Dennis & Tom’s 2023 Tech Resolutions

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 330 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 had our friend Debbie Foster join us for a look back at legal technology in 2022. It was a great show, highly recommended. Now, we look to 2023 from our personal perspectives. Now, we aren’t really big believers of predictions on the show especially after the unpredictability of well, the last several years or maybe even more than that. But we do have instead an annual tradition of sharing our own personal technology resolutions for each year. It is that time of year, again. TOM, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, as an addition of the Kennedy-Mighell report, we will indeed be sharing our 2023 technology resolutions. In a second segment, we’ll talk about our 2023 resolutions for the podcast itself. Spoiler alert, we plan to continue the podcast and we’ve got some big new goals on the radar. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots at one tip website or observation that you can start to use a second that this podcast is over.

But first up, New Year’s technology resolutions a long-time tradition on this podcast. Our premise of this topic is that anyone can and will make predictions. You probably at the end of the year saw lots of predictions, all the legal tech predictions and other technology predictions for 2023, lots and lots of them. What we don’t see are a lot of people publicly sharing their own technology resolutions each year. We, on the other hand, have a proud tradition of boldly sharing our annual personal technology resolutions, whether we succeed in them or not, and I guess we’ll get to that shortly.

We both liked the idea of resolutions because they give you a place to get started as the new year starts. But if you don’t happen to follow through on all of them, it’s also not the end of the world. Dennis wrote in the script that he likes to avoid telling how well he did on last year’s resolutions, but that’s where I want to start. But that’s not actually true because Dennis really likes to tell how he does on resolutions and I do not. So, Dennis, we’re going to start with you. What did you resolve to do in 2022 and how well did you do?

Dennis Kennedy: So, I had three things last year, Tom. First, the second brain, and the next version of that, and to become really fluent with Notion which is the platform I used to put my second brain on. Second was to do more with web three and document automation. I call this this goal back to the future. And the third was to experiment with short video and some other creative outlets than the traditional ones I use. And I also had a small goal to track down and eliminate some of my tech noises. Now, I will say that for me, at least, we’re still in a pandemic and that had an impact on, you know, what I was able to accomplish in some ways. But I wasn’t perfect but I give myself an A for second brain and solid Bs the other. How about you, Tom?

Tom Mighell: So I’m going to give myself a pretty much an F on every single thing and I think that part of the message that I want to talk about today is to come back to what I said earlier which is that because these are resolutions, you have to give yourself permission to fail if that doesn’t happen. And what happened this year was work got involved and other parts of my life got involved and I just didn’t have the time to take on these types of things which do take time out of the normal day and work. This was a particularly busy work year. So, I literally got none of this done. The three that I had from last year was I duplicated Dennis’ second brain goal which is to make progress on that. Didn’t make any progress. I wanted to learn more and get involved more with the metaverse. Didn’t do that either. I’m not too sad about that because I don’t really see that it made the kind of leaps and bounds yet that we’re expecting. So, I’m not feeling too terribly behind in that area. Where I do have genuine regret is that I wasn’t able to restart the newsletter. I wanted to do that.

(00:05:00)

I wanted to be posting to blogs. I wanted to be more active on social media.  I wanted to be out there more consuming content and talking about things and I just haven’t been able to. I just have not had the time which really is to me a major issue when you try to set resolutions is part of setting those goals means that they have to be realistic and I think that having the time to do them is part of that judgment that you have to make when deciding whether or not they’re realistic goals or not.

Dennis Kennedy: And I think the other thing about goals is giving yourself credit for some things that you don’t really set as a goal or resolution. So, Tom, you were talking about newsletter and blog posts and it’s not even on your list or my list that we do a podcast every two weeks for the full year and we do great new content and new topics all the time.

Tom Mighell: And we published a book. So—

Dennis Kennedy: And we published a book. We don’t give ourselves any credit for that even though we know that a lot of people had been doing a podcast or keeping their podcast alive is resolution and tons of podcasts fall by the wayside and there were very few that have been around as long as ours have. But you’re right. Failure is important and part of what my thinking has started to change over the last couple years is that I really am developing an experimental mindset. So, failure is one piece of that. I don’t expect that everything that I do, I know what’s going to happen and it’s going to work exactly as I envisioned. Things change. Circumstances change. What happens when what I hit reality will change those goals and 2022 again demonstrated the importance of experimentation, adjustments, pivots, and portfolios. And I saw some of the things I wanted to do evolve and I would tell you and I’ve said on other episodes, using Calendly to have people schedule Zoom appointments with me was one by far, one of my biggest tech winds of 2022, and it wasn’t even on my radar at the beginning of the year, except to the extent where I said there are some things in technology that’re really annoying to me and one of them is the exchange of emails to find the time that works for meetings and Calendly solved that. So, that sort of what I saw this year in changing my approach. But Tom, what are some of the other things that you’ve learned or maybe we’ve learned over the years on doing these technology resolutions?

Tom Mighell: Well, I mean, I think that when we do the resolutions, we want to make sure that they follow kind of what we’ve talked about on past podcasts is the smart goals method and making sure that they meet those criteria which are there are specific measurable achievable relevant time-bound. I think that if I’m looking in retrospect, what I really meant by saying realistic, I really meant achievable in terms of the smart goal’s acronym. But we think that that when you’re looking at goals like this, they really need to meet criteria like this. I think the one adjustment I am going to be making is not really along the lines of experimental but more in terms of – and I don’t really think of it so much as adjustments and pivots, but I’m going to be setting some goals but then also understanding what are small victories along the way to achieving those goals. What can I do that I will be making progress toward it where maybe I don’t get all the way to the goal like I expect, but that I get somewhere that I start working on it, that I do something and then I define what success looks like during part of that rather than focusing on the prize, figure out, okay, what does a B look like or what does a C look like here? What can I do to get some of it done to where I’m making progress, but maybe my time schedule or other commitments don’t allow me to get to that A level of accomplishment that I expected, and I think that’s kind of the adjustment I plan to make this year so that I don’t feel like a total failure by the end of the year.

Dennis Kennedy: I think that’s great and I’ve been thinking more in terms of process and then I’ve used this term before on the podcast, of chunking projects into tasks and saying what’s actually doable and that if you say what I’m going to do is I’m going to put out a weekly newsletter. I mean, it starts with something that’s a little bit different than saying do 52 newsletters and get them out. It’s, there are some first steps and it’s not just like published newsletters.

(00:10:01)

It’s broken down into a number of components and you can set a goal that can be pretty ambitious.  I’m going to read 52 books in 52 weeks in a year and I can do that.  So last year I said, “oh, I’ll just do the same thing.  I’ll do 52 blog posts in 52 weeks” and that is actually really difficult.  But I think the more I break things down into these small chunks, next step in Smart Brain is going through part one of a Notion course to learn these things and then I get that sort of momentum and break it down into smaller pieces.  I don’t know whether that also appeals to you, Tom, or as part of your thinking for this year.

Tom Mighell: I’d rather probably say instead of saying I’ll get started on writing a newsletter, I’d rather be able to come back to the end of the year and say, I couldn’t do a newsletter every week, but I did a newsletter for half a year or, I did a newsletter for a quarter of the year, or I got some content on a regular basis.  That’s the type of thing that would make me feel like I had gotten to the point where I had made some accomplishment towards something.  Although that really isn’t part of my goals for next year.  So I probably shouldn’t mention that it’s what I’m thinking about doing for next year anyway.  But I think small steps and defining sub victories of the goal and resolution I think is going to be important for me.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah and I would just add to that. When I chunk things down, I often find what’s actually the blacker for piece.  So it could be that you say, oh, I want to start a newsletter or a podcast or a blog or whatever, and you think about all these things and it turns out it’s like some aspect of hosting or maybe it’s the name of the blog that you’re not sure about.  And if you identify what that blocker is, then you can address that and that can make a lot of things happen.  So Tom, I use a three-part approach and we’ve talked about it before when it comes to technology for a new year.  The first part is, is there a specific technology pain point that I’d like to alleviate or remove?  Second, is there a new technology, a new technology skill, or a more advanced use of a technology that I’d like to learn?  And third, is there something I can do to advance my career to accomplish more with technology, improve processes or enhance client service, or in my case, enhance what I do in teaching students? Tom, I don’t know whether I’ve gradually gotten you over to this theme or you use the theme to organize, but let me ask you that and then you can jump in with your resolution one.

Tom Mighell: Well, in the past I have kind of used that theme.  But this year I’m throwing it completely out the window because if I’m not going to achieve my resolutions, I might as well just really, I’m not even thinking about it’s too hard to divide the things I want to do into categories for me.  I know the things that I would like to do and they don’t really fit a theme.  So I’m doing the things I want to do and that’s how it’s going to be. I think that actually you’re going first on this one and I’m going first after this. Okay, so I’m returning to the Second Brain. I’m building on the successes I’ve had and I see where I want to go next with the Second Brain and upping my Notion game.  So I’ve taken a couple of courses.  I build out big sections of the Second Brain and I have a list of about five or six areas that I want to go next. Some things are like tagging, making notes accessible. Well, first of all, taking notes and then making them accessible is something I return to. Also, Notion has built in a little bit of the current generative AI type of tool and I want to use that to sort of automatically create tagging.  So that’s the part in my reference and notes section of Second Brain that needs the most work. I’m looking to experiment with the built in AI tools to see how far it will take me on tagging.  As I tell people, even if they gave me like 50, 60, 80% of good enough on tagging, that’s way better than the 0% I’m doing now. And so my approach is going to be to revisit the courses I took, look for more education on that and then I have mapped out of the things that I want to work on over the year. I’ve set aside a time which I think is going to be Saturday mornings where I’ll spend an hour, which is some people call it like a power hour type of approach, but where I have an hour of this just dedicated to updating the Second Brain and making sure it’s working the way that I want.

(00:15:00)

Dennis Kennedy: So my first one is no surprise, very similar. I need to come back to Notion. We spent a whole year talking about our Second Brains and it would not do well if I just abandoned it. I don’t plan to abandon it. I have been contributing to it from a reference standpoint. I’ve been adding books and articles and all sorts of things to it. So there it is a huge database that is in desperate need of organization. I’ve got the structure set up, it’s ready to go. I’ve got it to a point where tagging for me is very simple and dividing it up into areas is very easy. What I’d like to do better is use Notion as a notetaking tool. I’m not taking notes within Notion. I guess part of my problem is that I don’t really take notes ever. I’m not a note taker. I will read things, and I will highlight notes and I might make a note of something that I see in an article, but I’m not really a note taker. So I’m trying to decide, is that even something I want to incorporate into Notion? I am also learning how, from maybe less of a Second Brain standpoint. I have built out a rather large travel database within Notion that I use to take vacations. I use it to keep track of restaurants all around the world that if I happen to be traveling, I can go to if I want to see them. I’m keeping track of that. I want to make that more powerful. I want to kind of get that solidified. And so I’m looking forward to working more on that, especially as I’m getting ready for a big vacation over the summer. All right, we’ve got a lot more resolutions coming, but before we get to them, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors.

[Music]

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Dennis Kennedy: And we are back. Tom, what’s your second resolution?

Tom Mighell: So my second resolution is that I need to finally do what I want to do and make some small steps with improving audio and video towards a means of making recordings whether that’s for YouTube, whether that’s for TikTok, whether that’s for a community. I don’t know what that’s for yet. I haven’t gotten that far. I purchased a very nice shotgun microphone a number of years ago, and I haven’t made it work. My good friends with Legal Talk Network promised that they will be able to help me get that configured so it works well, and it’s something that will do professional video and audio recording. So I’m looking forward to doing that. I want to experiment with whether I get a DSLR camera to up my video game or do something else. But watching those who do video, it really requires a redesign of my office. The way that my office is right now doesn’t lend itself to recording video. I’m not in a position where I can record and it will, I guess it won’t pass the roomrater.com or the room rater Twitter account. I won’t get a very good rating on my background. So I kind of want to look at what my room redesign is. I might want to move my desk over to another side so that I’ve got a little bit more room, make it more friendly, so that if I do record videos. It looks more pleasing, it’s more professional. Those are the things that I’m going to get started on this year, is to make a conscious effort to get everything set up to be able to record some level of content in the future. Dennis, your number two.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. It’s interesting what you said there, Tom, because it relates to my notion of chunking projects, because the way you went through what you needed to do, it’s clear that it’s less about audio and video and the blacker is the room design, because once you get the room design, I think all the rest will flow. So it’s just kind of interesting when you start talking about these things and breaking into their components, what might surface for you. But my second one is, it’s kind of interesting how much things have kind of exploded in this space, even in the few days since I wrote this down in the script. But I have practical emphasis on practical, practical, practical applications of generative AI. So there’s a lot happening now.

(00:19:59)

I’m sort of waiting to dive in until we get the next generation of GPT, which is GPT-4, which I think it’s coming in a couple of months but there are some things that I want to do to experiment with these sort of small, practical uses of generative AI and I’m using them to generate images for slides that are contextually appropriate for what I want to do to illustrate points, and that’s fascinating.  I’m using it to help me visualize some ideas.  I want to use the AI that’s going to be built into Notion in ways that they’re going to build that out and to use it for tagging.  I like using it for summaries and really simple, simple things.

I think that it’s easy for people to look at Chat GPT these days and say, “Oh, it’s going to do all these amazing things and it’s going to take the place of humans, and it’s going to write whole novels, and it’s going to do all this sort of stuff,” and I think the state is actually at – is that it can do some really cool, simple things that are of a first draft type of nature or something that you could work with.  So, really, the success you will have with it is the sort of hybridization of human plus AI with the emphasis on the human part of it for now.  Maybe that will change a little bit in the next generation, but I think that the practical, small applications will be what, and to have some things to show for that that are really helping me, will be my second resolution.

Tom Mighell: All right.  My final resolution that we’ll talk about is for the past couple of years I have been saving to a bookmark folder what is now a large number of collaboration tools, other tools, other websites that I’ve labeled in the folder called “software to test” and what I did was, the intention was, I wanted to come back and I wanted to take a look at it with the idea that maybe I could then test it out and then have some level of experience or review, or feedback, for you or for the people who read the blog, or for people who read the newsletter, or people who watch our YouTube channel.  So, I could say, “Here are some of the tools that you might think about and here’s how they work.”  I’ve literally never had time to do that and I want to finally start taking a look and doing more of a deep dive into these tools.

As of today, I have a total of 123 tools that are in that folder.  That’s a whole lot of things to test and a whole lot of things to think about.  So, I got my work cut out for me but I’ve sort of been excited about getting started with this, and I want to dive in and take a look at what some of the tools are, are some of these, you know, to a certain extent collaboration tools that are dime a dozen.  People come out with new collaboration tools all the time and it turns out that nobody’s really using them, that there’s somebody who just, you know, made a nice-looking web front page but when you dive in and try to actually take a look at it, it’s really not a very good tool.

I fully expect that when I dive into some of these 123 tools, some of them will have gone away entirely because that’s kind of the nature of some of these sites and some of these tools, but some of them will be good, some of them will have made headway, some of them will be genuinely useful, and I want to try to look at them and say, “Are any these useful collaboration tools.”  You know we talked about lots of tools in the ‘Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, Work From Home Edition’ but we don’t go into detail, we don’t have time to go into detail.  And so, this is kind of my effort to do that to say, “All right, we’re recommending some of these tools.  Here’s how they really work,” or, “Do they really work at all?  Are they really worth your time looking at?”  And so, that’s kind of where I want to go and that to me feels like if we’re talking about chunking, that Dennis is mentioning, I feel like that’s kind of one of the blockers to getting me to developing more content is actually to getting in and looking at these tools and learning about them.  So, I think that’s where I’m going to be headed this year, is to be learning more about some of the tools and bringing that to you all and others, whatever audiences I decide I want to bring them to.  Dennis?

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah.  So, my last one I’ve kind of labeled as post-Twitter approaches, and so to me there’s two pieces of social media and one is consumption and one is production, and with the sort of brouhaha at Twitter and over Twitter these days, I’m taking both sides of it.  Although I love Dave Winer’s notion of the river of news for stuff just kind of comes in and you dip in as the stuff flows by you, I do think I’ve reached a point where I want to be intentional about news and in social media consumption.  And that may have me go back to some aggregator sites, you know, like Wall Street Journal or Financial Times side of my Yahoo page, some of these things that will help me where I can say I can just take a look at things really quickly, catch up on the news, and that kind of follow it down, you know, for and lose an hour here or an hour and a half there.  So, that’s the consumption side.

(00:25:22)

On the production side, I’m looking at the audience and what I want to accomplish and I sort of feel that we’re in this movement from communication and wide-scale communication to more narrow community-building, and to me that’s as mighty networks, and that is definitely going to be a direction that I’m going to say, “Can I do something for a much smaller community,” and sort of to the world at large maybe do something else.  And then, “Can I automate–,” and automate is going to be a funny word here but, “Can I automate some of what I do?”

So, one of my Chat GPT type of projects, what I love to do is, because I’ve heard somebody else do this as an author, is to train the AI on my innovation book and then create a simple chat bot where people could ask me questions and then the chat bot would answer in my voice with material from the book.  And I think that would be a totally cool experiment to do.  It would kind of fit where I’m going with social media.

The other thing we usually do, Tom, is we usually wrap up with a couple of small resolutions, and I think that we’ve both found that sometimes it’s in that small resolution that we do on this that it actually turns out to be something that actually becomes really helpful over the course of the year.  So, do you anything on the small side this year?

Tom Mighell: Well, I would say that my small resolution this year would be to kind of get control again of my content consumption workflow.  This is slightly related to your post-Twitter approaches, making the assumption that Twitter will not be the same place that I would normally go to consume content.  I want to think about where the best place is to do that, and to be honest, where I’m sort of hoping to put it all into, and I’ve not been able to say this in a while, is whether or not I want to actually try using the Readwise reader as my content consumption.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, you may have heard that we’ve mentioned Readwise on the podcast before as a tool for highlighting articles and putting those highlights and those notes into your Notion or into other places.  Well, they’ve recently developed, and it’s now in a public beta which means it’s available to anybody, a reader app where it’s very ambitious, which means it may not get everything just right or very well, but I’m intrigued where, one, it’s got all the articles you want to read.  You highlight those articles, they go right into Notion automatically.  It has an RSS reader so you can upload all of your feeds and read all of your RSS feeds.  You can upload what – it actually plays into how I consume Twitter right now because I’ve got a – I use a Twitter list that I’ve created rather than follow or read all of my followers or the people that I’m following, and all you do is subscribe to the list in Readwise and you could follow your tweets in there as well.

I am very intrigued about the idea of being able to consume everything from within one app.  It’s interesting to me.  I don’t know if it’s going to work out.  The real downside to the RSS reader is it’s lacking one or two features that to me are must-haves, that Feedly does really well.  We still use Feedly to a certain extent for my RSS, and this still hasn’t fixed those issues.  So, I think my goal is to get to a point – I feel like I’ve been out of the loop, I’ve missed stories.  I’ve missed keeping control of what content I’m getting and I want to get back control of that, and I’m hoping to be able to do that with this tool or in combination with a couple of others.  Dennis, what about you?

Dennis Kennedy:  So, my small one is kind of just taking a Twist on how I usually think about things.  So, I usually think of myself as a software and internet person rather than a gadget and hardware person.  So, I decided to challenge myself a little bit, and partially just from looking what’s around me, to say, “Maybe I can make 2023 a hardware year.”  So, I’m looking at an Apple Pencil 2 that I really wanted, and I haven’t really played with that much and I can see how it might help me in my workflows, in my work streams.

(00:29:56)

And then, I also have this little – and I know you have this too, Tom.  This Elgato Stream Deck, which allows me to have this little board that would allow – you know, where I can automate certain things like in connection with the podcast, and other things.  I just think I just want to reserve some time to play with both those things in terms of hardware.  Then also in my second brain where I had notes to myself, I had some things that I flagged as go-back-to, and/or I actually called return-to.  And there’s this note in there that just says “appropriate tech” and that’s all I said.  And I’m not sure what it meant, but I actually think there’s something cool there.  And so I think that one of the things as I think about hardware is that I want to use that as a frame to say like, “Well, what is appropriate tech and where might that lead me?”  And then as always, Tom, we like to assess each other’s chances, so I let you assess my chances first on achieving my resolutions.

Tom Mighell: To be quite honest, I think this is the first time we’ve done this, Dennis.  I’m not sure we’ve done this before.  But if I were to assess your chances, given what I know about the time you have available to do that sort of thing and your past experience, I think that you will probably succeed a great deal in what you are hoping to accomplish.

Dennis Kennedy: And I think that once you kind of look at what you’re doing and kind of chunk it a little bit, I actually think that you’re going to be solidly in the B plus A minus range for this year.  And we’ll have to check out that prediction next year and we hope our listeners – to our listeners, we like this process.  We think it’s a useful frame for the year and a good way to think about technologies.  We encourage you to try it and to let us know how it works for you.  Tom, you want to wrap up the segment.

Tom Mighell: I don’t have anything to wrap up other than to say Dennis that’s a very optimistic prediction on your part about me, but I thank you for it.  And in the meantime, we’ll be back in just a minute to talk about other resolutions that we have.  But before we do that, let’s take another quick break for a message from our sponsors.  And now let’s get back to the Kennedy-Mighell Report.  I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy.  We also wanted to create some resolutions for the show itself.  Tom, we literally could repurpose our podcast goals from last year, and we didn’t do so well.  So let’s start with a fresh slate and I’ll throw out a few starter ideas and Tom will react, and add to the list.  And then we can narrow down like a top two or three as our actual podcasts resolutions.  So, Tom, are you willing to try that?

Tom Mighell: Yeah, go ahead.

Dennis Kennedy: Okay, so we already did a set of shows that I really liked based on our collaboration tools book and I like to do more of that.  I told Tom before that I finally have an idea for an interview series that works for me.  I’m sort of thinking it’s working titles called New Voices and I would like to actually say every other show where we are going to do interviews.  I think we have our usual goal of audience questions in the big segment.  We’ve talked about doing it of Kennedy-Mighell Report community.  And then the other thing I’d like to do that we’ve been doing in the past year or two is to push that envelope even further.  I think this podcast is the first to talk about cutting edge tech as it applies to the legal profession and we cut through the hype and try to tell you what we think practically is going to be important and how you might use it.  And I would like to really become even better known for that approach.  Tom, what might be on your list?

Tom Mighell: Well, I want to actually respond to what you suggested, which is I think that the collaboration tools topics, I think that you know, talking about cutting edge tech and pushing that further, I think those are things we are probably naturally going to do.  I think that those are things that are going to happen just as a natural course of this podcast.  What I’d really like to focus on, and listeners are no stranger to me saying this is, we need more guests on this show, and I’ve been pushing for this for many years.  And so I’m excited, we have some discussion to do about whether new voices ends up being it because some of the people that we have in mind, I would say are not necessarily new voices, but they’re good voices.  And so, we’ll come up with some ideas for how to frame that.  But we will definitely be bringing voices other than ours to the podcast.  I am very much intrigued by the idea of a community, a discord or something like that.  I’m not sure what the critical mass would be for that.  I’m not sure whether there’s enough of an audience to do something like that, but I like the idea of that kind of community.  That’s something that Dennis is already working on, on his own Mighty Networks.  I don’t have a specific community set up, but I am intrigued with it so far.

(00:35:01)

We’re thinking about resolutions for the podcast, goals that we have that I would say stretches or things that we haven’t done before.  I am looking forward to more interviews and finding ways to extend our community.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I think those are right and I think we will do this.  But I like what we did also – I mean we’re going to do the cutting edge.  You’re right, Tom that doesn’t even need to be a resolution.  But I think that I like what we’ve done over the past couple years with the second brain project and the collaboration tool series of focusing on some practical hands on topics and kind of sharing with our listeners what we do.  And so, it could be that some of the things that come out of our resolutions, we might turn into a series like that.  So I would add that probably as the third one.  And then I do have this question here, that I think is worth asking in 2023, which is, we’ve had the tagline for since the beginning.  So that’s like 2006-ish, that we talked about legal technology within Internet Focus.  I guess that I have kind of like to explore to share kind of what that means in 2023 and beyond.  So that’s the other thing I would had.  So now it’s time for a parting shots at One Tip website or observation, you can use the second to this podcast.  Tom take it away.

Tom Mighell: So I think I probably mentioned this on the podcast before, but I’m going to mention it again, because I had another good experience with them. My go-to backpack company is Peak Design.  The bags that they originally designed, were made for photographers, they had these side zippers that made it very simple to open it up and pull out lenses and things and they had dividers within them.  But they’ve really moved to just a regular consumer, someone who’s not necessarily a photographer.  And I realized that the backpack that I have super high quality, you know, indestructible not going anywhere soon, completely waterproof, just a brilliant backpack.  But it’s small for trips where I need a little bit more than what I’ve got in my carry on.  So I’ve got stuff in the carry on, I’ve got a little bit extra, like maybe an extra pair of shoes, or so another day’s worth of clothes that I couldn’t fit in the suitcase.  And so I went and I bought another one of the backpacks, it’s a little bit bigger, and it’s even better.  I love it to death, I took it on a recent trip to New York, it worked fantastically.  So if you are in the market for a new backpack, or any device because I also bought a gear bag for it to put all of my cords and adapters and things like that.  I really love it.  The quality of the materials is really great.  I would take a serious look at Peak Design.

Dennis Kennedy: I sometimes wonder if tech people at heart are really backpack and bag people when you actually get down to what they’re all about.  But yeah, I looked at the site, there’s some cool stuff there.  I have one thing that I ran into that I found really useful once again, and then just a couple of plugs for some things I’ll be doing.  So I got a new keyboard and immediately I accidentally turned on the caps lock, which surprised me because I always turn off the caps lock on any keyboard I have.  And I don’t know what it is, but that simple thing of going into the settings and turning off the caps lock so it doesn’t do anything, it just has really relieved my technology tensions, and I think it’s a really useful tip, if you find that you’ve typed something and accidentally had the caps lock on.  Then I want to kind of plug three things I’m doing just tell people to take a look at.  So watch what I’m doing and what we’re doing at the Michigan State Center for Law, Technology & Innovation, there’s some cool things planned for this year.  I created something new called the Law Department Innovation Library, which is not surprisingly going to do exactly what it sounds like and there will probably be a community – I mean, there will be a community associated with that on Mighty Networks.  And then I’ve been so happy with this thing called Personal Quarterly Offsites that I created that I don’t really want to write another book this year.  But I’m toying with the idea of doing an audio/video book version of my thoughts and my approaches to Personal Quarterly Offsites.  So those are my parting shots and take a look at them and always happy to hear feedback.

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 notes for this episode on Legal Talk Network Show for our podcast.  If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the show on iTunes, or on the Legal Talk Network site where you can find archives of all of our previous episodes along with transcripts.

(00:40:06)

If you’d like to get in touch with us, remember, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn, we’re on Twitter, or we love to get voicemails from you.  We’d love to do a voicemail feature a voicemail from you 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 liked what you heard today, please rate us on Apple podcasts 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 Dennison and Tom’s book, ‘A 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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