Tips to Make You a Microsoft Teams Wizard

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Intro:  Web 2.0, Innovation, Trend, Collaboration, Software, Metadata…  Got the world turning as fast as it can?  Hear how technology can help, legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors, and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.  Welcome to The Kennedy-Mighell Report here on the Legal Talk Network.

Dennis Kennedy:  And welcome to Episode 324 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report.  I’m Dennis Kennedy, in Ann Arbor.

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

Dennis Kennedy:  In our last episode, we wrapped up a big four-part series on the takeaways from our new book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Work from Home Edition’ in an episode in which our friend Debbie Foster turned the tables on us and interviewed Tom and me.  So, fun and informative show that we recommend to you.

In this episode, we want to share some of our favorite tips to help turn you into a Microsoft Teams wizard.  Tom, what’s on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:  Well, Dennis in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will indeed be sharing some of our favorite tips to level up your Microsoft Teams game.  In our second segment, we’ll go to the dead pool and talk about what some are calling the Google Product Cemetery and what Google product is most likely to find its way there next, 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, we felt that it was time to share some tips.  So, we haven’t done that in a while.  So, we thought we’d share some tips and this time the topic is Microsoft Teams and, yes, some of these can be found in the new edition of our book, ‘The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Work from Home Edition’ which is out now and available for order.  We have included a link in the show notes for you.

Back in October of 2020, as we were all settling in to working from home, we interviewed the great Karuana Gatimu from Microsoft about this relatively new collaboration tool, I say relatively, it was new to lawyers, it had been around for a while, called Microsoft Teams.  Not new to most – to a lot of people, but new to lawyers, and fast forward two years and adoption of Teams has really skyrocketed in the business world, and I think to a certain extent in law firms.  So, we wanted to revisit my favorite collaboration tool and give the latest tips on getting the most out of it.  Dennis, would you agree that Microsoft Teams is the clear big winner of the legal tech collaboration universe over the past few years?

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah, and by a landslide.  I wrote up a summary of the 2022 ABA Text Survey results on cloud computing and Microsoft Teams had about a 50 percent share.  I’m also looking at legal technology news survey of larger forms as Microsoft Teams was at 68 percent.  In that survey among big firms, Slack was less than 4 percent.  So, kind of like what the heck happened to slack?  And there’s definitely a move, I mean a big move toward Teams.

Tom Mighell:  Well, and you know, I think Slack to a certain extent has benefited by being purchased by Salesforce.  Lots of companies that use Salesforce’s CRM software may also be likely to use Slack, but here’s the problem.  Microsoft enjoyed an advantage.  Its roots were already planted in most law firms and companies within Microsoft Office.  So, it kind of was poised to grab that level of share.

As Office migrated to the cloud and became Microsoft 365, it started adding tools including Microsoft Teams so that companies and law firms got Teams for free.  It just came along as part of it because they’re already using Office, but you had to pay to use Slack.  So, why buy something that you already had to use?  And I think many would argue, many who have used Slack would argue that Slack’s feature set is much better than Teams.  In fact, there was a story earlier this year, I can’t remember if we mentioned it on the podcast or not, where a guy who was interviewing for a tech job once he learned that the company he was applying for used Microsoft Teams he said, “I’m sorry, I can’t work for you unless you use Slack.”

(00:05:00)

And he based his decision solely on the use of Teams.  But Teams has advantages over Slack.  First, it has a built-in meeting capability that Slack until only recently was able to sort of duplicate or replicate I guess is probably the better word, and second and most important, Teams is completely integrated and tied to the other Microsoft 365 tools including all the Office applications, and that kind of combination is just hard to beat.  So, those levels of adoption in the legal world is really not surprising to me.

Dennis Kennedy:  And I’m thinking, Tom, one of the things as I thought about this episode, it’s kind of my response to two lawyers and other legal professionals who say to me or sometimes they whine to me that there’s just so much to learn in legal tech and they don’t even know where to begin or what to do, and to me they the adoption of Teams and how it’s being used, and in how many places by how many people, Teams adoption is a locomotive and if you’re going to pick a train to jump on, to me this is it.  And I think that one of the best ways to develop legal tech expertise and to be known as an expert is to get very good at one thing to start with, and if I were going to pick one thing to start with these days, it would be Teams.

Tom Mighell:  I agree, and I think it comes back to it’s something you already have.  It’s something we talk about all the time, is, “Why not get good at something that already exists for you,” in most cases.  Now, we may be talking to people who don’t have Microsoft 365 yet.  If you are among those that don’t have it, go get it.  I don’t know why you don’t have it already.  You should have gotten it over the past two years but if you didn’t, go get it now.  If you’ve got Microsoft 365 you should already be finding a way to use Teams, only if you’re testing it out.

Most of the companies that I work with who are slowly and cautiously working with Teams are right now only using it as a Skype replacement as they used to use for Skype and using it for instant messaging and chat, and they really aren’t taking full advantage of other things yet, which I think is not a bad thing, is to go in and use the chat, learn how it works, that’s a good way to get involved in it, and then take some of our tips, and learn how to go further with it.

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah.  I was going to say that, you know, Steve Jobs has said the best camera to use is the one you have with you, or words to that effect, and Teams feels the same way.  Like, I think the best collaboration tools that you can use is the one you actually have in front of you.  So, Teams kind of fits that and I think you can become a Teams superstar with a little effort, and that’s why we’re going to talk about tips today.  Tom, you want me to start us off?

Tom Mighell:  Yup, you kick it off.

Dennis Kennedy:  All right.  So, my first tip really comes down to that is like if you’re going to get good at Teams you have to learn how to get good at it, and I think that means training, and I think it means sort of regularly trying to learn more, and the good news for you is that there are fantastic resources for that from the Microsoft Teams website, YouTube videos.  If you’re at a firm that has a training department they’ll probably give you a directed training.  There are webinars out there, there are all kinds of things, and just by putting in a modest amount of work from a half hour to an hour a week, I would say over a few months you’re going to be at a really high level of knowledge about Teams and people are going to say like, “Wow, you’re really good at this.  You’re the expert,” you know, “You’re our Teams person,” and that’s going – it’s going to help you both in the collaboration you’re doing and the impression and the reputation that you create for yourself as a legal technology expert.

Tom Mighell:  I couldn’t agree more.  And with that in mind, I will recommend one YouTube channel that I think is really good.  It’s a Microsoft employee.  His name is Mike Tholfsen.  I’ll put a link in the notes to his channel.  He does tips for all the Microsoft products, but he does lots, and lots and lots of Microsoft Teams tips.  It’s a great place to kind of learn about some of the features of Teams that you might not know about.  My tip follows on Dennis’s, and it does that because I’m actually – I probably shouldn’t start out with a more advanced or down-the-road tip, but it kind of went along with Dennis’s learning tip which is, look at the Microsoft Teams adoption page on the Microsoft website.  They have a site dedicated to helping companies get off the ground with Microsoft Teams.

Now, some of this you may not be ready for.  It’s kind of designed to use with your employees.  You know, once you’ve gotten – bitten the bug, gotten bitten by the bug and you like using Teams, this is about helping others to become engaged with it, to find out how to use it to how they like it, to build champions, to make sure the people in your firm or in your company are champions for using it.

(00:10:15)

There’s a ton of use cases in there to see how others are using Teams.  So, if you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, okay, Teams is there and I get it, but how am I going to use it?  What difference does it make to me?”  There’re some great use cases in here that you can see how other companies are making use of it and something they spark some inspiration for you to try to use that.  So, I think keep this, even if you’re not ready to drive adoption in your firm and you’re really looking for more like what Dennis talked about, YouTube stuff.  Keep this webpage in your back pocket because it’s got a lot of useful resources on how you can get more educated on Teams and then how you can help your employees and your co-workers get more educated and get more excited about using it.

All right, I’m going to move right into another tip really quickly, and this tip is a lot simpler.  And this tip is just learning how to use the forward slash.  If you go up to the top box in your Teams application, there’s a search box up there and if you just go up and type a forward slash mark, that’s all you have to do, type that forward slash mark, you will get a full list of all the different actions you can take just by typing a slash mark.  It’ll give you the full list of everything you can do.  You can set your status.  There are different ways you can, say, set your status to available, you can set it to busy, you can set it to offline, just by typing those words in.  You don’t have to go and find a place in there that where any of this happens.  You’re able to set that status, you can type /chat or /call and then a person’s name to talk to them, to immediately call or chat with them.  You can slash to see recent files, you can go – you can just type slash to go and then the name of a team or a channel to go straight to that channel.  You can see any recent activity that you might be involved in, all the times you’ve been mentioned.  I’m just getting started.  There’s a ton of things that you can see from this.  I think just type the slash bar – slash button, so that you can see what all the options are, and then take more use of them as you start getting used to using the tool.

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah, it’s a great tip, Tom.  So, I have like a super simple one as well and this is like one of my pet peeves.  And something that I thought once we went more online would become less of a problem, unfortunately its area where we as humans have ported some of our bad in-person habits into the online collaboration world.  And so, my tip is if you’re doing meetings in Teams, just be on time.  I mean, I don’t know why this is so hard because you could set reminders, you log in.  You should be at a meeting right when it starts.  I hate when people are late.  I start my meetings exactly on time and I actually try to embarrass people by not summarizing everything for them when they come in five minutes late, like just be on time.  It’s courtesy.  It’s so easy to do with the reminders and stuff you have on your computer and Team makes it super easy to do that.  So, be on time.

Tom Mighell:  And speaking of which, we need to be on time and take a quick break from a word from our sponsors.  See what I did there?  We’ll be right back.

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Dennis Kennedy:  And we are back, and Tom and I are sharing some of our favorite Microsoft Teams tips, and I’m going to start with my tip number three.

(00:15:00)

So, one of the things that is a little bit confusing about Teams, is that it’s the name of the program and then each of the areas that you work in are typically called Teams.  To me, it feels like they should be called channels, and that’s how I think of them, but they are Teams.  And so, my tip is to be thoughtful about creating those new Teams for subject matter so you really figure out what needs to be divided into these separate Teams, and then route the content to the right place.  I think this is really a place where if you have a random team, a team called random where you throw stuff into, it really doesn’t help anybody.  And then, I think you – and as Tom has taught me over the years, you need to be disciplined.

So, even if you’re sort of messaging the same person in real time and you have a comment that goes into one team, that you have another thought, you know, go ahead and move to that other team and put it there even though it sort of feels like you have this split personality where you’re having two conversations going on at once, but it helps you find things later, keeps things organized.  And so, I think that just being very thoughtful about how you set up those Teams will pay off big benefits in the future, and this is something that Tom has taught me and has been extraordinarily patient about having me learn.

Tom Mighell:  Well, and when I saw Dennis wanted to talk about this, I wanted to follow on along with it with a little bit more of kind of how we talk to our clients about doing it, because working with an information governance company and a consultancy, this is one of the things we’re talking with clients about now, is how to best organize your Teams so that they are best for you to use them, they make you more productive, you don’t wind up keeping too much information in too many different places.  So, I wanted to follow up with a couple of other thoughts on this.

So, one of the biggest dangers I think of using Teams is creating too many Teams that you wind up just creating team after team because you think that they have something different to do with each other.  You start to create them for any purpose and before long you have this massive list of Teams and it’s hard to control, and it’s hard to – you’re going to have them all in your list.  What we usually see are companies creating sort of two types of Teams, and I’ll call them for sake of this discussion project-related and reference-related.  So, a project could be a team that you create to manage a piece of litigation, a lawsuit that comes in, you’re conducting a transaction, or any type of matter that you undertake for a client, something that has a beginning and an endpoint, something that it starts now but it’s going to end at some point in the future whether it’s a year from now, two years from now, three months from now, whatever.  The idea is you conduct the project and when it’s over, you move the documents from that project to a more permanent location, like a SharePoint site or other document management system that you use, and then you close down that team, you’re done with it.  It was for collaboration purposes.  That collaboration purpose has ended.  So, now move it and shut it down.

The other kind of team is a little bit more permanent.  I think of those as reference, things that are ongoing.  You might have a marketing team where you discuss and talk about ongoing marketing efforts, or maybe if you have a mentor program in the firm or in the company, you create a mentor team where the mentors and mentees can chat with each other, share resources, those types of things.  They tend to last a lot longer because they don’t have a defined end.  Be thoughtful.  Like Dennis said, be thoughtful about how you structure these, because you can get out of control really easily.

My other real quick tip on this would be, I think it’s a terrific idea not to have a team called “Random” but to have a team called “Just for fun”.  They can’t all be serious.  They can’t be all about work.  We created one.  We still have a lot more things we can do with it, but we started out by calling it “The Dogs of Contoural”.  That’s the name of my company, Contoural.  We call it The Dogs of Contoural and everybody posted pictures of their pets, whether they were dogs, or cats, or other animals, and it was nice and we were able to use those collaboration features to learn more about each other and have a little bit more fun, so don’t use those channels and teams just for work purposes.  Learn how to have fun with them too.

All right.  I will switch it around.  I’m going to take the next tip, and this tip is actually something that starts outside of Teams and if you are using Microsoft Outlook, you will start to notice that in your emails, in Outlook, you now have a button that allows you to share to Teams.  So, if that email is content that you want somebody on a team to know about, rather than forwarding that email around to everybody, don’t forward that email.  Share it to Teams so that everybody has a single copy of that communication.

(00:20:00)

You have a couple of different options when you click on that button or hover over it, you have a couple of different options.  You can share that email to the team, you can turn the email immediately into a Teams meeting and say, “Okay, this is important.”  And so, you can turn it into a Teams meeting and everybody copied on that email will automatically be invited to that meeting when you put it into the into your calendar.  You can chat directly with people in the email, you can actually click a button and you can start chatting outside of Teams, but the chat shows up in Teams with the people who are copied on the email.  I think it’s a pretty cool way to interact between Outlook and Teams, and it just keeps showing how integrated Teams and the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite are.  Dennis, you’re up with your tip number four.

Dennis Kennedy:  This is one that’s fairly obvious but I didn’t use it as much as I could have early on, but I think that the search tool is really good and it’s often underused by people.  And I’ve used it to go back and find conversations even from a couple years ago with my research assistants and stuff like that. It’s also a great time and I use it to say, see I really did tell you that a while back, you know. So it’s just really useful, you know, once you start to have these Teams to say, I can go find these things. And it’s important because as we move to these different tools, it is getting harder to say like oh was that done in an email? Was that done in Teams? Was that an instant message? Was that, you know, how did I do that? So just having that search tool in Teams, I think is highly useful and if you haven’t tried it, I think you’re going to be surprised at how beneficial it is for you to use it.

Tom Mighell:  All right, my next tip is also pretty basic, but it is incredibly important, especially if you happen to be a member of a lot of Teams. If you happen to be part of a lot of Teams, when somebody makes a communication in one, you’ll notice that the channel to the left side in the menu gets highlighted or bolded when there’s a comment, but we never have time to look at all that. If you’re a member of a lot of Teams, how are you ever going to look down and say, oh there’s a new thing, I need to go look. The best way to get someone’s attention or the best way to get your attention should be to use the at sign. Once you type in the at sign and then type your name, you automatically get a notification when that happens and you may not be at your desk so you may not see the notification come in, but that post that has the at mentioned for you is now listed in your activity feed, and the activity feed is designed to show anything that concerns you that had where someone has mentioned you by adding you doing an at sign at your name, in any Team throughout the throughout all of Microsoft Teams. So that’s where I go first thing in the morning is I usually have three or four or five messages sitting there in my activity feed. I go there, they’re in five different Teams, I can respond to them quickly and easily, but I know where they are. If somebody just types my name in and then you know, a day later, they say, why didn’t you respond to me, it’s because I didn’t know that you were doing anything. So make sure you at somebody to make you get their attention, or that they at you to get your attention.

Dennis Kennedy:  So my next one is sort of a general tip but lot of people use Teams for just regular meetings. And so, typically these days, things are either run in Zoom or they’re on Microsoft Teams and I actually take Teams is a little bit harder to do your video setup and then, as everybody has found out these days that whether it’s Zoom, Teams, Google Meet whatever it seems like they all battle over control over your default, microphone and camera. So you never know what to expect when you switch from one tool to another. So my tip is in a couple ways you want to optimize your audio and video setup. So with Teams, I like to do because this is a little bit harder just to make sure that it’s you know, it’s using what I think it is. And then I think you do want to up the level of your microphone, your webcam, your background, your lighting, all those things that we talked about, we actually go into a lot of detail about this in the book, but I think that it’s — we’re increasingly doing video meetings and it just makes sense to look more and more professional with your audio and video setup.

Tom Mighell:  All right, for my last — this is our last round of tip Dennis. So for my last tip, I’m actually going to cheat and do two quick tips because I came up with seven and I couldn’t decide what to cut so I’m not going to cut any of them. So it’s our podcast, we can do what we want. So here are my two tips for tip number six, which is one. I talked about the fact that you might be member of lots of Teams but there might be Teams that you’re a member of that you don’t need to see all the time that there might be three or four Teams that are most important to you.

(00:25:08)

You spend most of your time working in them but you don’t want to see all the rest of them. All you have to do is click the buttons right next to a Team and the first option in the menu is hide. And what it will do is it will hide it down below. Down below you’ll see a new line below your active Teams. It will be a line that says Hidden Teams. And when you click that toggle button, it will show all the Teams that you belong to that you’re not seeing. So I use that all the time. I only have the Teams that I’m active in all day long at the top so I don’t have to scroll all the way through all the Teams unless I need to get to one of those hidden Teams, really easy for me to do. Last tip is, and this is something I don’t see very many people doing, but I think you should, which is make use of tabs in your channels. If you notice when you go into a channel for a Team, you’ve got your posts, which are your chat, your communications, you’ve got a tab for files, which gets you to your files and then there’s a plus sign and if you click on it, you can add just about anything you want to, you can add a spreadsheet and have a spreadsheet that you can all access in one place, you can add a Wiki page that you turn into a web page. It says rules for this channel or something like that. Dennis and I created a channel for getting guests for the podcast. And one of our tabs is a Trello board that we use that has lots of information about the speakers we are trying to get. The second one is a spreadsheet on all of our episode planning so that we can go to it and get to it immediately. We don’t have to go and dig into files and look at the file from there. It’s immediately available to us. You don’t have to use just those apps, there’s tons of third-party apps that you can connect to it, and it increases the value of working in a channel just exponentially because there’s so many different things that you can do by adding a tab. So, go explore the plus sign next to your post and files tabs and see if there are tabs that might work for your Teams. Dennis what is your last tip?

Dennis Kennedy:  I’m going to cheat and do two like you, but I’m going to do them really fast. So, the first one is that Tom and I use Teams and there’s just two of us on the Team and it’s really useful for us. So I think that there’s a message in that and that is like, don’t think you have to have like these big groups of people for Teams to work. I think you can do with two people could be, you know, you and your spouse, you and a child, you know, whatever and you can do that. It’s super useful. So, think about using Teams, it’s sort of non-standard, maybe none-business ways and then I want to end with the tip we make in the book and we’ve made a lot on the podcast about collaboration tools is when you use these collaboration tools, you need to be brutal about not letting people slip back to email because once people still back to email it, it kills the value of the collaboration tool. So everything you’re doing it needs detail and force people staying in Teams and not using email, so that’s something to think through carefully and just be super rigorous about it.

Tom Mighell:  All right, well it’s time for me to be brutal and super rigorous about ending this session, ending the segment.  I hope you got some good tips. We got a lot more tips if you want them, please reach out to us. Happy to talk about Teams, anytime we love talking about Microsoft Teams. But right now, we need to take a break for a message from our sponsors.

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[Music]

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

Dennis Kennedy:  And I’m Dennis Kennedy. Once again, Google has announced that they are killing off a product that many people, but apparently not enough for Google use regularly. This happens so often that some people use the term, the Google product cemetery, there’s even a website called killed by Google, killedbygoogle.com. There’s a long list of dead and soon-to-be-dead Google products. It currently list 274 products. Tom is this a known hazards of people need to deal with is part of due diligence since selecting products from Google?

(00:30:03)

Something, especially unique to Google and what do you think is the next Google product that is getting to be ready to be loaded into the Google hearse? That’s what’s known as the complex question I believe.

Tom Mighell:  It is many questions in one Dennis, that is true. So I mean, what can you say about this? Google is a company that likes to try lots of new things and sometimes those things don’t work out at least not in Google’s eyes. The problem is a lot of times those things gained a small but passionate following which causes a lot of pain and grief when that thing goes away. Dennis and I wept openly when Google kills Google Reader and the untimely death of the collaboration tool Google Way was also hard to take. Of those 274 actually I went and looked at it. I think you said 274, it’s now 275 since you looked at it the first time, they’ve killed something else just in the day since we’ve written a script. Of those 274, 200 of them are services, 54 are apps and 21 are pieces of hardware. So the majority are different services they offer. So the question is why does this happen? I think basically, it’s because Google is such a big company. They’re made up of smaller teams. Those teams work on apps services or devices, all three of the things that are getting killed. Sometimes Google acquires a company that makes one of those products obsolete. They bought Fitbit and they’re about to Fitbit off to put it into their watches. So sometimes two teams develop similar tools and one of them invariably gets killed off. Some services just go out of date because they just don’t make sense anymore. Sometimes they try an experiment to see if it sticks and if it doesn’t, they kill it. Google has killed a lot of things but it hasn’t killed the big bangs, it hasn’t killed Gmail, Gmail still around, YouTube isn’t going anywhere, Google Chrome and Google Photos seems to be enjoying long lives. So to answer your initial question Dennis, I think the other companies do this but none of them do it with the frequency of Google. I think Google stands alone and how they kill things and at the frequency at which they kill things. So yes, look at a new Google service like you like with a weary, I think that when it comes to a Google service, be aware that you might — there might be issues with it and ask if this service goes away, am I going to have to do a lot of work to move to a new tool? For example, when Google Reader went away, I was unhappy, but it didn’t take me long to find another RSS reader that work just as well and I’m okay with that. I’ve grieved and I moved on and I’m fine. On the other hand, if Google Photos ever goes away, moving all my photos is going to be a huge issue and I’m going to be really unhappy, I’m hoping this is one of their lifer products but you never know. Now, as for your last question, which Google product is next? You know, I literally have no idea. I’m not going to predict. I will say it’s not going to be a big one. It’s going to be one of their smaller things that they do. And that’s why it’s hard to predict what it is because you never actually know.

Dennis Kennedy:  Yeah, the interesting thing, right? So Google is an innovative company and one of the things of the innovation is that you try things and things fail and the faster you can fail stuff, that’s going to fail anyway, is a good thing. If you’re the developer of those products and Google’s, you know, for something to be successful, it’s a pretty high bar for Google. So I think they’re going to kill stuff probably more frequently than other companies. Now, it’s tough, if you really rely on that product, which is why we’ve sort of — in my case I kind of shy away from new Google things. In fact, Tom is has kind of feeling today on Facebook like the little reminder thing I got of a past update was from 2009. It was talking about how it was excited to be in line to get Google wave, you know. So certain amount of irony in that one, but I think it is to me, it’s just part of due diligence and to know that things are likely to disappear. Some of these things if you look at the what they’ve killed off, they make sense, other things you’re going like, oh this is could have been really good. I wish I would have known more about it. If I had to guess and I’m you know, quite likely to be wrong but the one I suspect might disappear as a separate product is Google Meet but we can check back in a year or two and see how close to right I was on that Tom. So now it’s time for our parting shots that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast in.  Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell:  So my parting shot is a tip that I recently learned and I am passing on to you. And actually, I haven’t utilized this tip yet, so I can’t tell you how well it worked or not.

(00:35:02)

But I will say I’ve been having some problem with my mesh network at home. I purchased eero mesh network. I love it. It’s great. But the current mesh network that I have is supposed to be able to replicate up 2GB speeds if you have it, and we have it here in Dallas, I have a gigabit internet. I have that here with the – I connect an Ethernet into my home computer and it’s brilliant, it’s wonderful speed, but I’m only getting about 200 megabytes download speed, which is still awesome but it’s not gigabit. So I did some research, and I learn, and I’m going to put a link to an article in the show notes called Seven Mesh Router Mistakes to Avoid and one of the tips there is using too many or too few mesh nodes. I thought I’m going to get — I’m going to blanket my house with coverage. I’m worried that I might not have good coverage in places. So I have a two-story house and I have three downstairs and I have two upstairs and I got on the phone with the people from eero and they said you got way too much. They said this can go through floors, it can go through walls, you need probably half of what you have right now or two and a half of or one and a half of what you have right now, something like that. So it might very well be that when you — if you set up a mesh network, don’t go all out, don’t think I’ve got to have it from one to the other end of my house. These things actually have good range on them and I am learning that the hard way by having purchased too many. I need to decide which goes where, and that’s my next step and maybe I’ll report back on the success of that later on how I improved my wireless connectivity throughout the house. Dennis?

Dennis Kennedy:  Yes sir, I was like you just add one at a time and it see how it works and whether it’s—

Tom Mighell:  But I got to figure out if that one at a time upstairs or downstairs because it can go through the floors. It’s a good question, I don’t know. I would just say the good news is they say it is much easier to get good coverage in a two-story house that is more compact than a one-story ranch style house that is spread out and we don’t have that. So that should at least make it a little bit easier.

Dennis Kennedy:  Or you could just go get a new house. It’s perfectly suited for the number of routers that you have.

Tom Mighell:  That was not the purpose of this tip.

Dennis Kennedy:  So anyway, I’ve been looking at the ABA annuals technology survey results and also the LTN tech survey from law.com of bigger firms. And so some of the numbers are out and I’ve been looking at security is the thing in cloud usage which is the interesting area for me. So I am really troubled by what law firms are doing, actually, what they’re not doing with on the security side. And these numbers just bear it out. So I’m just looking at the LTN numbers, which I put in the show notes because the ABS stuff won’t be out for a little while. And from what people perceive is the biggest security threat, 39% employee negligence, 36% ransomware, 14% phishing attacks. Yeah, you know, I think those numbers are a little haywire to me in terms of what the real threats are out there. And then steps people have taken are just sort of shocking, how low the numbers are. So increasing internal cyber security training about two-thirds, hiring outside cyber security expertise half, increasing training 14%, I mean, it’s just really kind of shocking how little is going on out there. And then also, I think the move to the Cloud in large firms is actually quite significantly smaller than I would expect it to be so slight increase is the highest category, 64%. Anyway, these you know, these numbers to me are always useful to give you an idea what’s going on and to see where the gap is between what’s, you know, what we think is happening and what is actually happening, it can help you set your strategy but the cyber security numbers really, really give me a lot of concern in light of the current threats out there.

Tom Mighell:  I think that given all of that, it is surprising but then again the numbers aren’t different from how they’ve been every other year. I mean, it’s always shocking to see how few people are taking security seriously. All right, 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 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, or in your favorite podcast app. If you like to get in touch with us, remember, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn, on Twitter or leave us a voicemail. Remember, we always like to include your voice messages for our V-segment. That number is (720) 441-6820. So until the next podcast I’m Tom Mighell.

(00:40:14)

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

Outro:  Thanks for listening to the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, the Lawyers Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Smart Ways to Work Together from ABA books or Amazon and join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report only on the Legal Talk Network.

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