Dennis Kennedy is an award-winning leader in applying the Internet and technology to law practice. A published...
Tom Mighell has been at the front lines of technology development since joining Cowles & Thompson, P.C....
Published: | November 18, 2022 |
Podcast: | Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Category: | Legal Technology , News & Current Events |
Uh-oh, the robots are gunning for your jobs again. Or… are they? Generative AI has the ability to analyze existing knowledge and then produce its very own creative content, with varying results thus far. Dennis and Tom talk through what’s happening in this sphere of technology, recommend tools to try out, and examine whether real live content creators need to worry about losing work to these AI usurpers.
With the possible self-destruction of Twitter, is a return to RSS a viable alternative? Listen in as the guys run RSS through their “Hot or Not?” filter.
As always, stay tuned for the parting shots, that one tip, website, or observation that you can use the second the podcast ends.
Have a technology question for Dennis and Tom? Call their Tech Question Hotline at 720-441-6820 for the answers to your most burning tech questions.
A Segment:
B Segment: Hot or Not? RSS
Parting Shots:
[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 #326 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 introduced you all to the world of digital twins, and some of what that might mean for all of us. You should stay right here, but send your digital twin to listen to the episode right now. In this episode, Tom and I want to share some of our thinking and a few experiments in another newly named area, Generative Artificial Intelligence or Generative AI.
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 discussing the idea of Generative Artificial Intelligence and whether or not it’s going to take anybody’s job away.
In our second segment, we can’t stop agonizing about whether we should stick with or leave Twitter. So, we’re going to consider whether an old technology is a length hot again. 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’ve lately been in the mood to identify and talk about some new technology developments that we don’t see a lot of in the legal-tech space and introduce them to our audience. We did it about digital twins last time. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about something called Generative AI, Generative Artificial Intelligence.
Now, it’s not quite true, we have talked about Artificial Intelligence being able to generate content via GPT-3 in past episodes. I think it was last year, it may have been earlier this year, and I guess I’m surprised to see how fast the technology has exploded. How much it has advanced since we covered it in that podcast a while back.
Dennis, were you able to successfully resist the urge to let GPT-3 generate your first comments for this podcast?
Dennis Kennedy: Actually I was but it was very tempting to see what I could do. I’m sort of going to guess that maybe you weren’t, but you’re always trying these experiments for the podcast. I guess this one we really do have to define, do you want to jump in with the definition there?
Tom Mighell: Well, you’ve found this definition so I would be fine with you talking about it because I’ll read the definition that you’ve put in here but it feels weighty to me. So, I’ll read this here.
Generative AI refers to unsupervised and semi-supervised Machine Learning algorithms that enable computers to use existing content like text, audio, and video files, images, and even code to create new possible content. The main idea is to generate completely original artifacts that would look like the real deal.
That last sentence to me is really the most important part of that whole thing. That first sentence, what essentially is, is it’s taking a body of knowledge whether that is text, whether that’s audio, whether that’s video, learning as much as they can about it so that the Artificial Intelligence can actually generate new completely never seen before content, whether that’s an image, whether that’s a story or a letter, or other kinds of text. Whether that’s an audio or a video file. So, it’s an idea of being able to create something completely new where nothing existed before.
And I would say that that’s different from regular AI because it is creating something completely new where what I call “regular”, and I put that in quotes, is essentially analyzing something that already exists. Generative AI goes beyond that. It analyzes something that already exists and then it makes something new from it.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and I think it really is as simple as that. Although, obviously the results are more complicated, but the Generative AI really just means that AI is generating something, whereas normally we just think of AI as analyzing things, recognizing patterns, helping us look at things and draw our own conclusions. While degenerative takes the next step and actually is creating something. And as you mentioned, Tom, it feels like in the last two months or so, it’s just exploded with how many different things you can do.
(00:05:03)
And it’s surprising when you think anything that you could do a text, you can do audio, you can do images, you can do video. I mean, people are even writing a software code using Generative AI tools. So, it’s really a pretty amazing thing and how fast it’s happened. But before we enthuse too much about it and have these sort of abstract definitions, Tom, maybe we could give some examples to illustrate what we mean.
Tom Mighell: So, I think that what examples to what we mean, I’m going to give some of the tools that I’ve seen over the past couple of months, and I think you have some examples you want to mention. I will only mention in passing DALL E 2 because both of us use it. We’ve both talked about it on the podcast before and how we were signing up for it. I’ll leave you to talk more about how that works.
What’s been interesting though is, is that DALL E 2 relies on you to sign up for it. It relies on, in fact, it will charge for things at some point in time down the road if you run too many experiments or tests against it. The tools that I’m seeing that have jumped out from that, there are other tools very similar to it, like a tool called Midjourney AI, very similar, will create images based on your text prompts for what it is. Stability AI, the thing that makes Stability AI different is that it’s Open Source. It’s free to use.
Now, when we get to the what’s bad about this area of the podcast later, I’m going to talk to you about some things that concern me. Generally, we are fans of Open Source, free to use and for all I know, Dennis may still be a fan of Stability AI being Open Source and free to use; I’m not so sure, we’ll talk about that in a minute.
More than 200,000 people have downloaded the code for Stability AI since August. It offers some interesting new things like what’s something called Outpainting. So, like you take a regular picture that you upload a copy of the Mona Lisa and you say, “Please draw what would be around the Mona Lisa.” And so, it starts taking cues from what it can see around, what the current picture says and it begins to interpret it and says, “Here’s what we think is outpainted from what’s in Leonard da Vinci’s original painting.
There’s also, I think we’re seeing it happen is, there’s a stable diffusion plugin for Photoshop now, so you can actually install it in Photoshop and will allow you to infinitely edit images in that tool. So, already we’re taking these AI tools and moving them into tools that we already know about. There’s a tool called Jasper. Jasper helps you create marketing copy. It will allow you to develop stuff to put on your blog or to develop marketing campaigns. There are multiple writing tools. One of them is called Sudowrite that helps you write novels and screenplays. It’ll help you write things. It’ll help you describe, if you’re having trouble describing something, you put in a few words and it helps you describe it. It’ll help you rewrite something. It’ll take something you’ve written and rewrite it if you need to. It’ll help you brainstorm ideas for a screenplay or for a novel.
Like Dennis mentioned, there are Generative AI tools that help you with code. GitHub has the tool called GitHub Copilot. Type a few lines of code and that tool will start writing code for you. Kind of scary. And then the one to me that is really interesting, although I haven’t really seen it in action that much, is a tool called Runway which allows someone who is creating a movie to live edit in a background, remove objects, anything that would ordinarily require a digital effect artist you can do by just typing in some text and getting it done.
We’ve mentioned on the podcast before, the tool Descript which will basically create a deep, fake, worthy version of your voice or someone else’s voice. Tons and tons of options I’ve spent a lot more time talking about it than I probably should have but those are kind of the examples that I’ve taken a look at and I’ve been seeing. Dennis, what about you?
Dennis Kennedy: I look primarily at the core tools and that to me is like for text, it’s GPT-3, for images it’s DALL E 2 or the Stable Diffusion tool. For music there’s something called Jukebox and for video, the company used to be known as Facebook, Meta has something called Meta Ai Make-A-Video.
And so, those are things that if you want to get a sense of what’s going on out there, those are the things I would probably look at and then dig deeper. I just saw, I think it was today or yesterday that somebody’s created a GPT-3-based legal specific generating tool. So, seeing a lot happening fast.
(00:10:00)
And so, the idea here is that these tools have been trained on massive, massive amounts of text in the case of GPT-3 or images and it takes tons of computer power to do it and you’re able to kind of tap into them.
And so, GPT-3, it looks at the text and then kind of predicts what’s likely that come next. And it keeps learning associations of words and sequences and you can start to produce pretty amazing things with it. So once you start to see some of the examples, it’s sort of astonishing. And Tom, one of my favorites is and I don’t know that maybe we can find a link for the show notes, but I saw this like page-and-a-half description of or definition of AI-generated by an AI, and I think it was out of GPT-3 and actually it was pretty darn good.
Tom Mighell: Well, I don’t know if that was that study that was submitted a study paper where they asked AI to generate a report on itself. And I know it was being submitted to major scientific journals and they were going to let them know when some journal had accepted it for publication, but I mean if it hasn’t happened yet, it’s going to happen. It’s just something that is only a matter of time because sometimes the text is scarily good, sometimes it’s not relevant at all, it’s trying but I think the benefit of it is it gives people who are writers, the ability to see things that maybe they didn’t see before, and the tool gives them some text that maybe helps them look at things, look at the issues or what they’re trying to write or what they’re trying to create in a slightly different way. It may not be relevant at all to what they want to create, but it might help them nevertheless.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, and I see it as I’ve started to see all AI, is I think, it’s really useful for this kind of first slice of thing or first draft, or to kind of give you initial screening of what you’re doing. And so, for me the benefit and you’ll see some examples here out there and it doesn’t take much to find them because you see more and more all the time of — somebody could say I would like to generate a non-disclosure agreement and it actually does a pretty good job of that or can do a pretty good job of it.
And I guess the other thing I would say about all of this is a really key thing for people to understand is I think it works on the basis of prompts, so you’re basically — and I used DALL E 2 as the example that you go in and you say what you wanted to give you. So I was doing a PowerPoint slide and the point of my presentation was about irrelevance. And so I decided I wanted to generate a graphic for that slide and so I went to DALL E 2 and I typed into the prompt box. I said irrelevance in the style of Picasso, so very simple prompt, and it created this really cool little graphic that kind of gave you this vague sense of irrelevance but it was a cool looking Picasso like thing. But it’s that sort of prompt notion where you’re saying — you’re telling it what you want to do in a descriptive way or a prompting way and then it produces the output.
So lots of I think potential benefits in creating first draft, summaries, kind of creating images and stuff like that, even if you’re not very sophisticated. So tons of benefits. Tom, you may have others, but Tom, as I know you will point out there were plenty of concerns these days.
Tom Mighell: Well, there are, and I don’t mean to be the coldwater on all of this, because I still really like this and think that this is a great tool, but there are things you have to think about which is one, we will just replace content creators. There have been a lot of articles out there that say that, when writing goes to zero because you don’t have to do it anymore, you rely on somebody else; artists, writers, videographers, voiceover artists could find themselves out of a job because it would be easier to create using these tools than to actually employ people to do that.
Let’s extend it into legal. Could there be, Dennis, you mentioned there’s a new tool out there. Could text generator tools be used for legal briefs or other legal writings? Absolutely, why not. And would that be the type of commoditized work that associates would do or that we would have?
(00:15:01)
I don’t think that Generative AI is going to replace a lawyer and their advice, but can it be, do the same type of replacing that document assembly could for lawyers as well? I think humans are still going to create their individual sentences for a very long time but AI is going to help remind us of related ideas that we might not have considered.
Obviously Deepfakes are a concern, the fact that you can create videos or audios that look like the real person and fool people doing it. The interesting thing about most of these Generative AI tools is that they’ve got very strict rules in place to prevent users from creating. Violent contact, pornographic content, copyright infringing content, but Stable Diffusion doesn’t have any of that. So the Stability AI that we talked about, it only has a basic safety filter which actually can be disabled.
And as a result, what we’ve been seeing is the Internet being flooded with a lot of bad stuff. A number of Reddit sites were shut down after they were inundated with non-consensual nude images. There were people creating images of violently beaten Asian women for some reason. The founder of Stability AI pushes back against the restrictions. He says and I am quoting this, he says that radical freedom is necessary to achieve his vision of a democratized AI that is un-tethered from corporate influence, which I think is a good goal. I think we want to make sure and I like the goal, but it also sounds the way that he says that is, is radical freedom, it feels a little bit like a stereotypical movie villain to me that is unleashing something upon the world by the end of the movie. And that’s only a slightly dramatic way.
I am concerned about a tool that anybody can download and use without restriction. And I think that there needs to be some way to combat it or control it. You can’t guarantee that only good people will use this and only people, obviously we’re seeing that that’s not happening. So it concerns me that it like anything else can be used for bad things. I think the Stability AI person basically is using the same kind of article that’s having a big time same kind of argument that says that AI doesn’t generate bad content, people using AI generate bad content. And true, but still, it’s just a concern, it’s something we need to pay attention to and be aware of as we’re looking at these tools.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, Tom, you’re right that his comment about radical freedom and democratized AI does sort of sound like it came from a prompt that says of describe democratized AI in the manner of a stereotypical movie villain.
Tom Mighell: Of a bond villain, yes, yes.
Dennis Kennedy: So I think next we’ll kind of go to the practical and tell people how they might be able to try this out and learn some more.
Tom Mighell: But before that we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
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[Music]
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[Music]
Dennis Kennedy: And we are back. Tom, I have to admit that I am really excited about these technologies. So you are usually more circumspect than I am. So what are good first steps for listeners to try?
Tom Mighell: Well, I think that some of the tools that I mentioned, some of them are free to use that Sudowrite tool, you can go and write things whenever you want to and use it for free. So I would say go and check it out and see what some of the options are.
One of the tools that I recently used with I would call mixed results, is a tool called DrawAnyone and DrawAnyone is a tool that you upload between 5 and 10 photographs of yourself or whoever and they have to be sort of close-up.
(00:20:07)
Other people can’t be in them. There can’t be a lot of space around your face. They have to be kind of close-up pictures. It will analyze and intake all of that information. And then, you can start doing different versions of those pictures. So, after it took all my pictures in, I said portrait in the style of Rembrandt. I said super hero. Tom is a superhero.
There’s a number of self-created prompts — sorry, pre-done prompts that you can do. One of them is called colorful. But when you enter it in, it says portrait by Kenne Gregoire, James John, Tran Nguyen, trending on ArtStation, 8K, Masterpiece, chill summer, graffiti paint, fine detail, full of color, intricate detail, golden ratio, illustration. Those were all of the factors that went into creating a portrait of me. And I just have to tell you, I hated all of them. I think they’re all terrible and I will never show them to anyone outside maybe Dennis. I will say it’s very interesting. I did get some superhero pictures. I did see some things that were in the style of Rembrandt, but they are not things that I’m proud to show to anybody.
That said, it was a good experiment. It was nice to be able to say, I want to see my picture in these different modes and it was pretty successful in doing them in those particular different modes. Dennis, what about you? What kind of experiments have you been doing?
Dennis Kennedy: As I mentioned, I’m actually on a pretty regular basis for my classes and for a presentation. I’m using Dali 2 to illustrate PowerPoint slides and it’s, you know, conceptual things, stylistically to fit some things. I also did a thing where I’m working on an architecture project. I’ll keep it vague on that where I was just able to describe what I wanted to do and had Dali 2 generate some pictures, and it was pretty, pretty cool how that worked. Where I want to go though is more into the GPT-3 stuff, which I haven’t done yet. So, I guess, let me talk a little bit about a couple of things that I want to try that I’ve seen.
So, I’m really intrigued by the idea of generating summaries. I heard somebody talk recently about taking sort of training the GPT tools on a book they had written. So, imagine Tom and I took our collaboration tools book. And then, we were able to create like a chatbot sort of things where people could ask us questions and it would answer, you know, using stuff from the book. So, it sounded like Tom and I, you know, answering the questions in our own voice. I think that’s super cool. I saw something where somebody is able to embed some script to invoke GPT-3 into spreadsheets. And then, you know, based on the information they’re capturing in, it was in Google Sheets, but they were generating thank you notes. They were creating tags and, you know, filling in columns, you know, based on what GPT-3 was predicting. That was really cool.
So, I think there’s a whole lot happening in the text world that I want to play with and then starting to combine like a few different things into one thing. But at this notion of generating tags which is seem like an insurmountable problem for me, but the idea, if I could just kick it over to an AI tool that just kind of made us best effort in generating tags, I think that would go a long way for me. What about you, Tom?
Tom Mighell: I think that the next thing that I want to do is as I slowly but surely make my way towards making videos and/or other podcast or audio offerings, I’m very intrigued with the idea of editing video or audio using a tool like Descript where I can just easily type in and it will use my voice pattern to say the words without me having to re-record anything. I’m really intrigued with that. And so, I think that’s probably my next area of looking at it is to figure out whether or not it can successfully edit a video just by typing in text and not have to use a complicated audio or video editing tool that I would be spending hours and hours learning how to use when all I really have to do is go in and delete some words or add some words and the AI will take care of the generation and editing for me.
(00:25:00)
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I mean, they’re sort of attracted too if you had a tool that you could just say, take the video from the starting point to one second before I first start talking and delete that. That would like be really kind of a cool thing that you could do and you can imagine some other things like that. So, Tom, this is — now usually, we talk about new technologies and we say, well, you know, kind of fit into the duty of technology competence framework and this is something that a lawyer would need to know, you know, under that type of standard. But I can sort of see the impact of these tools to me could just be immense and it’s tons of implication.
So, it’s one of those things where, you know, normally I’m like a little bit — on the one hand, on the other hand about whether lawyers, you know, or our listeners should dive into this and more and more about it. But this one, I come fully on the side of this is something you need to be learning. And so, I think it’s just going out there and kind of seeing what’s possible looking at some of the main tools and look at some of the examples and videos, and I think you can find stuff on YouTube where people are doing illustrations. And so, there’s some very cool stuff out there. But that’s what I would do is kind of see what’s out there and then figure out ways to experiment because it’s happening. It just feels like it’s happening really fast and the power of this just kind of suddenly happened for us. And to understand — I think you want to understand what the potential is, what the potential risks are, where it’s likely to show up, and there’s going to be like a ton of issues out there that you just need to be aware of.
Tom Mighell: Well, and I think that this is another competence, another technology competence issue that we talk about all the time here. And whether it’s something you use, something your clients use, it’s definitely something you need to be aware of. I think, Dennis, you’re right. This is going to be huge whether we want it to or not, and I think it’s coming faster than some of the other things that we’ve talked about that I think some of the other things are more speculative or are going to take a long time. This seems to be on a very fast track.
All right, we’ve got to move on to our next segment. But before we do that, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.
[Music]
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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. It’s time for the segment. We like to call Hot or Not. 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 welcome to suggest future Hot or Not topics for us.
So, as people lately and even as we’re recording this seems like very quickly are scurrying to find Twitter alternatives, one of our favorite old technologies is started to get some mentions, and it’s really simple syndication or RSS. So back in 2003, J. D. Lasica described RSS as news that comes to you, and some are seeing — and you can think of it in terms of news feeds or, you know, where you get the updates without actually having you go to the site. So, some are seeing a return to RSS as a possible way to bring you Twitter-like updates potentially with more control. So, Tom, RSS, is it hot again or is it not or is it just kind of pointing this way to a concept that might become helpful to us again?
Tom Mighell: Well, you know, Dennis, your use of things like, I’m hearing people say or some people are seeing sounds very shady because I’m not seeing the same story as you’re seeing. I’m not hearing the same things about RSS. I feel like this is — you’re wanting to manifest something here. And I think the thing is, RSS has always been a way to bring you updates of information. That has never changed, and it’s still doing that. You are still getting RSS feeds on lots of major news sites.
(00:30:02)
Whether you use a news reader or a feed reader or not, RSS is still being used behind the scenes at many of these sites that you happen to capture information for. You and I have been huge proponents of RSS even after Google Reader died and people started to abandon it for easier updates through tools like Twitter. I mean, I think that’s why most people went to Twitter because it seemed to be easier, less friction. You can talk to people at the same time, but I still use an RSS reader today because it still brings me some news that I can’t get through Twitter or that doesn’t seem quite as reliable.
I agree that RSS is a partial alternative for Twitter with a couple of caveats. First of all, it’s only good for receiving news update. So, if you use Twitter just to get the latest, it can serve that purpose. It can serve that purpose. If you are also using Twitter to promote your practice or your business, or if you enjoy having conversations with others in the community, I would say that RSS is next to useless. I mean, it’s really just a one-way conversation. It’s information that gets news that comes to you. That’s what we call it and it’s not anything else, and it depends on the people having something to say publishing via on our RSS feeds.
So, if the people that you usually follow on Twitter don’t make some jump to a blog or another type of site that has an RSS feed, you’re going to lose that voice. You’re only going to have the mainstream websites and tools and people who set up. You know, you can set up a sub stack newsletter that has an RSS feed to it that gets delivered to you in that way, but you, otherwise, are going to lose out on a lot of voices. Now, those voices may be going to other tools, so you may be losing on them anyway, it doesn’t matter. But I think you will be limited to those sites or people who use RSS and you’re not going to be able to guarantee that anybody is going to continue to use them because I think that — so, I would say that RSS is not any hotter than it has ever been.
I would say that it is about as hot as it has always been. I don’t see it becoming hot with people abandoning Twitter and suddenly generating their own RSS feed so that we can continue to follow what they say. I just don’t see it making a big comeback because Elon Musk took over Twitter. As much as I would like to see Google Reader resurrected, I don’t think that it’s going to happen. So, I’m just going to say it’s just there. Dennis?
Dennis Kennedy: You know, I think I’m going to end up close to you, but I take that the conversation and, you know, what’s happening with Twitter as it forces us to think about alternatives and what we use Twitter for, those of us who use Twitter, is I think useful and I take the concept of RSS, and maybe its use in the background as like a part of the internet plumbing and how information is delivered. It’s actually kind of interesting as a way to take advantage of something that already exists and to use it in sort of new and perhaps better ways that help us. But I think what’s more important is there’s the two elements of RSS that you could subscribe to something and then updates just come to you. I think that one’s really useful and the fact that you have control over what you subscribe to. I think both of those components are things that you consider as you look at Twitter alternatives.
And so, the RSS concepts and the idea of having a news reader where I say I just go to one place, one app, one website, and I get all the information that I want in one place like a dashboard, and I see new stuff as it comes in is really attractive and that is one of the uses that people make of Twitter. But it’s that one piece of it that you say, “I have to replace” because it’s not — RSS is typically, you know, unless you set something up with your own RSS feed. It’s not going to work as the way that you’re direct messaging people, that you’re even posting as you do to Twitter. It’s probably not going to give you exactly the same sort of like what’s hot kind of thing on Twitter or have stuff just served to you by algorithms.
So, I think it makes sense where there’s control. So, I think the conversation around what RSS could give you is actually going to be a relatively hot in the conversation of what the world is going to look like after this Twitter meltdown, you know, to whatever extent it melts down. But I think overall, I agree with you.
(00:35:00)
It’s sort of medium to low on the scale and it is going to be — ultimately, it’s going to be a techie part of the plumbing, but we’ll see. If you start to see newsfeeds, then you can sort of feel that RSS has become a bit hotter, but it’s always going to be the background. Now, it’s time for parting shots at one tip website or observation. You can use the second this podcast sends. Tom, take it away.
Tom Mighell: All right. I have a tip this week, a cool tip about a boring tool and that is Microsoft Excel. So, let’s say that you get some discovery from a client or from the other side and it’s not a digital file. You get papers tables or paper versions of information. Somebody gives you a bunch of printouts or printouts of spreadsheets that have lots of information and it’s like, how are we going to get this into digital format? We could scan it, but it won’t be really something we can manipulate like an Excel Spreadsheet. What do we do? Well, the new — not the new Excel Mobile app for both Android and iOS has a terrific feature in it. You create a new document. You click the Insert button and then you do data from picture, and it takes a picture of something and it will automatically scan that information and put it into separate fields, in separate columns just how it was originally, and it is quite literally magic.
It is a great way that in case you are confronted with data that happens to be on paper, I don’t know if that’s happening that much these days. But, you know, I bet it does happen from time to time. If you’re confronted with that and you need to get it into a spreadsheet quickly, insert data from picture using the Excel Mobile app. It’s a great tip. Dennis?
Dennis Kennedy: I was going to say, you know, that is something that if you — there was a time when you described that, you said if we could do that with software that would totally be artificial intelligence.
Tom Mighell: Yup.
Dennis Kennedy: And now, it’s just sort of like a utility.
Tom Mighell: It’s just a menu item in an app.
Dennis Kennedy: So, we’re at this time period when I wrote this script. My intro was going to be like, “Well we’re at this time where we’re watching our 401(k).” It’s kind of a drift downwards substantially and we’re being tested in our resolve, in our investments. And then of course, when they recorded it —
Tom Mighell: It’d been a good week this week, huh?
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, on a day if you courted, like the stock market is up like 5%. But the message is that we’re in this incredibly volatile time with investments. And so, my parting shots are there’s two resources I use on the investment side because I think they’re really easy to understand. They’re devoted to long-term investing and they’re just seemed really smart. One is a newsletter called Humble Dollar, which is free and it’s just solid, solid financial advice and I really like it. And the other one I use is a podcast called WealthTrack, which is a companion to a PBS show with Consuelo Mack and she’s been doing it for a long time. But she interviews these leaving investors of these really significant mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, and all sorts of things, economists and stuff.
And it’s just really good because you get the perspective and the recommendations of people who have been doing this for a long time with great track records, and it’s just a pleasure to listen to. And, you know, her thing is always like, what investment should you have if you’re a long-term diversified investor and that’s what I think I want to be these days and probably most of the rest of you do as well.
Tom Mighell: And so, that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Network page for our show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes on Legal Talk Network site or in your podcast app of choice. If you like to get in touch with us, remember, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn. We are also on Twitter, at least for now, and you can also send us a voicemail. We love to get your voicemails 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.
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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, and join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.
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Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell talk the latest technology to improve services, client interactions, and workflow.