Pardon the Interruption: 2022 Edition

Episode Notes

Transcript

[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 329 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

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

Dennis Kennedy: Well, another year is in the books and we’ve reached Episode 329 of this podcast on legal technology with an internet focus and we’re about to start year 17 of the podcast.

In our last episode I once again tricked Tom into talking about Twitter, Twitter alternatives and whether people should stay or go with Twitter, which everything was changing within a day or so after we recorded the episode, but more important for those of you in the audience, we used Twitter as an example in that podcast of how you think about either staying with or leaving any technology that is part of your tech stack.

In this episode it’s time for our annual end of the year tradition. 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 wrapping up 2022 in our traditional style. Longtime listeners will know that ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption show a.k.a. PTI with Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon was one of the inspirations for this show many, many years ago. Our tradition is to use some of the elements of PTI for the format of this recap episode. And to do that, we have a special guest, our favorite fan of the show, Debbie Foster. Thanks for joining us on this episode Debbie.

Debbie Foster: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Tom Mighell: And for those of you unfamiliar with the PTI format, we’re going to have three segments. Toss Up, in which we purposely take opposing sides of a legal tech topic, which will be interesting since there are three of us. What’s the Word in which we fill in the blank on a statement about a legal tech topic with a well-chosen word or sometimes words. And our own new segment Hot or Not in which we categorize a legal tech topic as hot, not or something in between. And then we’re going to end with a fast response Big Finish to give you, Debbie and Dennis a sneak preview of the results. Again, indeed the results every year that we do this, I win every segment.

Debbie Foster: Yeah.

Dennis Kennedy: Oh, come on, Tom.

Debbie Foster: And now we are going to change it up this year.

Tom Mighell: All right, so let’s get started. Debbie; for those of you in the audience who haven’t met Debbie; Debbie, could you introduce yourself. Tell everybody who you are.

Debbie Foster: Absolutely. My name is Debbie Foster. I’m with Affinity Consulting and I am, as Tom said, a super fan of the podcast and love coming back every year to help out with the PTI episode.

Tom Mighell: Well, thank you Debbie and good luck to you in this game and thank you in advance for helping me celebrate my victory at the end. Our first segment is called Toss Up. In Toss Up we’re all required to take a different side of each topic. We argue our positions and at the end, again, I declare myself the winner. Dennis, are those rules clear?

Dennis Kennedy: You know, I actually disagree about the rules and the results. In fact, I disagree with the whole system, but here’s our first three-sided Toss Up question. What was the biggest lesson we learned about legal tech in 2022? Tom?

Tom Mighell: You know, when I started to look at some of these questions that we were going to do, I realized how far away I am from legal tech, so I’m going to be a provocateur and I’m going to sit back and let other legal tech experts really talk about many things.

But to me, I would say that if I had to take a title for 2022, I would say the more things change, the more things stay the same, which is, we continue to see some advancements in things, but then we also continue to see lawyers not doing the same stuff that they’re doing. I feel like it’s a broken record and that things are not improving the way — it just seems to me that things are not improving the way we would want them to improve. After we talk about the whole advance ten years and ten months argument of COVID, I feel like we really haven’t done much since that time to accelerate or move things forward. But I may be wrong because I’m not in the picture that often.

Debbie, how do you feel?

Debbie Foster: You know, it’s a little bit of a mixed bag for me. In some respects I hang up off of — on phone calls or Zoom calls and I think I’m going to have a job forever. There will never be a day that I don’t have a job helping people think differently about how they get their work done. But then there are times too when I talk to a firm who is really struggling and they make strong decisions and they spend money and they really think about automation and workflow and the things that can really make a difference in their firms. Part of it I think is that there’s just so many that we’re lagging behind that I don’t think there’s ever going to be a time that we check everyone off the list and get on to the next thing.

(00:05:14)

So I think there’s been movement, for sure, but I think this — I’ll say the same thing next year and the year after and the year after because there’s still a lot of people to bring along.

Dennis Kennedy: So what I’m going to — I’m going to go a little further. I’m going to say there is never a lesson learned. Probably Tom when you were talking about the 10 years and 10 months I wanted to go — I wanted to say like this year has felt like we’ve advanced 10 days in the last 10 months. But it really is a mixed bag and I think we’re going to see this retrenchment coming because of concerns about the economy and the legal profession worried it’s over-hired and some interesting, not necessarily competitive, but some sort of systems pressures that are likely to come.

So I think that what I would hope the lesson would be that invest in technology that makes sense for what you’re doing, but I sort of feel that the legal profession and legal tech tends to dabble, tend to be disappointed that some technology that was never intended to replace the lawyers actually doesn’t replace lawyers and then people retrench and I sort of think we’re back there again.

Tom Mighell: All right. Here is our second Toss Up. The statement is the most interesting legal tech developments are happening in the collaboration technology space. Debbie.

Debbie Foster: So I don’t — like I don’t know that I would say it’s the most interesting, but if I’m talking about collaboration, in the last week I have had at least two, maybe even three conference calls which are so awkward and weird and I don’t even know how we do business over conference call anymore. I’ve gotten documents back to me that are not properly redlined in a deal that I’m working on. I don’t see a whole lot of development there and, back to my earlier comment, still see a lot of people who are stuck in the way they’ve always done it. I was really struggling to think about what are the most interesting legal tech developments that are happening right now, and I don’t have a big list there, but I don’t think it’s happening in collaboration. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: Well, since Tom and I wrote this absolutely amazing book about Collaboration Tools and Technologies, I sort of feel like you do in some ways that there is this probably not intentionally, but sort of lawyers are kind of falling into the collaboration space. And so if I have one sort of motto or one principle for legal technology in 2022, it just comes down to make it easy for people to work with you and I think that just gets you into all the collaboration spaces, make it easy for people to pay you, make it easy for people to hire you, make it easy for people to work with you, make it easy to work on documents. And I think that that all sort of leads people into these — into the collaboration spaces.

And so I do think that probably what we’re seeing, and Tom will probably talk about Microsoft Teams and other things like that, but I do think that most of the really interesting stuff, and we will talk about AI in a little bit, but I think the really on the ground interesting stuff is happening in collaboration space.

Tom Mighell: So what I’ll say here is kind of a counterpoint to Debbie which is, I don’t get to see how law firms and lawyers are managing in legal tech development, but I see how the normal business world is. And I will say that my impressions of the 10 years and 10 months for the business world really did happen because businesses were forced to collaborate and businesses get it where law firms do not, where law firms are slower. And my clients, for the most part there’s going to be some differences, nut for the most part, they are much better at collaborating than they used to be.

I mean it is to me a world of difference than it would be working with lawyers. There’s still stuff to learn, but they expect it. That’s part of the whole thing is now rather than come and spend a week on site, because lots of them are back in the office now, so it’s not — although a lot of them still are in the office, now it’s, well, we expect that we’ll have all of these interviews by Zoom. We expect that we’ll be collaborating this way. And so it’s become an expectation.

So I guess my point here is that the most interesting tech development that should be happening for lawyers is collaboration; I’m not sure that that’s the case.

(00:09:57)

Debbie Foster: Well, Toss Up number three is with GPT-3, DALL·E 2, ChatGPT and other new generative AI tools. AI has really, really arrived.  Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, possibly, maybe, but I would say not in the ways that people actually expect at the moment. So I’m going to teach a class in AI and law next semester, and one of the things I’m going to start with is to say that for the last 70 years AI has been two years away from really happening for 70 years. In 1982 when I was in law school we were talking about AI and it was again like two years away.

But I do think these new developments with generative AI are giving you some practical examples and have gotten people’s interest up in certain areas. You can see actual practical results. And people are more willing to experiment with them. So I think that’s going to push people to try new things. Then I think once they pull back from saying, can AI replace lawyers, to say, who cares about that, but what can these new AI tools actually do for us, and Tom and I have talked about this in the podcast, from first drafts to summaries to creating images of things and videos and other stuff as a first draft type of thing, I think it’s really cool stuff that’s happening and I think it’s probably as arrived as it ever has been. But in two years from now we’ll probably be saying the same thing.

Tom Mighell: So I will argue that to the mainstream user, to the person who is going to probably make very little use of AI tools, I would say that these types of new tools make it feel as if it has arrived. It is accessible now to the average user. You can go in, and I went into ChatGPT and I said write me a poem about; and I talked about this I think on the last podcast, write me a poem about the Senate runoff in Georgia, and it did. It wasn’t the best poem in the world, but it was relevant and it had the right people’s names and it said all sorts of things. To me, the average — just the mainstream user, that was sort of magical that it could just do that and come up with something like that.

I’ve used some of the tools that I put my photo in and then I tell them I want to take my headshot and turn it into kind of a van Gogh painting in the style of the 1950s art deco or something like that, and it doesn’t always do a great job of it, but it does something — it tries hard and you can see what it was trying to do.

So I think that for all intents and purposes for the average user, I think that it’s gotten to a point where it’s useable, where it’s something that people can use. Is there more to come? Absolutely. Is it going to continue to improve? Are we going to see more things? Is it going to be to a time where lawyers can actually make use of it? I don’t know the answer to that, but I think that there are aspects of AI now that I think are accessible enough to where the mainstream user feels like it’s arrived. Debbie.

Debbie Foster: So I don’t know that I’m the average mainstream user, but I’m certainly not a super user. I might like be one micro step up from the average user when it comes to AI. Interestingly enough, this past September I was at a conference in Boston for the HubSpot conference, and there was a product there called Jasper AI they were exhibiting, and I was like tell me about this. They are like, oh, it’s artificial intelligence. I rolled my eyes like whatever, and they’re like, oh, let’s write a blog post, and I gave them a topic and they wrote it and I read it, and I was like, holy bleep, how much is this? And they said $458, and I said can I give you my credit card right now? And I did and I bought it and we have used it.

I don’t know if you know who Dharmesh Shah is, but he’s one of the cofounders of HubSpot and he had a quote yesterday on his LinkedIn profile that said Netscape was to the Internet what ChatGPT is to Artificial Intelligence. The Internet existed before Netscape. But the browser helped millions of mere mortals connect the dots on what could be done and dream of what could be. AI existed before ChatGPT, but… And I thought that was a really interesting take on it.

So I actually think that it has arrived, and people who explore ChatGPT or Jasper really can get a very practical example of something that’s more than just like, oh, you know, how when you go to Netflix and it said people who watch this could also watch that, which I think was relatable to us.

Tom Mighell: Or your Amazon shopping, yes.

(00:14:59)

Debbie Foster: Or your Amazon shopping, like those things were relatable. But this like, write me a poem about the Georgia runoff or why do law firms need strategic planning, and boom, all of a sudden you have a 250-word blog post about it that you just have to tweak a bit, I think is a game changer.

Dennis Kennedy: I’m there with you Debbie and I think you have that realistic perspective, it’s really opened your eyes and opened up your wallet too as you said.

So Toss Up number four, our last one, if you were to sum up your thoughts on 2022, where and how would you do that, a Tweet stream, a Substack newsletter, a YouTube video, TikTok, a Discord server, an NFT, ChatGPT 3 document you generated, a podcast, or something else? Tom.

Tom Mighell: Okay, first I’m going to say where I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it in a Tweet stream, because my God, Twitter is dying so fast. Even since our last podcast it’s dying even harder, so no Tweet stream. I’m not going to do it in NFT. No way I’m going to do crypto. I mean hell no, I’m never going to do crypto, because my gosh, have you read the news lately.

So for purposes of this discussion I was going to go with TikTok. I’m a little nervous about the fact that the entire United States government and every state is trying to ban TikTok because it’s owned by a Chinese company. But I will say I have gotten very interested in how TikTok works and how the algorithm gives you interesting things to see. So I am very intrigued by TikTok as a means to sum up my thoughts on 2022. So I’m going to go with TikTok. I think that it’s got lots of audience, it has lots of potential, it’s short form stuff, so I like that, because you’re not spending a lot of time, you’re spending short amounts of time. It’s not people have to read your long newsletter or other things.

I would say that the Discord server comes in as a close second for me, because I’m really intrigued with the idea of community and that seems to be one of the easy ways to entry for a community. But TikTok is my bet. Debbie, how about you?

Debbie Foster: I’m pretty sure on the last year’s episode of this I said I didn’t even have a TikTok account. So I am one step further. I actually have a TikTok account, but I think I’ve only opened TikTok on my phone one or two times, but it’s definitely not on TikTok.

For me, I think it would be the old-fashioned YouTube video, maybe a podcast. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: For me, as a content creator more and more my answer is like all of the above and more, the more outlets and channels the better. I’m looking to refine. So if you go back to our last podcast, I’m looking to refine some of the things I do, but I want a diverse portfolio of channels and outlets, because I don’t know what to expect. I think there’s more uncertainty than ever and I think it’s good to get stuff out. Where I’m most likely to go and a hint for what you’ll see from me in 2023 is Mighty Networks community. I think that that’s where I’m going to put a lot of effort to have a very targeted community and reach out to them in a number of ways to try to create community in addition to pushing content.

Tom Mighell:  And that does it for Toss Up. And as I said at the beginning I think it’s pretty clear that I won this segment.

Debbie Foster: No, I think I won.

Dennis Kennedy: Oh, come on. We were really good.

Debbie Foster: We were good.

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

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

[Music]

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

[Music]

Dennis Kennedy: And we are back. Tom, what will you be rigging the judging on next?

Tom Mighell: Dennis, the answer to that question is What’s the Word. In this segment we have a sentence about a legal tech topic with a blank. Each of us has to come up with the best word to fill in the blank. Dennis, what is our first sentence?

(00:20:01)

Dennis Kennedy: The one thing that should be at the top of every lawyers must Learn list is, Tom.

Tom Mighell: This is going to be a short podcast, because I’m just going to say collaboration, collaboration, collaboration the whole time. Like what’s his name? Balmer. Developers, developers, developers. I’m going to say collaboration constantly. But I think it is. I think that lawyers, anybody. I think we have to get better at collaboration. I won’t really be labor the point there. It’s hard to pick any good one because I think all three of us are going to pick something that’s valid, it’s something that all lawyers need to learn. So I’ll just choose collaboration as one of the three.

Debbie Foster: So, for me, I agree with Tom and I couldn’t say the same thing. So, I decided to take a different path and say, the one thing that should be at the top of every lawyer’s must learn list is dealing with people, relationships, culture, employee engagement, emotional intelligence. Like all of the soft skill things that are often at the bottom of the list, I think that should get to the top.

Dennis Kennedy: And there’s especially there in technology, which I think too few people realize. So, my one word and my one thing is cybersecurity. And I just taught a class in cybersecurity and data protection, and in all the work we did in the class and all the research I did around it, lawyers are just terrible at cybersecurity. I mean, it’s embarrassing, and we’re in the worst threat environment ever where it’s realistic to be talk about cyber warfare. We have ransomware, and we have all these new things, zero-day attacks like there’s so much going on. And I just think as a profession, cybersecurity for protecting our clients and ourselves as well has to be job one.

Tom Mighell: All right. Time for our next what’s the word and the sentence is, the one technology tool all lawyer should be using more of is blank? Debbie?

Debbie Foster: So mine has a collaboration flavor, but coming off of a couple of projects and having conversations with clients about how they figured out ways to use their matter management software to better internally collaborate on how work is getting done. Almost like a project management tool inside their matter management tool has revolutionized how they practice and I would love to see more people adopting that. Dennis?

Dennis Kennedy: I’m going to say notion, because I love it. So Notion is this great online database tool, almost like a wiki tool, but with a great graphic interface, and I’m doing so much with it. It’s the foundation of my second brain project and I just keep coming up with more ways to use it. And they are building generative AI into the tool. So I think everybody should be using that. But if that’s not what you want to do as a lawyer, I would say, number one, would be a password manager. Tom?

Tom Mighell: And here I come again with collaboration tool, which is Microsoft Teams. I’ve mentioned these multiple times. Dennis already predicted earlier that I was going to mention it, and this is only the first of probably six times I’m going to mention it in this podcast. I think teams is a must have. I hear lots of complaints these days about, oh it doesn’t work this, and we don’t like that, and the video is better in zoom and blah, blah, blah. But for collaboration purposes, if you understand how it works and how you can absolutely use it, it has changed the way that my team works with each other, and to a certain extent, it has changed the way that we work with our clients. The amount of email that we exchange these days is down to zero. I mean, we literally don’t communicate with each other by email anymore and I think we’re all the better for it. So, I think that take the time to learn teams and it will — I think it will take care of you.

Debbie Foster: All right. So number three, the experience of new law school grads and law students starting work in law firms can best be described as?  Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: My word is flashbacky. So, I’m in with my students, and there’s this whole room of people with these Mac laptops and then I will ask them about their experience when they work in law firms, and the stories you hear are just amazing. It’s almost like they feel they’re walking back in time when they go into a law office. And it makes me wonder of practicing lawyers today at firms. How many of those lawyers are actually embarrassed by the technology their firms make them use today? Tom.

Tom Mighell: The word that I have is the hyphenate not unusual. And the reason why I say that is all right, you talk about people coming in with their Macs and law students coming in with their Macs, and I don’t know that your experience is any different from my experience when I was at the law firm. It’s now been 15 years since I was at the law firm where the younger associates were definitely digital natives. They definitely were born in with the technology. They knew it. But that doesn’t mean they know how to use the technology the law firm needs to use.

(00:25:00)

That doesn’t mean they know how to create a table of contents or table of authorities in Word or they know how to sort in Excel or they know how to redact a document in Acrobat. I mean, I think that they understand the tools and how the tools work, but that doesn’t mean that they know them any better and they still need — I think what makes that easier for younger generations is it makes the learning curve shorter. It makes change management probably easier. But then again, when they see older generations in law firms or maybe IT departments not caring as much about technology, it doesn’t give these younger lawyers a lot of incentive to improve themselves on it either. Debbie.

Debbie Foster: My word is painful. And my firsthand experience of talking to associates in law firms, they are almost always scratching their head about something. I think they learn bad habits. I think it’s harder for them to be mentored and to get that practical experience when they’re always struggling with technology and unfortunately, that’s true almost everywhere I go. S,o painful is my word.

Tom Mighell: And that is it for “What’s The Word”, and I have racked up another Tomorific victory.

Dennis Kennedy: Oh, come on, Tom.

Debbie Foster: That’s not even a word.

Tom Mighell: Dennis made up the word anyway, so I mean, I’m just reading what he wrote in the script. So, all right, there’s no time for more comments. We are going to move on to our final segment, but let’s first take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.

[Music]

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

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

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy, along with our special guest, Debbie Foster. I’m not sure about the judging on this show. Tom is acting like the referees at a Dallas Cowboys home game.

Tom Mighell: If that were the case, the cowboys would have a much better record than they currently have, so I’m not sure that’s true. So let’s move on. It’s time for our new segment, and our final segment, hot or not?

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, fire away with the first topic.

Tom Mighell: Hot or not? VC investment in legal tech in 2022? Debbie.

Debbie Foster: Not hot at all. I think it’s less than a slow burn compared to last year, the year before, the year before. Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: I think it’s a nice little crackling campfire, not the raging bonfire of last year. I think there’s a little bit more going on than people think, but I think it’s a nice small comfortable blaze.

Tom Mighell: From my position not being completely within the legal technology area, I don’t see anything of high or low. I see that it’s still happening but I don’t see that it’s happening amazingly. And so, I’m just going to say it’s a comfortable 98.6, normal human temperature, not feverish, but also not frigid either.

Debbie Foster: All right. So hot or not, access to justice technologies? Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy: I have this as simmering. I think there’s so much potential and so much stuff about to get started in access to justice and some things already happening, and I think there’s a lot of simmering just hasn’t turned over to the boil yet. I think that could happen in the next year or two, but there is so much potential in that space. Tom.

Tom Mighell: So I’m going to modify your slightly and say perennially simmering, because isn’t that the answer that we give every year, isn’t it that there’s so much potential that it’s just on the verge that it could be doing it and it doesn’t do it. And again, I’m outside looking in on this but it seems like there’s just so much that’s not happening. And so, I just have to say it’s there and it’s ready, but it’s not happening yet.

Debbie Foster: And I would say the same comment about AI, like, we’re two years away from it being here, right?  It’s like the same story. There are a lot of busy people but I don’t see a whole lot happening, but lots of people are talking about it. So, that’s where I am.

Dennis Kennedy: All right. Last one. Tom, increasing law firm tech budgets.

Tom Mighell: All right. So being where I am, I’m going to say that that is Texas without a power grid coal. I just don’t see that happening. I see especially as we’re headed into a potential recession, I see budgets decreasing, I see places to cut, I see organizations may be moving to things like Microsoft365 because they can save money by moving things to the cloud, but I certainly don’t see them doing a whole lot of other investment in law firm technology.

(00:30:00)

Debbie Foster: I see exactly the opposite. I think I’ve had more people in the last couple of months talk to me about budget numbers for 2023 and more people signing off on proposals in December this year than I have seen before. So, I think there’s stuff happening.

Dennis Kennedy: And I think I call it glacier renewing cold in recognition of climate change. So, I think there are some spots, and I think Debbie is definitely in a space where you see some of that commitment and I also think you’re going to see some innovators and some others. But I think for the most part, you’re going to see law firms, especially in some law departments as well, look at the possibility of recession and see the tech budget as a place where they can get savings. So, I would actually expect to see some decreases, although some people might lie about those decreases and say that they are holding the same or bumping slightly.

Tom Mighell: And the script says that I won again and that’s hot, but based on this last answer, I’m going to say, you know what, I did not win this one, so I’m going to — let’s move on and not dwell on that. So, it’s time for the big finish. We’re going to answer six questions in 60 seconds. Debbie, number one for you. What’s your best tech decision of 2022?

Debbie Foster: I bought a new Apple Watch and I am a huge fan. I had one before, I didn’t wear it for a couple of years. I bought a new one and, big fan. Oh, Dennis, what’s your favorite new tech tool? Sorry.

Dennis Kennedy: It’s got to be notion again or as Dev and I enthused about awhile back, Camlin Deli, which is so helpful for me on setting Zoom appointments. Tom, best new Google or Microsoft product or service?

Tom Mighell:  Well, so I’m going to say with qualifications, I’m going to say my Google Pixel Watch is amazing because I finally now have a watch that connects to my phone. It’s a one data release, so it’s got a lot of improvements. It’s no Apple Watch, but it connects. It does what I need to do what it needs to do, and I’m looking forward to the new iterations of it. Alternatively, I will say I like the fact that I no longer have to say, “Hey, Google” to my — although it’s just answered me right now. I no longer have to say it if I don’t want to. I can speak to it normally like a regular human being which is more than I can say for our friends at Amazon and Siri. Debbie, what tech do you most want your law firms to explore in 2023?

Debbie Foster: I’m going to go with automation, workflow, getting some systems in place, because I do think another thing that we’ve read about forever about the billable hour dying, I think that there’s more and more conversation around how value pricing can happen in law firms, and I think that can’t happen without workflow and automation. And I think that’s where I want our clients to be looking in 2023. Dennis, best new tech you saw in 2022 that people will be talking about in 2023 and 2024?

Dennis Kennedy: I think this has to be generative AI again, but in targeted used cases. So, I think this, think small, think practical, don’t say, is this going to replace the lawyer, but say, what could this do? Can I generate summaries? Can I take a 1200-word draft and turn it into 500 words? Can I create slides for my PowerPoint with new graphic images? That’s what I think is going to happen. And then gradually, we’ll see this buildout into things like document generation and legal document generation for commodity documents. So, the world is exciting there. And Tom, your best tip overall for 2023?

Tom Mighell: So you’re wanting me to do my best tip for a year that hasn’t even started yet, for the whole year?

Dennis Kennedy: Yes.

Tom Mighell: No.

Dennis Kennedy: Because you’re that good.

Tom Mighell: I’m going to cop out. I’m going to say look. Buy our book, ‘Lawyer’s Guided Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Work from Home Edition’. That tip will last you the whole year, and listen to our podcast. We have some new and interesting ideas for the show coming up in 2023, so stick around.

Dennis Kennedy: So, that was 2022. A year that in some ways felt like a bit of a lull, but upon reflection, saw a lot of movement under the surface. We’re all cautiously ready to move on to 2023 because we always have to be cautious these years, it seems like, with a bunch of great new topics and ideas to share with you. Thank you, Debbie, for joining us. Debbie, will you tell people how best to reach you?

Debbie Foster: Absolutely, and thanks for having me. I think the best way is probably LinkedIn. linkedin.com/debbiefoster. You can search for me there, connect, send me a message. We’d love to hear from you.

Dennis Kennedy: And Happy New Year to all.

Tom Mighell: And so that wraps it up for this final edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report for 2022. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

(00:35:00)

You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Networks page for the show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes on the Legal Talk Network site where you can find archives of all of our previous shows or in your favorite podcast listening app. If you’d like to get in touch with us, reach out to us on LinkedIn. Used to say Twitter, I’m not saying that anymore, or leave us a voicemail. We still love to get your voicemails to have questions during our B-segment. That phone 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 write us an Apple podcast and we’ll see you next time for another episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Male: 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 of the week for another edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report only on the Legal Talk Network.

Continue Reading