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: | February 24, 2023 |
Podcast: | Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Category: | Legal Technology , News & Current Events |
With ChatGPT splashing across headlines pretty much everywhere, what’s left for us to know about this new and almost ridiculously hot tech? Dennis and Tom give their two cents on all the buzz that is ChatGPT, discussing thoughts on its many exciting and (possibly) concerning capabilities and its potential within the legal world.
Later, have you ever felt like no one bothers to read your emails? The guys offer up their strategies for drafting quick, efficient, and attention-grabbing communications.
As always, stay tuned for the parting shots, that one tip, website, or observation 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 answers to your most burning tech questions.
A Segment: ChatGPT: What Else is Left to Say?
B Segment: How To Draft Emails People will Read
Parting Shots:
[Music]
Intro: 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 333 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 focused on Tom’s area of expertise, information governance, and how important it is for the legal profession to get up to speed in this area. In this episode, we decided to jump in with the crowd and just admit that it is now impossible not to talk about what ChatGPT and generative AI can do. So, we thought it might be a good time to update some of what we discussed about this topic over the last few months because a lot has been happening even in the last few weeks or even the last few days. How can you sift through the news and hype and determine what’s real? Tom, what’s on our agenda for this episode?
Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will indeed be returning to the topic of Generative AI and more specifically to ChatGPT which has been making a lot of headlines lately and which, by the way, we will be using or maybe more likely GPT-4 to create a chatbot based on our collaboration tools and technologies book that’s going to answer questions about collaboration tools just like you are talking to us. In our second segment, we’ll talk about whether anybody reads emails or anything else for that matter and what you can do about it to get a response or get people to read them and as usual finish up with our parting shots that one tip website and observation, you can start to use a second that this podcast is over. But first up, we wanted to revisit what is clearly the hottest topic in tech today and that is ChatGPT and by relationship to that Generative AI. We first did an episode on Generative AI back in November and then just one episode later, Chat GPT was introduced. Since then, so much has happened, just so, so much. It’s in the news every day. So, we wanted to catch up on it. See if there’s anything there worth talking about during a podcast. Dennis, what do you think we can add to this ChatGPT conversation?
Dennis Kennedy: I think, first of all, we should say that we’re pretty sure that even though we did a podcast before it was introduced that probably was not the cause of the ChaTGPT explosion. So, I think we have a fair amount to add to the conversation based on what we’ve seen lately and some specific examples as well. But at first, I want to acknowledge something that did happen earlier this week. So, I think many listeners know I’m now the director of this Center for Law Technology and Innovation at Michigan State and you probably are very aware of a mass shooting incident that happened on campus, and I just want to kind of take the time to acknowledge that happened and asked people, you know, to keep the MSU community in mind. It’s been a difficult time and I’m sure it will continue to be difficult. And so, I just want to stop and say that.
And then for ChatGPT, we had started a legal design challenge for the 2L students at Michigan State, and the topic was and is, how could we use ChatGPT to enhance access to justice? And we actually kicked off that contest and the finals, we’re going to push back by a week or so. So, we are starting to explore that in a very practical way and an experimental way, and I also get the chance to talk with my MSU class in AI and law about ChatGPT almost in every class this semester. So, we’ve started to really look at some of the things that are happening and we had a great conversation earlier about what students thought about what kind of controls that educators should put on the use of ChatGPT, and it was super thoughtful conversation and it just reminded me that, sometimes, people in charge need to ask the people who are involve. So, educators probably should ask students what they think because their answers are very thoughtful —
(00:05:00)
— and not just because I think they reflected Tom, somewhat you and I think about ChatGPT. It is a tool. With this, it is going to be used in a lot of ways and it’s best to learn it and see what it can be used best for and not avoid it and figure out how to keep people from using it.
Tom Mighell: Well, yeah, I mean, that’s been I would say an unfortunate consequence but probably not an unusual consequence. I mean, when a new technology comes out that has potential for misuse, there will always — although, I sense these days I feel like we’re rushing towards that more frequently than we used to, but there is a rush to control it, to ban it, to do something with it and there are probably some good intentions behind what’s going on and we certainly don’t want to have ChatGPT writing papers and dissertations and things like that even if it could do a good job in doing that, but I think that we need to be more thoughtful about it. It’s good to see that your classmates, your students are being thoughtful like that and thinking about that, not in such a way that is either one way, let’s get rid of it or another way, we should be jumping in with both feet ready to just do whatever we want to with this, no limits to the things that can be done with it.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. So, I think it’s a really interesting period of experimentation where people really pushing things forward and pushing the other people working on AI, Microsoft and Google, especially to move faster than they think they planned and I think we’ve seen a lot of advances in just in a couple of months. I mean, I know that people say that as an app in a broader sense, ChatGPT has been adopted faster than any other application in history that might or might not be true, but that’s what people are saying. And so, I like the fact that we’re moving in. We are digging into it and, Tom, I think one of my fondest hopes is that we, I know, but hopefully others will stop resorting to the already tired trope of having ChatGPT write our script or articles and then complaining it that it doesn’t do it as perfectly as we can.
Tom Mighell: I have to say I was listening to some people talk about their test with ChatGPT and one podcaster actually went all in on an all artificial intelligence podcast where he actually had ChatGPT write the script for the podcast and then he used and we’ve talked about it on this podcast before. He used the tool called Descript which will basically create your voice. You can have it do your voice and he had Descript read the podcast script completed by ChatGPT and he said, “You know, it did an okay job,” but he said the one thing that the voice lacked and the words lacked were they lacked passion. It’s that they didn’t have the flare. They didn’t have the emotion. It wasn’t that it was totally in monotone, but it was also — it just didn’t really have that oomph that a human is still giving to it. So, I think you’re right is that Descript still can’t do it as perfectly as we can do it. It can’t do it as well because it’s just not a human doing it.
Dennis Kennedy: And we’re the judges of how well it’s doing.
Tom Mighell: That’s right.
Dennis Kennedy: So, we always win. So, to reference another earlier podcast of ours, Tom, I think that in terms of the classic Gartner Hype Cycle, I would say that ChatGPT might be the highest heights of the hype cycle that I’ve ever seen, and I wonder if the trough of disappointment will be as low as we ever see because we’re sorry starting I think on that downward path where people are going to like, wait, this isn’t perfection. This is going to do all these things. It’s just sort of like maybe first- or second-generation approach and it does small things really well, but it’s not making all the changes that we expected.
Tom Mighell: I thought frankly that the meteoric rise of Web3 and NFTs, especially NFTs on the hype cycle. I thought that was something to see. Do you ever hear about that anymore? I mean, I don’t hear about it hardly at all maybe because crypto which is tied to all of it is really not in favor that much anymore, but I frankly think the ChatGPT has beat the heck out of NFTs for heiping exposure. I think that there’s more about that. I frankly think that ChatGPT has more staying power. I’m predicting that in the long run it will be a tool worth using, —
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— but I think that right now the hype is largely blown a little more out of proportion because of like you say what we think we can do with it, not with what actually is possible in a realistic way to do it. When people look at the difference between their hopes and reality, there is a little bit of disappointment there but that doesn’t mean it’s not still a good tool that can’t be used for great things. We just need to get to that phase of settling down and really getting into using it.
Dennis Kennedy: Well, I think there’s a sort of magical part of ChatGPT that people really like. And so, people don’t totally understand what it is, what it does, how it works. We give it human qualities. When we describe it are just, anyway not just but a lot of us are just starting to question like, how it was put together, how it’s being sold, how it might be used and not used and some of the problems that could inherent, ethical and otherwise, and because there’s so much happening that’s unplanned and unrestrained and experimentation that I think that surprised Google and Microsoft who I think had really constrained an internal experimentation and are now kind of dumping what they’re doing out into the world. I think with very, very uneven success.
Tom Mighell: Well, so, I mean, I frankly think that Microsoft’s offering looks a lot more interesting because they’re really working directly with open AI. They’re directly integrating GPT-3 into Bing and into Edge. Frankly, Bing is kind of the moline search engine. It’s kind of the one that people don’t really go to. And now, I’ve seen lots of articles saying, could Bing actually be good again and I think the answer is maybe. I mean, it could be. I mean, we’ve complained on this podcast or at least maybe Dennis has complained. I have a complain about how bad Google is getting. Maybe, this is something that pushes more people towards Bing. I mean, I think that the early results are not bad. For a brand-new tool, it’s not something that’s totally disappointing. I think it’s pretty interesting. You have to register to join the beta test. So, if you’re interested, you can get on the waiting list and join the beta test for that. I haven’t been accepted yet. I don’t know. Dennis, have you been accepted? I don’t know if you’ve gotten into it or you’re part of it.
Dennis Kennedy: I’m just learning about the beta list as we speak.
Tom Mighell: As we speak, there is a beta list to get on the Bing waiting list. I join like the day it came out and they’ve started letting people in but I’m not. I must be much farther down on the list. One thing that is very different from this version of ChatGPT that Bing is using is that the ChatGPT that we’ve talked about that we’ve gone and tested out and played with is using data that went up to some point in time in 2021 and didn’t go beyond that, but the one that Bing is using is actually pulling data from today, from current time. So, if you asked to the question like, what did Apple announced today? It is product announcement. It should be able to give you a pretty good summary of what got announced at the — at whatever, whoever gave an announcement, Apple or otherwise. So, I have pretty high hopes for Microsoft and, frankly, we’ll talk about this a little more later. I don’t care so much about putting it into Bing or Edge. I am really excited about maybe putting it into Word or Teams or something we are actually you want to generate content where you want to have it write something. Now, of course, all the educators are going to start freaking out and say, “Oh no, we can’t put it in Word. We can’t just have it so easy to generate fake articles.” Anyway, we’ll see what happens.
Now, Google really had a bad showing for a company that touts its AI experience through Google assistant and I brag about it all the time. I talked about how excited I am about Google. They really messed up and got caught unprepared for Microsoft’s announcement, and they tried to rush something out. They’ve got a tool. They called it Bard, which also feels rushed and made up. I mean, I just doesn’t Bard. It’s okay, Bard. But in the demo, it made a really substantial mistake about something and that’s never good for business. So, I’m not sure that Google has — I mean, I have to put them as the playing catch up right now that Microsoft is the frontrunner and I’m just thinking about asking Word to create a blog post for you in your own writing style. So, it’s say I want you to go read my blog. I want you — I’m going to feed my blog to you and you think about it. I want you to create a blog post for me in my writing style around my specific area of legal interest. Then, all you have to do is review and revise it. What a huge time saver is going to be. It’s not going to put you out of business. It’s not going to put there any other content creators out of business.
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It’s just going to give you a good start and I’m excited about that.
Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, I like that. I mean, I guess one of the thing as you mentioned that I’m a little bit afraid of is like the — I know that marketers and advertisers will use it to say like generate yet another unsolicited email to Dennis that might appeal to him and that will become even easier for them to do that. So, I’m intrigued. There’s couple developments time before we go to the break today that were worth mentioning. I’m really intrigued by how many people are looking at to build apps that use the GPT tools and including in legal. We’re already seeing that and Nikki Shaver is putting together a list of companies that are doing that. I see this sort of really innovative small uses like I said. I think when you think small that the potential of ChatGPT really opens up to me and I see things that concern me, like the historical nature of the training data sets, to build in biases that we have, no ethical and other issues, questions about how things were trained and then the whole question of, who got to decide that all these things could be trained on content contract like what you and I create and they didn’t pay for it. Not only didn’t they pay us for it, but now open AI wants to charge us for premium access. So, I’m not sure what exactly they mean by open there, especially when I feel like I was parked contributor to this.
Tom Mighell: Well, yeah, I questioned what the meaning of the word open is in that context and, frankly, it’s not going to be cheap either. They’re going to want to charge $20.00 a month for it. Now, that may be pretty good if you plan on using it to generate a lot of money-making content. So maybe, that’s worth it.
Dennis Kennedy: Or spam emails.
Tom Mighell: Or spam emails. Well, if it’ll make you more than $20.00 a month to do it, then fine but it’s not what I’m used to seeing from a tool like this. So, I may still go ahead and do it because it’s interesting enough to me, but there are a lot of things about it that I like. I mean, I think it allows us to be more efficient, get a lot of on point content in a short period of time. I think that I use the term high quality in a certain way to the extent that it’s accurate. It’s well-spoken. It is something that is not just dumb down. It’s something that a lot of people I’ve seen have called ChatGPT confident in its tone.
Dennis Kennedy: Supremely confident is the —
Tom Mighell: Yes, and I think that’s a little bit of ego on the part of ChatGPT, but it feels like it’s high-quality. It’s training a lot of data. Now, the question is, is it historic older data or is it using the new data? Like I mentioned that Bing is going to be using and it has a possibility creative. Tell it to, you know, come up with 10 titles for a blog post talking about this topic and there might be something in there that you didn’t think about. I heard comedy writers saying, come up with 50 jokes about this topic and 48 of them are going to be terrible, but two of them might have some gems in them that the comedy writers didn’t think about. But what concerns me really — what concerns me the most is accuracy is that there’s a lot of inaccurate things that get posted and when they are posted with that supreme confidence is even more dangerous, I think, and some of the information is just plain wrong. I mean, it posted that two different judges, conservative and liberal judges, on the Supreme Court had come down on the opposite side of a Supreme Court decision was just wrong. It’s not a deal-breaker for me. It just means it needs to get better, doesn’t understand the quirks of human language. So, it’s not going to get that quite right.
Like I said before, there’s really not an emotional connection. I think a person writing with feeling is always going to come across a little bit better. I think that there’s a challenge on how you’re going to be able to tell ChatGPT text from real human text. Open AI actually introduced a new tool to allow you to tell the difference, but from what I’ve read so far, it’s only accurate about 26% of the time and that feels a little odd to me that the people who wrote the tool, there are tool to tell you if something’s being written by their tool is only accurate successful 26% of the time. But anyway, there are a lot of concerns we want to really talk more about that in the context of the law, but we’ve been blabbing a lot anymore than usual. Let’s take a quick break from our sponsors before we continue with this topic.
[Music]
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Dennis Kennedy: We are back. Tom, how is ChatGPT and the other degenerative AI tools likely to impact the legal profession and the legal system in the short run and in the long run? Should our listeners just ask ChatGPT to answer that question and run with the results?
Tom Mighell: I would say no. ChatGPT only got about 50% right on the bar exam when they told the bar exam. There is still a long way to go. But if we look at the short-term on this podcast, every time we talk about tech show or legal week or any legal tech conference, all we talk about is when we walk the vendor floor is AI, AI, AI, AI, and now you know what’s going to happen, we’re going to go and it’s all going to be ChatGPT now and that’s going to be the buzzword and all the vendors are going to try to find a way to incorporate ChatGPT into their offering, whether it fits naturally or not.
Some legal tech companies are already doing that. I mean, I think the one that interests me the most right now is Ironclad and their contracting tool is that they’re going to let you generate redline versions of contracts with language that’s drawn from clauses you’ve already approved. They’re going to look at stuff you’ve approved in a contract, they will look at the other contract. They will automatically redline it for you. Then, all you have to do is review the redlines and you’re done. You can also basically tell ChatGPT to make changes based on a simple prompt to say something like make all non-disclosures mutual and it will automatically do that in the document or it will automatically insert redline language into the document to show it.
I think that’s a very interesting and good development of how they’re using it. Like you said, Nicki Shaver has listed a couple of other companies that are planning to do this, so I think that there are slow cautious steps in the ChatGPT but then I also see that a lot of other companies are standing right behind them, bumbling their way into ChatGPT and for better or for worse.
Dennis Kennedy: To me, it all comes back to the fact that ChatGPT is a text predictor and it doesn’t have special powers, it doesn’t have special insights. It’s one category of AI which is some of the things I learned when while teaching a class on AI in law. I look at the short-term and I just see people just expecting so much from ChatGPT and saying it’s going to do all these things, so even the example you gave of finding the clauses that you actually use and stuff. Well, people have been doing that with KM tools and playbooks and stuff for a long time, and you say, now we have this text predictor tool that’s doing that. We’re still going to have to look at it. I don’t know, maybe it saves time, maybe it does or doesn’t work for certain things.
I see the benefit is in these really transmittal documents, simple things like write a cover letter for this, do a sum — I think with ChatGPT, there’s almost no excuse for lawyers not to do summaries of complex documents because the ChatGPT could generate a good draft of a summary that could be really helpful and very client-friendly.
I look at those things and when I see people are saying it’s going to do so much that that’s why I get weary, but like I say, if I look simple that ChatGPT, the potential there is really great especially for the things that lawyers have not decided to do document automation on already, because I think that if you haven’t done document automation at all, the ChatGPT is an interesting way to leapfrog document automation for first drafts on relatively simple documents. I think that’s sort of fascinating.
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I see some stuff happening in the short-term. In the long-term, Tom, I guess is that like in the newest technology is that e-discovery is where we’ll see the biggest impact of AI as it develops including ChatGPT possibly as an interface to some of the stuff, but again, I see summaries, outlines, the sort of transmittal type documents, things like that, where I think it will really shine and if we say it’s probably not going to be able to do prediction, it’s probably not going to do this dramatic pattern finding those sorts of things, that’s some different set of tools but I think that for what it can do if you’re thinking text prediction, you stay in those terms, I think there’s some cool things that can happen.
It potentially gets quite better in the long term, although I think that’s an open question as it trains on more and more documents. Are we so sure it’s just going to keep getting better or is it going to potentially decline in its ability to do things just because it’s been trained on so much.
Tom Mighell: From a short-term benefit to the other area that I think law firms can benefit from is perhaps in marketing content, so writing copy for your website, writing first drafts of blog posts, writing newsletters, other marketing communications. There’s a judge in Colombia who allegedly tried to use ChatGPT for a decision. I don’t think that’s a good initial use of ChatGPT. I mean, it’s certainly not trained on all of law right now and I’d be interested to see what happens then, but what I’ve been hearing is is that so far, it’s avoiding some of the problems before when, if you remember Microsoft came out with its own AI a few years ago that literally within hours of being made public had already been taught to be racist and make Nazi slogans all over the place.
So far, that’s not happening, but it’s going in the opposite direction. Somebody asked it to write a heartfelt poem on the life and legend of Ted Cruz and it came back and said, “I’m sorry, I’m not comfortable doing that for the fact that it might politicize something.” It actually is staying away from that, but then it’s also sounds like it’s a little bit defensive is that if it doesn’t know something, it comes back and it will be a little defensive with you. I’m interested to see how it learns from that because people are going to be testing it. People are going to be feeding it stuff that’s going to test its limits to see what happens to it and I’m really interesting to see because it will grow, not in the sense that a person grows, but it will grow and evolve and I am really very interested to see in which direction it’s going to grow.
Dennis Kennedy: Well, that’s an interesting point, Tom, because I think that we’ll probably rapidly go to the place where there’s not one universal ChatGPT. We’re going to have all these specific instances of it that’s trained. Like we’ve experienced with search engines and other things that the results you get might be different than what I get, and they might be different from time to time.
I think there are really interesting things out there and then as people are testing it, people are testing this stuff really hard. They’re trying to break it. They’re trying, to put it mildly, inappropriate things using the tools and to see what happens. We’ve already heard that as they’ve tried to deal with some of the problematic content, they’ve paid people very small amounts of money to do that and a lot of them had to go to counseling after reviewing obscene materials.
Not everything is good about this. There are a lot of issues and we’ll see even more of them, but having said that, I did want to mention two things that I thought of that could be really interesting for a law firm, and you talked about it, Tom, when the marketing sense, I think anything where you have something that’s committee type of report to generate the first draft of that has to be and maybe even to the whole thing, has to be better than what most committees come up with.
Then, one thing we talked about in our class was what if you train ChatGPT on your documents in your firm and you were then able to generate things in the style of your firm and then get a consistent style because people started from the same place, they reflected that style. That’s been something people have wanted to do for a long time and if this was a shortcut to do that or get something close to that, I think that’s another use that’s worth doing some experimentation on.
Tom Mighell: I’m putting a link in the show notes to the OpenEye website. You can get it your own account there. I would say go get it while it’s free. Test it out. See what all the hype is about. If you have a chance, there are a number of resources out there with different kinds of questions and things you can ask. Maybe one on this podcast we’ll be talking about as well. But go give it a shot yourself and see what we’ve been talking about. All right. Before our next segment, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor.
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Tom Mighell: Now let’s get back to the Kennedy-Mighell report. I’m Tom Mighell.
Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy. If you ask Tom what the question is that he asked me most often, it would probably be, “Did you read my last email or message?” In fact, I must confess that we actually had this very conversation right before we started recording because I hadn’t read closely enough an email we had gotten earlier. And so, sometimes, I have to plead guilty of not actually reading the email and then I try to find something else or someone else to blame.
To be fair, there are days when I wonder if whether anybody reads emails or anything else these days. It’s a problem. We thought we might share some of our solutions, Tom, without limiting yourself just to things you try with me. What are some approaches that listeners might take to help them with their emails and messages read?
Tom Mighell: I will say that I have a number of years of hard experience with a boss who does not appropriately read emails. They are selective in what they read. They answer only what they want to answer. They sometimes don’t even notice it, it comes in and so when you have people like that in your life, you have to learn strategies to make sure that they’re getting the messages you want.
And so, here are some of the things that I’m making sure that I’m doing and that I’ve seen as good practices. One is making the subject line clear. Don’t make it like, need your help, or question, or hello. I’ve seen emails that say hello and that’s not useful at all. Instead, say something like, “need help with,” and make it specific or “question about blank.” That makes it very clear what you’re asking about.
Please try to avoid long narrative emails with long paragraphs. I’ve seen so many of those and my eyes glaze over when I start to read them. Even if some people do read them, nobody wants to read them. Break them into smaller paragraphs, fewer sentences, make them digestible. Use bullet points to make it easier for people to read.
One of the things that works really well with my boss and with others is to put something at the top of the email that usually says something like “net” and it is just a summary. If I have to put a lot of information in there, it’s a summary at the top with a few bullet points. If you want to read the detail, you can read it below, but otherwise, you’ve got a summary at the top that tells you all the important stuff.
Remember that some people will only respond to the first question you ask. If you ask more than one question in an email, they may look at the first one, answer it and then they’ve assumed that that’s all you’re asking. Find a way, either send your questions separately, say at the beginning, “I need answers to the following two questions,” and bold, highlight, whatever you want to do on that, but you need to call it out because I get that experience so often. People will only pay attention to the first thing you say and not to anything else.
Then also, make sure that you put action items. Let the person know here’s what I need from you, here’s what I need you to do, and if it goes in that net section at the beginning, all the better. I think the point is not a long drawn-out thing, bullet-pointed items that are short, succinct and to the point, and ask what you want from them right at the top. Dennis, how about you? Anything different from what I said?
Dennis Kennedy: I go back to the notion that we scan more so than we read these days. And so, you want to construct your emails for people who scan. It’s kind of funny where you’re talking about like craft your subject matter lines well. I wrote an article on email 25 plus years ago. That was like the key points. It still is if you’re using that so that can be helpful.
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Especially if you say, if you kind of make the ask in the subject matter line, but you certainly build a subject line that people can find something when they’re looking for. Then, I think it just comes to thinking visually and say, let’s bold things, let’s do bullet points. If I have a number of questions, I just say I three things and it’s like one, two three and I use like a little header that’s bolded so people can see what I’m going through, and then you might summarize with the next action step at the end, but you also might put that at the beginning.
There’s a news organization called Axios and they have this approach. If you get their newsletters, they have this approach that they call smart brevity, and they have a whole structure to how they make it likely that you’re more likely to read something and it puts the main points in a summary and it tells you how long it will take to read and stuff like that. There’s actually some valuable things I think you can learn from there if you’re doing something that’s a little longer, but I think it’s just think visually the stuff that’s important. Make it bold. Make the font bigger, whatever it takes to draw people’s eyes to it. But the fact is none of us really read that well anymore because there’s so much coming at us. Now, it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.
Tom Mighell: Well, first, I’m going to say I highly recommend Axios newsletters. There’s so many good ones that they write. If you’re lucky enough to be in a town that has an Axios newsletter dedicated to your town, the one we have for Dallas is really great. Take a look at Axios newsletters. That is not my parting shot, however.
My parting shot is we you’ve heard us talk on the podcast periodically about the fact that we both have Stream Decks and that we both want to use them, and at some point, we’re going to do an episode about how we set up the Stream Deck and how we use it to automate working at the computer. Well, I was pleased to see that Microsoft Teams has come out with a plugin for Stream Deck, where you can actually control Teams meetings. The link that I’m going to put in the show notes is actually how you can control a Teams meeting from your iPad, which is nice, but you don’t have to use it from your iPad, you can use it from the Stream Deck itself and you can plug all the different buttons in to mute yourself, to raise your hand, to send a heart emoji. You can do all sorts of things and do that from the Stream Deck instead of from your keyboard.
This link is really designed if you’re running a webinar and you need to be doing a lot of things to run the webinar but I think it can be used for any other meeting. I will say and Dennis pointed out that in between the time that I found the link and the time that we’re recording this podcast, they found a security issue in the plug-in from Microsoft Teams to Stream Deck. They’ve taken it out of the store briefly. They’re fixing it. Once they put it in, it’ll be ready to go. Take a look at the link in there and once the app is back, give it a try. If you have Stream Deck. Dennis?
Dennis Kennedy: My guess is that the app will probably be back by the time this podcast airs. I have two things. One is a little bit of MSU Center for Law Technology & Innovation self-promotion. We have a new video that is a minute and a half video introducing the center and what it does. It features one of my Ras, Kendall Freeman, who just rocks the voiceover and has been told by more than a few people that he has a career in voiceovers if he wants to do it. We’ll have a link in the show notes in it and I’ll be putting it up on the center’s website on the MSU website as well.
Then, for ChatGPT, I use this for the design challenge we’re doing. There’s a great YouTube video, we’ll put the link in there and it’s not quite five minutes. It is called the 10 best ChatGPT examples, prompts and use cases. If you don’t know anything about ChatGPT, it’s a great intro, gives you 10 things, some you’ll like, some will impress you, some you’ll say, “So what?” But it’ll give you an idea of some of the capabilities the ChatGPT can be used for, and again if you focus on the small stuff, I think you’re going to get really excited about what it can do.
Tom Mighell: That wraps up this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Network’s page for the show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes, on Legal Talk Network site or within your favorite podcast app. If you would like to get in touch with us, remember you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn. You can Find us on Twitter but less and less. Remember, we do like to get those voicemails to feature your questions during our B segment. That number is 720-441-6820. 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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Kennedy-Mighell Report |
Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell talk the latest technology to improve services, client interactions, and workflow.