use and so the choice you made is made in conjunction with the people you are collaborating with.  So you have to find something that makes sense.  So if somebody’s on, if you think you’re going to have a Zoom meeting and somebody’s not using Zoom, they’re on Teams, then you’re going to figure out how to make that work.  And so you need to have this flexibility.  You need to understand what’s going on on the other side.  You need to choose tools that that work for everybody and I think that’s one of the things that’s moved us to some of these common denominator platforms like, you know, Microsoft Teams over Slack and some of these, you know, Zoom where you say like “Oh, more people are going to have them.  There’s a little bit more universality to that.”  And then also to echo what you were saying a little bit is as part of those choices were making, we’re figuring out what the right tool is for what we need.

Does it need to be a video meeting? Does it need to be something else? And we’re picking the right tool for it.  We are matching the tool to what the work we need to do together is.  And so, I called that co-collaboration and it really is, it’s just in a way, it’s a form of politeness and saying like let’s figure out how what’s the best way to work together and I can’t dictate to you what, you know, how you’re going to work with me anymore.

Tom Mighell:  Okay, I’m going to let you have that word but really it’s just collaboration, Dennis.  That’s all it is.  It’s all collaboration.  Anyway, my next highlight is more about the future which is looking at what I think are the next generation of collaboration tools.  What collaboration areas we’ve got and there’s two main areas that I think are sort of interesting.  The first one is the idea of the virtual office which is we’re not ready to be back in the office together or we’re never going to be back in the office together all the time, but we want to be able to work with each other and you know, we miss the ability to, you know, yell across a cubicle and ask a question or meet at the water cooler or meet in the lunch room and talk about things.  And in writing the book, I was very intrigued at the number of tools that have come up where you can simulate that online and you can see your avatar walking across the office or you can all be in a conference room and talking together.  And they use spatial audio so that, you know, when you’re in one part of the “office,” you can’t hear what’s going on across the hall or in another room down the hall of this office.  You have to walk there to hear what’s going on.  And I think that’s a really interesting way of managing a workspace if you have to be virtual is you can go and move your avatar to a quiet room and you can just work but you’ll be there, somebody wants to walk in and say, “Hey, do you have time for a quick question?”  Then you’re there and you can talk and it’s all audio but you’re still virtual.  I’m really intrigued by that possibility.

The second thing is another thing we’ve talked about on the podcast which we didn’t really talk about this much in the book, but I’m really intrigued by the idea of the metaverse for collaboration is in using different world out there to start working together in collaborating with each other in a virtual world.  So you know, Dennis and I spent some time in using our Oculus Quests, working in a conference room and we could have presentations there.  We could put a whiteboard up, we could draw things, we could collaborate in that area virtually as virtual avatars working with each other.  I think we’re just in early days there.  We’ve got – there’s a lot of kind of metaverse worlds that are starting to be built.  I think there’s more to do there, but I think that those two areas are going to be very interesting for the future of collaboration and I think where a lot more collaboration is going to start to take place over the next few years.  Dennis, what’s your next highlight?

Dennis Kennedy:  So, I love these tiny improvements, tiny apps, tiny tools that give big results.

(00:19:58)

And so, it’s interesting right before we started recording, Tom and I both use the tool to allow us to submit the potential times for meetings that we were available as part of the group that are all going to be collected and then they’ll choose the one where most people are available.  And it was a time I’d use the tool before, but I hadn’t. But it’s just the functionality, it’s super easy.  There’s a number of tools out there. The tools are things like doodle, which allows you to find times that people are available instead of doing the whole email, like are you available this time or that time?  Calendly, I really like for making appointments so you can just expose the times on your calendar that people can make appointments and they can just make appointments for Zoom meetings.  And it just frees up a lot of administrative time and just gets things on your calendar.

Microsoft Teams, I think, does some similar things because of its versatility so you can message somebody and say like, “Do you want to convert this into a call or a video?” and I think that’s important.  And for me, the one thing that I hate as people who know me know very well is I don’t like to have people just call me out of the blue.  It’s sort of like I feel like people are saying, “Hey, I want to be impromptu and call you at something that you were totally unprepared for and put you on the spot.”  I’m kind of like, “No, just like get on my calendar.  It’s like perfect.” And then I can do a little prep, I’m ready and I’ll be able to talk to you.  And these little tools, a lot of them free, can really address something that’s a big annoyance for you in collaboration.

Tom Mighell:  So my next highlight is a variation on Dennis’ theme, which is don’t look at just tiny tools, but look at simple tools.  If you are new to collaboration, if you’re not sure whether this is for you, look at some of the ways that you might actually already be collaborating with people.  And so, here’s some of what we think are just dead simple ways to do it.  Just look at your phone and look at the share function.  Whether you have an Android phone or an iOS phone, being able to share a picture, an article, a song, anything from your phone, and you can share it to a person in a text message, you can share it to a Facebook page, you can share it to a Team site. It’s easy for you to share with people using that share function.  This is the essence of collaboration.  Online shared calendars are so simple to use.  I will say we recently had another human being added to our family and we have created a shared calendar for all of us to work on, and we are all adding things to it.  When something that impacts the family comes up, we have a shared calendar that we can all visit to see what’s coming up and who’s doing things dead simple and very easy to use.

There are a lot of online white boarding tools that are also simple to use. You can just go in and start brainstorming and sketching out ideas you might have for something in the legal realm or just anything that you have going on with people that you’re working with.  We talked about bookmark sharing tools. We’ve talked about Raindrop.io. It makes sharing collections of bookmarks again very, very simple and easy to do.  So I think if you’re still inching your way toward collaboration technologies, try and start with a simple tool.  Go with something that you’re already using or something that maybe you’re a little bit interested in.  It’s not too hard to use. I think that will help you dip your toes in the water and become more comfortable using those kinds of tools.  All right, we’ve got a little bit more to talk about on our collaboration book, but before we do that let’s take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

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(00:25:00)

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Dennis Kennedy:  And we are back. Tom, do you have one more highlight for us?

Tom Mighell:  Yes. my last highlight is also about the future and it is whatever you come up with, we think that you should find a way to future proof your collaboration strategy.  You want to adopt practices that will stand the test of time so you’re not always having to look at the latest new thing and switch over and do something completely new because you didn’t think it through the first time.  So here are a couple of things to think about when you’re future proofing your strategy.

One, the cloud is no longer an option.  The cloud is the essence of collaboration because it is a place where you can share things and everyone can get to them. So get your heads in the cloud and start to think about using that as part of any collaboration strategy.  As Dennis mentioned before, platforms offer consistency.  If you have a platform like Microsoft 365, like Slack or something like that, you have a consistent way to collaborate with people, and the platform becomes a much more stable, consistent thing to use over time.  To the extent you can standardize internal and external collaboration, the way that you collaborate internally with your coworkers, should mirror to a great extent how you collaborate with people externally.

Obviously, there’s going to be some differences because some clients will want to collaborate in different ways.  But the more that you can standardize these, the easier it will become to stand the test of time.  And then really, in all of this, don’t let perfect be the enemy.  A good enough strategy is always going to be a perfect strategy that you never get off the ground, that you never implement.  So just get in there and develop something and don’t try to make it perfect because that will rarely if ever happen.  Dennis, what about you?

Dennis Kennedy:  You know that’s my slogan for this year.  Good enough is good enough for now.  So my last highlight is looking to the adjacent professions.  So if we look at what happened in the healthcare profession during the time of COVID, so far, that we see patient portals, we see video doctor appointments, we see a lot happening.  And if you would have had me predict in 2020, I would say that the client portals would become almost ubiquitous.  But they really haven’t in legal, whereas in medical they really have.  And so, I think that it’s important for the legal profession to look to those adjacent professions whether it’s healthcare, accounting, insurance, consulting, the whole group and see what’s going on there and say, does it make sense?  And ask, when I have the interaction with these other professionals, what is it about that experience that I like and why am I not doing that?  And one of the big ones, I think, that you get in these other professions is just being able to pay online by credit card, which is still all too rare in the legal profession.

So, Tom, let’s go to some recommendations.  So you’ve given some already, but what are we recommending that if you read the book, what are the recommendations you’re going to get that people do these days?

Tom Mighell:  Well, my recommendations are really simple and I’m just going to hit a couple since we’re running out of time in this segment.  Dennis has sort of mentioned this before, but talk to your clients.  How do they collaborate these days?  Do they have a preferred method of collaborating with you?  There is nothing worse than forcing a collaboration strategy on a client who doesn’t want to work that way.  The challenge there is to not windup having 25 different ways of collaborating with people, although you may do that.  Part of one of our things that we talk about is find a way to be agile and be versatile and be familiar in Teams and Zoom both if you need to be.  We think that’s a good idea, but really you stand a better chance of good relations with your clients if you at least try to understand how they prefer to communicate and collaborate with you.  That will help out your strategy.  I think that there’s the idea of small experiments, especially if you’re not used to doing this, especially if you haven’t really gotten in the habit of using collaboration tools, you know, most of the tools in this book are free to use.

(00:30:06)

They’re free to try or they are well worth the investment.  So, you know, try them out before jumping in and don’t jump in unless you’ve had the chance to try it out.  Don’t put all of your eggs on a tool that you can’t give a test drive to and see if it doesn’t work for you because there’s really nothing worse than purchasing it and finding out that it doesn’t meet goals, although there are things to be said about failing.  If you fail, then just figure it out and move on.  The problem with failure is it can become expensive over time, so having a well thought out strategy ahead of time does help with that.  We also think buying the book is a good idea, so that would be another recommendation that we would have for you here.  Dennis, any recommendations you’ve got to take us out of this segment?

Dennis Kennedy:  Yes, so I have three of them.  So one is I really want to emphasize that you should not go backwards.  Don’t allow yourself to slip backwards with this sort of back to the office, back to the normal, back to the old ways things.  We really did make some advances and the people that you work with and your clients really appreciate some of those things. so resist the urge to go backward.  I think the second thing is to consider what you already have because there’s more and more collaboration features built into the programs and the software used especially the Cloud tools, and I would actually take the time to sit down and go, “Let’s look at every tech tool that we use and list the collaboration benefits of it and what are their deficiencies and make that part of what you want to address over the next year.”  So, how can we improve those things?  How can we get rid of the deficiencies?  How can we make better use of the benefits that we have?  The last one is they think as you look at technology strategy and planning, collaboration has to be a core of that.  I sometimes see people saying they want contract lifecycle management and what should they buy?  What programs should they buy?  You know, what features that sort of thing.  I’m like — and nobody ever lists like how easy is it for somebody to work with me using these tools.  So, how can I collaborate through them?  And so I think that, you know, saying one of the things I look at and we give you some forms and templates to help you with this, is how do I make collaboration part of my technology and strategy and planning, and Tom, I’ll turn it over to you for final thoughts and maybe you can let people know how to buy the book.

Tom Mighell:  Well, so we’re going to put a link in the show notes.  You can buy the book right now at the American Bar Association Bookstore.  If you’re listening to this in August, it may still be on pre-order, but we expect the book to be published by the end of the month and will be making its way to you very shortly.  So, please order early and order often and with that, I think we’ve done enough of an ad for our book, so let’s move on to our second segment but before we do that, 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.  This episode we’re going to go back to our Hot or Not format.  We pick a tech topic in the news and discuss whether it’s hot or not.  We might agree, we might disagree, but you’ll get our insights and perspectives on the topic and you are, of course, welcome to suggest future hot or not topics to us.  This episode’s topic comes from me.  I saw recently that Samsung will be bringing up more foldable phones and tablets or maybe it’s more accurate to say devices with foldable screens.  So, these have been around for a while and frankly, I really haven’t seen any or certainly very few of them out in the wild.  So, Tom is our foldable device expert.  Tom, are foldable devices now going to become hot or not?

Tom Mighell:  Well, calling me a foldable device expert is debatable.  To explain why Dennis says that, I first have to explain that there are two types of foldable devices these days.  The first is what I would call a pure foldable.

(00:35:02)

The screen is made of flexible material that you can literally fold in half just like it sounds.  Early versions of these kinds of phones, the material that they were made of started to show signs of wear with age.  The more you fold it, it would start to show crease in the middle and having a phone with a crease in the middle just felt cheap and not great, but these phones were not cheap.  They’re expensive.  Now, newer versions are getting better with their materials.  This is less of an issue, but that sort of how I have viewed the pure foldable market.  The other kind uses hinges to hold the phone together.  So the screen itself doesn’t fold, instead it’s like two screens that are connected by a hinge that fold together.  No annoying crease but it’s been replaced by what may be an annoying gap in between the two displays.

I own a Microsoft Duo for a minute.  It was a hinge foldable.  Microsoft got the hinges right, but not a lot else.  In the end, it wasn’t the right form factor to me.  It didn’t really feel like a phone.  It felt like a little mini tablet and it didn’t have a space in my devices area.  But the idea of the foldable phone is still intriguing, right?   I mean phones are good, tablets are good, so let’s build a phone that unfolds into a tablet, best of both worlds, right?

Dennis just slightly correct your intro, Samsung didn’t announce more foldable devices, just updated foldable devices.  They introduced two over the past week.  The first one is the Z Fold4 which is an update of last year’s Z Fold3.  It got some improvements over last year’s model.  It’s a pure foldable device where you fold it together and when you fold it, it opens up into what looks like a kind of a tablet size, a little bigger than a phone but when you fold it up, it has a size that they call it candy bar style, so it’s not quite as wide as a regular phone would be.  They also introduced a flip phone.  It’s called the Z Flip4, an update again of last year’s Z Flip3.  It looks like your traditional flip phone but when you open it, you get a full-size smartphone when you open it up there or at least close to a full-size smartphone.

Both of these appear to be reasonable upgrades I think to the older designs but here’s the problem I’ve got.  To get a foldable device, Samsung had to make a lot of compromises.  The cameras are not as good.  They are twice as thick as a smartphone when you fold them.  The batteries are not as good.  I would say the biggest advantage of a foldable is multitasking.  You can run two apps side by side which is pretty cool, but I just don’t think that I want to downgrade my phone only to get a half decent tablet.  So, that’s why I’m going to say that foldable devices are hot but only for a niche group of buyers, the people who are really looking for them.  Otherwise, I’m going to say pretty cold.  Dennis, what about you?

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah, it struck me as a solution in search of a problem and maybe coming out a little bit after the point where there would be a market for it and so let me explain what I mean there.  So, it used to be that we had the smartphones and as they got a little bit bigger, it became hard to find pockets and purses and you know other things to put them in that they fit well, you know, and then sometimes just the form factor themselves was a little bit big.  Well, I think that over time now pockets are bigger, people keep saying they’re going to make women’s clothes with pockets.  So, it’s going to get even up.  So that need to have that sort of flip phone form factor that’s smaller and flips open and closed, I don’t think there’s as much need for it anymore, and then the second thing is I don’t think that many of us use smartphones for phones anymore, you know.  So, the idea is to have like the smartphone that we are using for everything else but talking on it kind of changes our relationship with the device.  And so, the flip phone seems like it’s optimized a bit more for the telephone experience which I think rely on less.  What you’re saying is sort of interesting that I have a smaller form factor and then it becomes larger, you know, maybe but again it’s sort of feels like I don’t really have a need for that.  So I actually think I’m going to come down really close to you Tom.  I think there is a group that something like this could make sense for but the trade-offs that you were outlying are really significant.

(00:40:00)

So I’m going to go with the cool but potentially in a couple years, you know, with advances and maybe figuring out what, is I would say, what job it is that you’re doing or what problem you’re solving, they could become more significant but I would hate to bet on it or put my own money on it.  Let’s put it that way.  So, now it’s time for our parting shots, that one-tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends.  Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell:  So, I will start my parting shot by once again referring to the American Bar Association Bookstore where you can order a copy of ‘The Lawyers Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Work from Home Edition.’  It is available for pre-order now, but it will be on sale for all buyers by the end of August at the very latest is our great hope.

My real parting shot is I spent a lot of time last week working — doing citation research for some clients and looking at legal regulations around the world, and I had to spend a lot of time in Belgian regulations which for whatever reason choose only to provide those regulations in Dutch, German and French, and there’s no English translation and I came across, I was talking to somebody who provides the citations to us, he pointed me to a site called deepl, D-E-E-P-L.com.  I’ll put a link in the show notes, and it is a new — well it’s not even a new translation service.  They say they’ve been out since 2017.  I haven’t paid attention to them if I was aware of them at any time.  But looking at them, it’s very intriguing.  They translate text for 28 languages, so not as much as Google, but they claim to be three to six times more accurate than any other translation service that’s out there no matter where, whether it’s Amazon or Microsoft or Google or any of the other translation services.  You can also drag PDF files, Word documents, Power Point files into this tool and it will translate the documents for you as well.  The general translation tool on the website is free.  You can also download either a Windows version for your computer or an iOS version for your iPhone or your iPad.  I’m really intrigued.  I haven’t had a lot of chance to put it through its paces but I’m intrigued by this.  So if you’re frustrated with Google Translator or others, then you’ve got another option here, deepl.com.

Dennis Kennedy:  It’s a great option to have alternative to Duolingo too, right? Because you can — it does all the work for you.  So, one of the things that happens fairly often are it happens if you have friends, like I have on Facebook, is every now and then somebody will say like, “I’m really sorry, my account got hacked and so don’t accept an invitation from something that looks like it came from me.”  And so — and somebody asked me the other day like I think that my Facebook account got hacked.  What should I do?  And so there’s a great little article by Anya Zhukova on the online tech tips side.  It’s called what to do when a friend’s Facebook account is hacked or duped, and it actually does what it says.  So if you run into that situation or you see somebody on Facebook who’s been hacked, then you have a step-by-step approach or you could just send them the article, so terrific little resource.

Tom Mighell: And so that’s wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report.  Thanks for joint us on the podcast.  You can find show notes for this episode on Legal Talk Network’s 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, you know where to find us.  We’re on LinkedIn, we’re on Twitter and we always love to get your voice messages.  Please call us 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 liked what you heard today, please rate us in Apple Podcasts and we’ll see you next time for another episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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Outro: Thanks for listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report.  Check out the 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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