Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Nick Rishwain

Episode Notes

Transcript

Intro: Web 2.0, innovation, trends, 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.

[Music]

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to Episode 346 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 tried out a new game about new ideas that we think we will call Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down. Give the episode a listen, and let us know what you think. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices series.

In Fresh Voices, we want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. We have another fabulous guest. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy-Mighell Report, we are thrilled to continue our Fresh Voices on legal tech interview series with Nick Rishwain, who is among other things, the Vice-President of business development and relations at Experts.com, a strong social media voice on legal technology and he is doing some interesting things in the Blockchain and cryto field around real-estate.

We want our Fresh Voices series to not only introduce you to terrific leaders in the legal tech space but also provide you with their perspective on the things you ought to be paying attention to in the legal technology.

And as usual, we’ll finish up with our partying shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Nick Rishwain to our Fresh Voices series. Nick, welcome to the Kennedy-Mighell Report.

Nick Rishwain: Hi Tom. Hi Dennis. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Tom Mighell: Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit more about you? Tell us about your role at Experts.com, any other thing the audience ought to know about what you do.

Nick Rishwain: Yeah. Well, as probably one of our later questions might cover, I do quite a few different things, but my primary role is vice-president, at vice-president of client relations and business development at Experts.com, and we are an online marketing platform, and search service for expert witnesses. Essentially a Web 2.0 operation. We’ve been under current management, our current ownership since 2000.

Lawyers can search our site and contact experts directly or they can reach out to us and we can do a search for them for a flat fee. We do not broker engagements. So, that was essentially my entry into legal technology post law school and post working at county government, started at Experts.com as my entry into legal technology and sort of grew out from there by doing much like you guys did, podcast on legal technology and then time passes and you take on more projects and things develop.

Dennis Kennedy: That’s cool. I think that the expert witness locator is such a great idea. Not enough to get me to ever do litigation, mind you, but I think it’s a great idea. So Nick as you know from our conversation sometimes I get a little frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technologies and that’s both all the new technologies and its benefits to those in the legal profession.

You are great at this especially at brand new technology issues and using social media. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology?

Nick Rishwain: Yeah thanks. It’s very kind of you to say that. There was no well-developed plan here Dennis as if you’re familiar with my social media persona, it makes it abundantly clear. I’m dyslexic and it helps me to learn by talking about new technologies and discussing it openly with others. So it’s hard for me to learn from reading things. So to discuss, make comments, ask questions and learn how something works, that’s how I do it, learning by talking to others, learning by back and forth with Dennis or others on the service formerly known as Twitter.

Is that how we’re referring to it as a little like prince now, the artist formerly known as prince. So I have to actually jump in and test things out, see how the process works. I kind of have to understand minutia and then I’ll just ask questions, if I don’t understand it and then, as a result of those things, I think I find out ways to simplify in ways that where I can relate to what’s happening in a more simple terminology.

(00:05:00)

And then I share that and it probably isn’t the most technical or high end expression. But I think that’s where I learned to be able to communicate a little better. So it was by need and by necessity.

Tom Mighell: I think it’s fascinating to hear that because in some of our other Fresh Voices podcasts, we’ve had the people there, we kind of tend to want to know answers to some of the same questions because we get different answers and it’s fascinating to me that what works for you is the verbal, whereas what works for others is the visual that they like to draw things out and display things.

So, I think that lends itself to lawyers and others who have different learning and appreciation styles the same way. So I think it’s fascinating that there are so many different ways that people are communicating with lawyers about technology.

Speaking about communicating with lawyers about technology, we talk a lot about competence. There’s a lot of talk on the f/k/a Twitter but we see all the time in the blogs, and in the news about discussing about the duty of technology competence. We talk a lot about it on this podcast. So we always like to get a sense of where our guests are on it. So kind of what are you seeing out there? Do you have great hope for the future of technology competency? You feel that lawyers are stepping up to the plate on this duty thing or do we still have a long way to go? Are we somewhere in the middle?

Nick Rishwain: My experience is telling me we still have a long way to go. I have been with Experts.com for 13 years, we have an open directory. Lawyers can search to locate and communicate directly with our experts, straightforward Boolean search, right, which we should all be comfortable with at this point and we’ll still get inquiries.

Now some of this is a lack of resourcefulness on the part of some lawyers like they just didn’t even look at the site before reaching out. But then having to show them how it works has always made me uncomfortable as to oh my God, how are we still having this conversation?

So I think we have a long way to go. My personal experience has said that plaintiff’s counsel are generally the more innovative, the more tech competent, because they are looking for any ways that they can be more efficient, more economical, that’s part of the game. So yeah, I don’t think CLEs are about technology and getting credits by listening to something is solving the problem. I think we have a way to go for tech competence and lawyers.

And you know, it’s not all their fault. I don’t like continuously putting burdens on lawyers. Because I think there’s a lot of that. We have a justice system that is drastically behind and sadly COVID was — caused if I steal from history, the Great Leap Forward for the legal industry. So it took a pandemic to actually force some changes. So yeah, I think we have a way to go on tech competence.

Dennis Kennedy: You know, speaking of the Great Leap Forward that didn’t happen yet. You are known at least to me for being heavily involved in the blockchain world and the world of DAOs, that’s decentralized autonomous organizations. So most of what I see lately in the legal world seems to be just this big collective sigh of relief that the whole blockchain Web 3.0 thing is thankfully over and the vast majority of lawyers are happy, they never spent any time trying to learn it.

I sometimes feel that you and I might be among the very few blockchain believers left out there. Would you talk a bit about that, and why we still might be right about blockchain and Web 3.0?

Nick Rishwain: Yeah, that’s funny. I’ve been around long enough now to know that there’s hype cycles, right and it’s funny that it’s over. That’s usually based on media hype around something and it’s mostly only over because the number went down that the market went through a market cycle, and funds, liquidity and funds became available. And then AI, in the form of ChatGPT predominantly became the new hot topic for media to cover.

So I don’t think it’s over. I don’t think it’s dead but it makes me laugh that that has become a thing and for those lawyers out there who didn’t spend any time on it, I can assure you those who did who are now bringing huge lawsuits against those who had either stolen money or who would have — or plaintiffs who had lost money or protocols who may have mismanaged things.

(00:10:07)

There’s lots of practice here. I was just talking to an expert witness in over a $17 million endowment essentially that was stolen. There were reasons for lawyers to pay attention and it was less to do with having to know how this software is engineered, but knowing how it works, so that you could chase the business in that area. So I guess that is — we’re not alone, there’s quite a few of us who are still interested, just like the Internet wasn’t over when Pets.com failed. Blockchain has not failed. In fact, those that are still around have not been cen — what you would call centralized players, those who did fail were centralized and FTX was a centralized player, then and Terra and Celsius, these were centralized exchanges and those failed not places in defy.

So we need the cycles and I think a lot of people building in this space are really happy that AI is sucking up some of the attention, although that also sucks up investment dollars. So that can be problematic. But it is still valuable. It’s still if we have to tell it to I think probably the biggest disservice we did to lawyers was describing it as blockchain instead of software.

It is still just software, right? It’s just a different type of software. So get comfortable with it as software. It’s not software as a service. But quit telling them that it’s Blockchain and let them understand that this is just another form of software technology.

Tom Mighell: And so now I have two questions. The one that I was going to ask but I have a follow up question to this, because I agree with what you just said, although I probably put a slightly sharper point on it to say that the attention on it died; one because AI took all the oxygen out of the room on that. But two, to me, what I’m seeing is that it’s more of — when you describe companies lost liquidity, I will say they failed, they are being criminally charged.

And I would say that when it comes to crypto, maybe not Blockchain but when it comes to crypto, there is what I’m sensing sort of a general sense of distrust of the whole thing. Like we allowed it to go unregulated or they were able to do this type of stuff and here’s what’s happening and people are losing lots of money. What is it?

But I also see that those are — they are related, but also different things and using and taking advantage and working with the blockchain can be very different and not even associated with crypto if you want it to be. How do we get past that to the extent that I’m right, and that there isn’t essence of distrust? How do we get past that? What’s the — where do we get back to a place where people are comfortable whenever hype is ready to come back?

Nick Rishwain: Yeah, great question. I don’t think people understood it well enough to understand that those who were failing were similar to banks failing. So I don’t think that was described as those who were the distrust comes from what were considered banks, for all intents and purposes, for overall concept, these were closed opaque institutions. If you were participating in decentralized finance, instead of a centralized banking sort of organization, oversimplification there, that worked just fine because it was smart contracts interacting with smart contracts.

Those who we didn’t know what was going on behind closed doors, yeah, you should have distrusted them, just like Silicon Valley Bank, we didn’t know what’s going on behind closed doors and that also failed, followed by two other pretty large banks. So the distrust is in those kinds of closed opaque institutions.

You had another comment there and that yes, those frauds, there’s massive frauds that took place, that did suck out of a lot of liquidity because of the distrust but I think it’s important to focus where that distrust should be pointed.

Tom Mighell: Got it. Okay. All right, I’m taking a hard right, let’s talk about collaboration. You know, if you’ve listened to the podcast that we talk a lot about collaboration, we may have written a book about the subject. So we always like to talk to our guests to find out what they’re using or what they find to be useful, whether it is with the people you work with at Experts.com, whether it’s your clients at Experts.com or anybody else, what are the tools and what are the best ways you find to collaborate?

(00:14:57)

Nick Rishwain: Yeah, so interesting. So as Dennis I think is aware, we have this Cougar DAO decentralized autonomous organization, which is actually an LLC because Wyoming has essentially been the only one to define a DAO as roughly the same as an LLC and we wanted to do something legally compliant which a lot of crypto or blockchain related organizations failed.

In the Cougar DAO space, we use Discord and Telegram a lot. Telegram is excellent, that’s where all the members, managing members of the firm are most active. Discord for those who are unaware is sort of a more gamer related, but it’s still a version of Slack, a very similar version of Slack, but it was targeted more towards gamers, the crypto industry sort of liked it as an interactive tool, Slack style tool.

It is awful in many of the same ways, it’s great in many of the same way Slack is. It’s awful in many of the same ways that Slack is as far as distracting. For Experts honestly, so we’re small enough organization that our interact and we don’t use Slack in I’m grateful for that, we actually use Skype for our instant messaging and internal messaging stuff. And it works great for us because we’re small enough to do for your one on one conversations for your get togethers, video conferencing and we have done the company, the whole company messaging through Skype, but that doesn’t because everybody’s there, it doesn’t get abused the way that Slack messages can line up, right.

It’s this one channel, full company channel so it should be full company related. And I’ve just found through Discord and Slack usage that just because you can text message people all day doesn’t mean you should. Yeah so those are three that I think are and Telegram is similar to Skype in this way that it’s that one channel, and you don’t abuse it because it’s that one channel. When you can create 40 new channels, it becomes a nightmare to follow what’s happening.

Tom Mighell: Dennis and I have discussed setting up our own Discord and we have I think not done it for some of the same reasons that you’re mentioning, although it’s probably going to come at some point in time.

Dennis Kennedy: Tom, I was going to say this reminds me of when we used to be on Slack. We don’t do it as much on Teams. But we would be having multiple chats between ourselves in different channels at the same time, it’s totally bizarre.

Tom Mighell: We still do that. We still have that as we have –

Dennis Kennedy: Not as much.

Tom Mighell: We have a random channel and we have a channel for the podcast and we have a channel for the book. And I frequently get messages from you and all three of those channels.

Nick Rishwain: Actually you know Twitter or X is I guess — shoot Dennis and I have messaged, I work with a lot of my colleagues through Twitter DMs or otherwise for my colleagues outside of Experts.com or outside of Cougar DAO. So a lot of that does happen in Twitter DMs or just in Twitter chats and Twitter threads. It’s interesting, I don’t normally think of that as a collaboration tool but I think it has been.

Tom Mighell: Sure, sure, sure. All right we got a lot more questions for Nick. But we first need to take a break for a quick message from our sponsors.

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Dennis Kennedy: And we are back with Nick Rishwain at Experts.com. Nick, you often talk with legal tech startup company founders, in fact, you did podcasts with them for a long time. What is happening right now in legal tech that actually excites you or seems to have the most potential and how might these technologies or the startups or the startup founders even impact legal education as well as law practice?

Nick Rishwain: So it’s funny. What excites me now, Dennis, is what excited me in like 2015 when I started the podcast. That was the first 2014-15 was like the first hype cycle for blockchain and AI, right, or at least as I recall it, when I was really starting to pay attention to it, and they were pretty early stage. I mean, 2014 Aetherium didn’t even exist. So they were relatively early stage.

But it sounded fascinating enough as smart contracts came online and as companies like ROSS Intelligence and Casetext were popping up in working on some really fascinating stuff. Those were things that got me excited and I’m a software as a service kind of person. I like that, I think there are a lot of things that we don’t pay enough attention to that are on the cutting edge. So AI is the one that’s sucking up all the air in the room right now and I think it is pretty impressive because we had this thing with ChatGPT.  My experience, when we got ChatGPT available to kind of everyone, you had something really tangible that people could finally see that had some sort of and I’m sorry, Tom, to bring up ChatGPT.  I know, I listen to podcast.

Tom Mighell: No, no, that’s okay.  You just brought it up once, that’s good enough.

Nick Rishwain: Dennis brings it up.

Tom Mighell: But I think sometimes.

Nick Rishwain: But I think it gave us really something very tangible that the masses could understand. Even myself. Even the GPTs before it GPT-3 played with okay, cool, interesting, I’ll keep an eye on it. But then it started to operate at a different level. With all of its shortcomings, it was still pretty impressive. So I’ve been busy, my day job is experts.com. This is what I do, bread and butter. So I’ve been busy with Cougar DAO as a side project and experts during the day. So I’m not talking to as many legal-tech startups as I used to, but I’ve seen some really cool brief case briefing technology in the AI space that would be godsend to law students. And I can’t tell you that company because I don’t think that they are actually technically out of beta yet. But it was fascinating where you could put in Roe v. Wade and you could get a one page summary on all the pertinent parts and instantaneously, and you go, okay, all right, that would have been helpful. Stop giving me 100 pages to read before the next class. It would have been helpful for a Dyslexic guy like me, for sure, so that’s pretty fascinating.

Another one, perjury.ai was a phenomenal name. This one I met at a conference recently, and they call themselves perturbatory AI, but what they’re really going through, they can go and look at depositions and reports and memos and look for inconsistencies. All right, and, okay, that’s really cool. And I think that’s relevant to my expert witness customers like, okay, you need to be aware of this. You may have to use this to make sure that you don’t have inconsistencies. And you need to be aware that maybe in the future somebody’s going to be comparing reports that you’ve written. So I think that’ll be important. OpenAI, I think we’ve decided, is not at its current juncture, appropriate for law practices. We’ve seen that fall apart pretty quickly if you’re not paying attention to it, and you’re just assuming that it knows what it’s putting out is good. And there’s the added concern there, isn’t there of are you putting in client information into the engine and are you violating attorney client privilege by doing so?

So I think those are some really interesting in the startup in the AI space that I’m looking forward to, but probably for my own usage at experts I’m looking for give me the Microsoft Copilot. Give it to me in Word, give it to me in Outlook and have it read all my emails and all my responses to emails and be able to create the things that I because you guys know, there are and we have templates for this because you get some questions over and over. Well, just write the response for me, right? And then let me double check it.

(00:25:0)

Because I’m not past that yet with any of these. I still want to be the editor.

Tom Mighell: Oh, yeah, I’m right there with you. Although $30 a month. Gosh, I wish it would have been cheaper than that, but I’m still going to do it. Okay, I want to talk because you mentioned it when you’re talking about collaboration tools, and I know that you and Dennis frequently communicate a lot with each other on the new X. I want to get your take on where that’s headed. What are your plans? Are you going to stick it out there till the bitter end? Have you already looked at some of these other options? Where is this all headed?

Nick Rishwain: Yeah. Boy, I don’t know. Parts of me as a user get frustrated because what is going to be offered and what is offered seems to be constantly changing, and that just makes for a crappy user experience. So that’s been bothersome. But yes, I’ve tested I think all of the competitors. The competitors don’t offer the same information that X offers. It does not have the same real time news information. It does not have the same real time tech information. And most of them have not brought the Twitter or X users that I most engage with to their platforms. We have lost in the legal tech space, we’ve lost some people, which I think it frustrates me that they take these things so personally. Like, if you really ask me if we should have left anywhere, it was Facebook that they were problematic long before Twitter was problematic and at a much greater scale. But Twitter or X just still has the information I’m seeking as a legal tech person.

Tom Mighell: Well, and before Dennis says anything, I’m going to say my reason for being absent on X now is less to do with what X has become and more to do with the fact that they cut off all their APIs and I am so used to using Tweetbot that I can’t use the Twitter app. It’s unusable to me just because of that. But anyway, that’s a whole another discussion, I’m going to let Dennis go with his question.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. So, Nick, one of the things I like to talk about, and this is like a big area of interest of mine, what I call newlegal careers. And I like to say newlegal is one word. And at Michigan State, I’m at the center for Law Technology Innovation. One of my projects is something I’m calling the New Legal Careers Platform, which is soft launch and we’ll do like, in the fall. I think you’re a pioneer in this field, and your career path is actually quite interesting and I think it’d be instructive for our listeners who want to consider different possibilities of what they might do with a law degree or what they might do in a legal career. Can you kind of talk about your career history?

Nick Rishwain: Yeah, it’s weird, I’ll give you that much. I think you may have just referred to it as interesting and a pioneer. I’m not sure if any of those apply, who knows? So for a long time, I never really considered myself an entrepreneur. I went to law school with the intent to practice, struggled with the bar exam and then looked at a long list of family members who stopped practicing to go into some other form of business where it was more lucrative and less stressful than litigation. And so, I eventually gave up that battle and for most of my life, my dad did not have an active law practice. He was a lawyer, is a lawyer, but he didn’t have active law practice most of my life, but he was in other business. And I got to see over and over in business situations where having that knowledge was helpful, and it made him a better business person than I thought others were.

Of course I’m biased, it’s my dad. But I think somewhere along the line I picked up on that and he had a wide array of businesses as we were growing up, predominantly real estate, but he did a variety of other things that were real estate related truck washes, just a wide variety of things. And so I always saw that it was always that there’s something new there’s new project to work on. And the same with Nabil Zumout, our CEO of Experts.com who’s been a partner of mine now for quite a few years. And he’s got Experts.com, and he was a former practicing attorney, bankruptcy attorney, and we do real estate, and he’s got restaurants on the side. And so I’ve sort of been surrounded with this my whole life, that there’s usually more than one thing happening, and so that is inherent in me. So I guess at some point, I started doing various things.

(00:30:00)

And that’s stemming from the legal career, but also in my interests. But I’ve learned from people that I’ve spent a lot of time with that you do different things. And so, yeah, I’m involved in real estate with my family, and I’m involved in storage facilities, and I’m involved with Experts.com. I’ve noticed that I sell space a lot, apartments and real estate and self-storage and probably the farm Cougar DAO or the farm we purchased is the first thing that wasn’t space related. But on Experts.com, I’m selling ad space, digital, real estate. So there’s a kind of ongoing theme there. So recommendations or what people should do is, honestly, I start saying yes to a lot of things I do that I know a lot of people are like, no, you should say no to most things. Okay, fine, but say yes at first. Take it down a roll a little bit, down the road a little bit and see if it’s something you might like. Law school is helpful in understanding some of the issues that regularly come up in businesses that I’m involved in. It’s definitely a necessity for finding the right experts for a particular type of litigation. There’s contracts, breach of contracts, IP issues, tort issues, wide varieties of issues that constantly come up day to day. So I’m almost always in one in two L, reminders of one in two L, because those are the most litigated issues.

But, yeah, I say someone asks you to do something or try something on a project, if it sounds interesting to you, say yes to it and try it. See if it interests you to keep doing it. Probably the earlier you find out that the more financially, those projects that pay, something probably a better thing for you because you can take up a lot of time doing free stuff. And if it’s totally for fun and you’re enjoying it, then absolutely. But I think those are the things that it’s a very strange career, which Dennis make comments about, how silly and strange it seems sometimes on Twitter. But it is, and it’s been fun, right? And I think it’s good for the mind.

Dennis Kennedy: All right, we’re not quite done with Nick yet, but we need to take another quick break for a word from our sponsors, and then we’ll be right back.

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Dennis Kennedy: And now let’s get back to the Kennedy – Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy.

Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell and we’re joined by our special guest, Nick Rishwain VP at Experts.com. We got time for just a few more questions, and I want to start with the question we ask all of our Fresh Voices guests, which I’m calling our best advice question, which is give us an example of some of the best advice either that you have given to someone or that you were given or both. If you wanted to mention both, if you got two good examples, that’s great, but what is some of the best advice you could mention to our audience?

Nick Rishwain: So some of the best advice first is to ignore Dennis and anytime that he wants to name something legally related as Lex, such and such, so ignore that mostly and beyond that, be kind to other people. Be supportive of your colleagues. When people succeed, great. Help promote what they’re doing, if they’re doing good stuff. Negativity is just an absolute disease. And there are plenty of people in legal tech who are innovation and name only, who claim to promote innovation or tech and then who follow up with anytime somebody’s trying something, it’s all taking away from it or it’s all down talking or hating on whatever project it is, that’s really easy.

(00:35:00)

And it’s really easy for those of us with legal backgrounds to be hypercritical. So try not to do that. Try not to be a jerk about those things. Don’t attack people for trying something new. Encourage it, see where they might be right, rather where they’re wrong. I think that all comes up with being kind and being supportive, trying to eliminate that negative thinking.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, that’s great. That’s such great advice. And I think that sometimes just gets overlooked these days. So my question Tom is starting to give his question name. I’m starting to call this question the help us do our work question. So who are the fresh voices in Legal Tech that you would like to single out and maybe see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Nick Rishwain: Yeah, so I was telling somebody today that I’m not even sure that I count as a fresh voice anymore. It feels like I’ve been around, so of course I want to hang out with you guys. So it was great for you to have me on here. So I tried to think of those. This kind of goes back to how I did my podcast previously, those who are not yet getting any recognition for their efforts in the space. So Caroline Ponzini and I can email you guys these names as well. She is a lawyer and software developer who’s working on a blockchain related signature product. And he’s an up and comer. Justin McFadden from, painworth (ph) he’s a younger, fresh voice. And Julie Saltman of Standd.IO.  These are some fresh voices.  These are people that I have not heard from enough yet, and I think they’re much fresher than I am. I’m ready for picking.

Tom Mighell: All right, well, this has been great. Nick, we want to thank you for being a guest on the podcast. Can you tell our audience a little bit if they want to learn more about what you’re doing or get in touch with you? What are the best ways to do that?

Nick Rishwain: Yeah, nick@experts.com they can email me there. I’ve got a variety of Twitter accounts. One for Experts.Com, one for me personally Experts.com VP for anything Expert related at nickjrishwain for anything Expert related and then anything else or you just want to tell me jokes, I love that. So, yeah, those probably the best ways you can get me anywhere. We’ve got 1000 emails at experts.com and I’ll see most of them email addresses, that is. But, yeah, I’m all around Instagram @nickjrishwain as well. Been playing with some content over there. Having a little bit more fun over therewith Legal Tech and expert related content.

Tom Mighell: Cool. Of course, I have to make the joke that you are just about the last person left on Clubhouse, so people might be able to find you there.

Nick Rishwain: Might be able to find me there. Once a week for 30 minutes.

Tom Mighell: But thanks so much, Nick. You’re a fantastic guest. Great information, advice for our listeners, and I hope we find a good way to keep in touch if Twitter totally implodes. But now it’s time for our parting shots at One Tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Nick, take it away.

Nick Rishwain: Well, I got a plug. Experts.com like you could use it while you’re listening to this, right? So go give it a try. Contact us if you need help finding an expert.

Tom Mighell: That’s a great tip, of course. And so mine is an update on my use of the Readwise Reader. We’ve talked about it before. We like Readwise as a tool to save things to notion or to surface notes that you’ve taken in the past. Then they issued their own Read It Later app, which is more than just a Read It Later app. It’s also an RRS reader. It will incorporate Twitter feeds. It’ll incorporate all sorts of things. I am slowly making more use of it. It is now my full time Read It Later App. I’ve canceled my subscription instapaper and a Pocket because I can do everything in Reader. It has a smart an automatic highlight feature that you can do on websites. You can go highlight something on a website and it gets saved back into the Reader. They have a ghost reader function that uses guess what AI, you can ask questions. You’re reading an article and you say, I want to learn more about this or what does this mean? And it will chat with you during that time. It’s some great improvements. I am still not using it as my RSS reader because it still doesn’t have a way to mark things as read. So it still says I have like 40,000 unread things in there because I have to go through them individually and that to me is a deal breaker. But if you are interested in a Read It Later app that shows promise for the future of more things, Readwise is doing a great job. Dennis.

(00:39:57)

Dennis Kennedy: Tommy, you had really sold me until that not marking thing red thing.

Tom Mighell: I know that’s a killer with the RSS.

Dennis Kennedy: But I think I got to look at it. So I went back to something that I’ve done for a long time. So probably for more than 30 years. I don’t know if it’s 40, but definitely 30 years. I’ve used David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ approach to task management and kind of personal productivity. And I totally advise it, recommend using it and advise using it. So I had kind of drifted into my own version and one of the key things that he talks about is this notion of projects versus tasks. And so a project in simplest terms is something that requires two or more tasks. And so if you have projects on your to do list rather than tasks, you end up seeing things that don’t get done because they’re actually projects. And then David’s approach is that you want to break things down into chunks into the next physical action.

So if I have on my to do list clean garage, I never get to it because I don’t even know what to do first. And my wife and I were talking and actually my next physical action might be going to Amazon and ordering an electronic stud finder so I can put hooks in the walls and if I do that, that may get the whole thing going. So what I want to recommend is the book and the approach. But to go back and just look at all your projects and say, do I have tasks that are actually projects? And then start to look at how many projects you have and then to start to break them down. And I think it’s really beneficial to do this because you probably are likely to find that the things that are giving you the most difficulty and stay on your to do list the longest are actually projects. And once you break them down, you can make progress on them in unexpectedly easy ways.

Tom Mighell: All right. And so, that wraps it up for this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Network’s page for the show. You can find all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts on the Legal Talk Network website. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can probably get us best on LinkedIn. We are increasingly less on Twitter, X whatever it is, but we always like to get a voicemail from you. Please, we want to cover something in our B segment, so we love your questions. 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. As always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. And we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy – Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the Kennedy – Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book. The ‘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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