Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Tessa Manuello

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Web 2.0 innovation 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 360 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 another guest in our Fresh Voices in Legal Tech series, Quentin Steinhouse at Suffolk Law School. It was a great show, highly recommended as are all the other episodes in our Fresh Voices series. In this episode, we are on a roll and 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 new Fresh Voices on Legal Tech interview series with Tessa Manuello founder and CEO at Legal creatives and a strong voice on legal design and innovation. 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 need to be paying attention to. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Tessa Manuello to the Fresh Voices series. Tessa, welcome to the Kennedy Mighell Report.

Tessa Manuello:

Thanks so much for having me, Tom and Dennis, it’s a pleasure to be here on the show.

Tom Mighell:

Absolutely. Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit more about you, your role at Legal Creatives, what our audience should know about what you do to get started?

Tessa Manuello:

Awesome. So my name is Tessa and I work with Legal Creatives. It’s a company I founded in order to upskill the legal professionals using creativity and design. And I’m going to tell us during this episode why it’s so important to unleash our creativity, our creative thinking, our creative problem solving skills, and also infuse design in the legal profession. So what we do is mostly education online. We’ve done in-person events too, but we just love the online. I just love the online aspect. It brings everybody together in the same zoom call and people from all over the world and that gives great new perspectives, new insights while we learn those skills and while we put them in practice. So that’s what I do with legal creatives. And a little bit about me, I’m a French national, moved to Canada in Quebec part, now live in South America. So my accent is a little mixed up, so I apologize in advance, but if I get stressed out I’m going to start speaking Italian. So let’s just make sure we have a smooth interview

Dennis Kennedy:

Now I’m tempted to mix it up. I’m tempted to go there. So Tessa, I’m a fan of your approach to legal design. I like the fact that you emphasize global perspectives and online approaches. So sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology innovation and design to those in the legal profession and the benefits to those in the legal profession. I mean, sometimes lawyers just totally freeze up when you even say the word create or creative. Would you talk about your approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about design and innovation?

Tessa Manuello:

Yeah, great question, Dennis and not an easy one. I have to admit. It is not an easy task to talk about those really foreign concepts to lawyers. So the approach I have taken is to be very structured to back everything I talk about with science. I can make research papers and ideally empirical studies. We do have, believe it or not, empirical studies for design, design thinking into law even for creativity. And so my strategy has been to rely upon the literature and to bring this into the legal field and to adapt those concepts. I think this is very important, this adaptation because when we talk about creative skills, creative thinkings, imagination, and there’s a lot more techniques, I’m not going to go too much into the details at the beginning of this interview, but those are really, really, this is new thing for lawyers, right?

We are not being taught at all about that at law school and even in continuing professional education. So to make that relevant, we have to translate those concepts. We have to adapt them so that lawyers can relate. So lawyers can relate to drafting contracts for example, or drafting memorandums for Litigation or arbitration. I’ve worked in arbitration too when I was in France. So if we start to translate how creative thinking and how designed thinking skills can be relevant in those contexts, I think we have a much higher chains of convincing or at least getting people attention and getting people curious to know more. And then it’s about showing case studies, tangible examples of what we can do with those skills, with those methodologies. So those who are interested, who those who have the spark can eventually decide to start the journey, explore the methodology, and eventually use the methodology.

So I believe creative thinking and design thinking, anyone could use that, but not everyone will because some people will be more inclined to explore and others will be more reluctant. However, down the road in a couple of years from now, I believe everyone is going to be using the design approach and having to use more of the creative thinking because that’s so important for the profession today to I think just be able to survive the challenges we see with technologies, with disruptions, with customer centricity. So we’ll see more and more lawyers onboarding on this journey and we’ll see more and more in the future. And eventually we may not even call it design or we may not even call it creativity because it’s going to be part of what we do. It’s going to be embedded in the processes, but I think it will take a long time before we get there. But we are already on track and I see everywhere around the world more and more professionals working in law starting the journey and seeing the results, the value, and really enjoying themselves too.

Tom Mighell:

So we usually ask a question in most of our podcasts about what our guests feel are the current state of technology competence about lawyers. We want to switch that for you a little bit. And I wanted to ask what your view of the current state of legal design is among lawyers. But based on your last answer, I want to maybe make a little bit more nuanced question here, which is what are you seeing on the creativity level about lawyers? How creative can lawyers is their capability, I know lots of lawyers who are very able to develop creative legal theories and be very creative in being a lawyer. Does that extend what kind of person makes the best, the people who choose to go down this road? What would you find makes the qualities for that? And are you seeing that in the legal community right now?

Tessa Manuello:

Yes, absolutely. Great question and great point. I can talk both about the legal design and also the creative aspect. I think they’re very much related. In fact, when we look at legal design, which comes from design thinking, design thinking actually comes from creative problem solving. So it’s all the continuum, right? It’s not like one or the other, it’s just we’ve been building on top what already exists. And I think that’s what lawyers do in the day-to-day work, building on top of what they’ve already done. And that’s often the case when we drive contracts or documents, we just take a previous one and then we make changes obviously and we tweak a few things or maybe we have to change many things, but we’re just building on top of what already exists. And then we making connections, making connections between legal concepts when we think of Litigation or arbitration, also applying those legal concepts to facts.

And it’s all about making connections and making a connection that is coherent, that is logical and persuasive. And it’s the same for creativity. Creativity is the art and science of making connections. When we look at artists, say music, I’m sure both of you like music from what I can see from your background, lots of musicians there. And what is music? It’s musicians, what do they do? They don’t invent stuff from thin air. Did get inspired by what has already been done in the past by other musicians or by other musicians in other fields. Like just think of Queen, the album Bohemian Rhapsody with the combination of rock and opera. It’s such an unexpected connection and yet it worked. The producer at the time didn’t want to produce it and they did it and it was one of the major or biggest success in the music industry ever.

So creativity is about making connections. So when you lawyer work with contracts, when you put legal arguments, you’re connecting things together. And so when I talk about creativity for innovation or within that legal design context, it’s all about making connections so we can innovate. And innovation is not just a fancy nice to have thing, it’s a way for the profession today to survive all of the challenges I’ve already mentioned, tech challenges, tech disruptions, competition, alternative service providers, this just and now this chat GPT. So there’s just so much happening and when we give ourselves the time to reflect on what we are doing and to refine where we want to go. So the vision for the future, I think this is where creativity and the legal design methodology helps us have the most structured approach for that innovation. So whatever we want to do, we just follow the process. We are not just imagining stuff from thin air. Like I said, musicians also take inspiration. They follow a process and that’s what creativity helps us do. It offers that structured process and anyone can use it. It works, we can measure it. We can even have a very articulated scientific approach with numbers. And I think this is what gets lawyers more excited. It’s not just that pretty fluffy stuff, the science behind it.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, lawyers often say, and law students as well say they went to law school because they didn’t want to do math or technology or science or draw ideate, even write on post-it notes for that matter. I think they intend that as a joke sort of, but it’s not really, really funny anymore. So two weekends ago I was at a two day legal design thinking event on improving debt collection in the us. It was very structured, facilitated and the results that came out were really amazing and I don’t think could have been predicted at the beginning. And so I love that structured approach to creativity with the idea it’s something both anybody can do and that it can be learned. So could you tell us some of the ways you’re trying to change the way lawyers look at the world through some of the exercises and approaches that you take?

Tessa Manuello:

Yeah, absolutely. And I love the fact that you’ve mentioned the post-its and the sticky notes and we not used to sticky notes, we use word paper PDFs now, but sticky notes are super useful tools for us to mark down ideas to let our creativity be expressed freely. And when I talk about creativity here, I’m just talking about generating ideas. So usually what we do is we want to solve a challenge, we want to solve a problem or maybe we just want to improve a situation or something. So if we were to use the creative process after we’ve defined a challenge, we would start ideating on those sticky notes and sticky notes helps us achieve a couple of amazing things. First, it gives you the ability to explore the new, and this is something we don’t necessarily do because in law we always look at the past, we always look at the precedent for being able to make an argument in the present, but here we’re trying to look at the future.

So it’s a very different mindset, it’s a very different perspective. So we’re trying to look at the future and explore the new explore possibilities. Once we do that with the sticky notes, not only we explore the new, but we do that in a collaborative setting, everyone can put anything on those sticky notes and that actually makes the whole process so much faster than if we were having a conversation and trying to brainstorm ideas like we’re talking right now. It would take a long time if everyone had to say one idea at a time, using the sticky notes actually speed up the process. And by the end of the brainstorm where we do it, we do a selection of those ideas that we want to implement. And for that we can use many tools. There’s the impact effort metrics that is so wonderful. It’s a little bit like the Eisenhower metrics, meaning that you want to pick ideas that are easy to implement.

So you get those quick wins that do not take so much effort so you don’t have to invest so much time, energy, resource. And then eventually you make an implementation plan, you test, you see if it works, you keep whatever works, whatever doesn’t work, you just leave it out and you iterate. So that it ready process is very important. It’s about learning from the feedback you get. And that also means having an experimental approach, which can be difficult to implement in law because we are trained to get the answer. And with innovation there is no right answer, the right answer. You find it as you start the journey you test, you learn from the feedback, you iterate and eventually you have something that really works. Same for the programs. I’ve created a Lego creatives. When I started I didn’t know exactly what was going to work, but I just knew I had to start to learn what would resonate with my audience, what is it that they really like, what techniques are really useful and powerful?

And then just building on what works until you have a final product that is much more likely to be successful than if you try to get the perfect answer without asking for feedback. It just doesn’t work that way. So innovation is this collaborative process. There are so many techniques we can use the sticky notes, brainstormings are wonderful, but there are so many other techniques I’ve mentioned the impact effort metrics to also prioritize and make selections, but this is just a lot more, but I’m so fascinated, I’m just so excited for this. So I could talk for hours, but you even forgot the answer, the question, and this is when I’m going to start speaking Italian or Portuguese. Let’s,

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we have a lot more to talk about with Tessa Manuello, but before we do that, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Tessa Manuello at Legal Creatives. We found in the Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guests career path and our audience really does as well. Your career path I expect is really fascinating. So could you talk about that and the kinds of things that you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus on legal design and innovation?

Tessa Manuello:

Sure. Well, I mean some of the things I did, the first thing I did is at the time when I was working at the time of Paris in dispute resolution, it was like 20 years ago we didn’t have the technology we have today. We didn’t have access to all the information we have today online. I think at the time I didn’t even have Facebook or all those apps, so I had limited knowledge. So at the time I was like, what am I going to do? And I said, well maybe I just need to go change continents because I thought, okay, north America, I was in France, north America is the country for creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship. And I decided to make my way there to be closer to innovation. I knew there was something I wanted with that. So I started learning, attending conferences and I think the conferences and the summits and the events were a big game changer for me.

In 2013, I was in Toronto, Canada, and this is when I attended my first creativity conference and I had no idea we could use creativity in professional settings. There were people who were psychologists, researchers, educators, innovators, scientific and so many other professionals that were using creativity to help organizations create a better workplace, create better processes, innovate, create new products, new services. And I was just so astonished I had never thought about it. So I think attending events, attending conferences, or even now listening to podcasts, I mean at the time there were very few podcasts. Now we have so many amazing podcasts and I’m so impressed this is like 300 plus episodes. So well done to both of you for that. It’s just amazing. So being in contact with new concepts and new people I think was key in my journey. And then having the consistency, having the perseverance to continue on this path because it is not an easy feast.

You’re going to have to overcome challenges, you’re going to have to overcome resistance. So you need to make sure that this is something you really want to do, that something you really love to do. So for me, creativity is part of my I kai the Japanese concept for purpose of life. It’s really part of who I am and what I love. So I’m okay with having challenges and having to overcome breakthrough. I can deal with that because I’m super motivated. But if you’re not so motivated, maybe tech is the best, is another option. Or maybe it’s wellbeing or self-care. I have met amazing lawyers in recent conferences who decided to talk about humor in law, who decided to talk about self-care in law. So whatever is your i kai, whatever is your reason for being, what is it you’re passionate about? Was it you’re good at? What is it the world needs and is ready to pay for? Then just find that sweet spot and go for it. So for me, that IGI Kai moment was just so amazing and this is how I got started. So yeah, to recap, meet people, go to events, network, educate yourself this turn of free content out there and just hang out with people that inspire you and then start the journey.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, it is time for our obligatory questions about artificial intelligence. It is a very much over-hyped subject that we nevertheless need to make sure we are covering appropriately. And we get to ask this question in the context of other areas of the law, but we don’t get to ask it very often in terms of legal design. So what role do you see tools like chat GPT playing in legal design? And I’m assuming, given that I struggle so much with this, I assuming that creativity plays a huge part in all of this because my just basic use of it requires a lot of creativity in order to get the most out of the tool. What are you seeing as the best uses for it in what you’re working on?

Tessa Manuello:

Yeah, great question. Chat is absolutely phenomenal for legal design. And let me explain why it’s so useful because in the legal design methodology, what we want to do is we want to make the language more accessible for readers. So that’s one of the core component of the legal design approach is to ensure that contracts or privacy policies or compliance guidelines are fit for the readers. And so we want to sort of eliminate the legalese and all the jargon and all the technical words and replace them with more accessible words depending on who we are serving. And that is actually not an easy task. It can take a lot of time and CGBD helps with that or ai, whatever tool we want to use for generating text, this is absolutely a game changer because it’s speed up the process, it gives you text that is almost ready to use because you always have to check the text, you have to make tweaks and changes.

So it’s not like you put it all in chat GPT, and then you take whatever chat GPT or whatever tool you use spits out and you really have to review as if you were going to review work from an intern or even from a colleague and you just review and then you make those changes. But it’s not just for the plain language and turning the text into in a more accessible way, it’s also to brainstorm ideas. So continuing on this idea of redesigning legal documents and when we use legal design, we usually think of visuals, incorporating visuals into your document to ensure the document is easier to process, the information, easier to find and easier to understand and so easier to use. And even for the visualization, you can use your GPD whatever version you use, you don’t even need to have the visual version.

In fact, you can just brainstorm with chat GBD ideas as to how can you make this concept visual and chat. GBD is going to surprisingly find amazing ideas to help you with that visualization strategy for your Lego docs. So if you don’t know where to start, just start with any gene AI tool and use it to simplify the language to make sure it’s going to be fit for your audience and make sure to specify who is your audience. Because if you don’t specify charge, beauty doesn’t really know you have to provide the context. That’s very important. You have to provide the text and making sure that you delete any confidential information. So you have to respect all of that and then brainstorm ideas for the visual aspect. And it’s so amazing what chat GBD gives you, but also you can use the Jane AI to create chat chatbots.

There are so many professionals now working in-Law who are creating chatbots, plugging inside the tool, their own documentation, the list of resources and creating a bot to solve specific problems or to help users achieve specific task or goals. And that is all the design process, that is all designing a new tool. So you have to think about the content that is relevant, you put it in the tool and then the tool is going to work to help the user achieve the task. And this whole process is designed, it’s designing a new tool, a new product, even a new service. And so that’s why I think this Jane AI revolution is absolutely fantastic for the legal design community. It helps speed up the process, it helps find fresh ideas. And very often legal designers are working either Solo or in small teams. So it’s a fantastic AI assistant or coworker to get inspiration

Dennis Kennedy:

As a follow-up. I’m so intrigued by this approach and these uses of generative ai. So at the design thinking event, we did human ideas in the sort of standard like write down ideas in a few minutes and do three rounds of that. And then we switched over to Chad GPT to have it generate 25 ideas. And I think that’s the piece that’s really interesting is because lawyers say I don’t have ideas, I’m afraid to put out a dumb idea, but it’s okay to just have the Chad GPT do that. And then like you said, the visualization thing is interesting because if you can’t draw well or feel you can’t draw, well maybe there’s a way that you can generate a visual that will be helpful to you. So I usually find myself, and I don’t think this is a great answer to people, I like just getting my hands on the gen AI tools and trying stuff. So how would you suggest that the profession get ready for the AI era and what examples of AI uses seem most exciting to you that are coming in the next couple of years?

Tessa Manuello:

Well, that’s a good question and I like what you have just said about if you don’t have any ideas, just ask Gene AI to help. And I think this is fantastic. And you can even say, give me 50 ideas, a hundred ideas. It seems like those tools, they have endless inspiration. So that’s a good way to start and that’s what I would recommend the audience to do is to start using chat PD as a brainstorming assistant to get those new ideas. And I’m pretty sure you will find a couple that you find really interesting and then you can build on that. So building on top of that. And in terms of the future of chain AI and legal design, I think we’ll see more and more legal designers work with lawyers and with institutions, public institutions to create those chatbot, to create those tools for clients and justice users at large.

So the public to actually be able to interact more with the law, with lawyers, with legal concepts and being able to solve legal problems. There are so many legal problems that remains unsolved because people don’t know where to ask for help or people think it’s going to be too expensive or too complicated. So I think there’s a lot we can do in that space to make sure that justice is truly accessible for anyone promptly and that people can start to understand how it works and how they can use it. And so I think there’s going to be phenomenal opportunities. We are already starting to see lawyers creating those chat bots for different use cases and I think we will see more and more of that in the near future and anyone can do that. It is not complicated, it’s not rocket science, it’s not like we are building a rocket to go explore a new galaxy. It’s made easy for anyone to use, so let’s just use it and use it mindfully, use it in a way that is going to help us also better serve our customers. I think this is, at the end of the day, this is what matters the most.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, well we have a lot more to talk about with Tessa Manuello, but we need to take another quick break. So we’ll take a break now to hear more from our sponsors. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis Kennedy and I’m Tom Mighell. And we are joined by our special guest, Tessa Manuello at Legal Creatives. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. The question that I want to ask is what we’ve been calling our best advice question and we want to know what is the best advice either you have received from a mentor or for someone in the past or the best advice you have for our audience or maybe both?

Tessa Manuello:

Well, that’s a good one. There’s so many things I would love to say, but I’m going to stick to one because those are the rules. One advice I would say don’t be afraid to ask for the feedback. This is critical, the legal design process, this is also absolutely essential for your creative ideas to end up being useful and impactful. So ask for the feedback not just quite too soon though, you want to let yourself explore the possibilities. In the legal design methodology, we have this tool that is called the diamond. It’s a design diamond. So you explore the possibilities and only once you have enough ideas on the table, then you kind of make a of the best ideas you want to use, you prototype them, you test them, and that’s why you ask the feedback and you see if it works or if it doesn’t and if it doesn’t work, well it’s better early in the process.

If you don’t ask for the feedback and you keep building on this idea and you realize people don’t like it after you’ve invested so much time, energy, resources, it’s going to be extremely disappointing. In fact, it happened to me back in 2017 when I started my journey. I already had this vision of working with education in this space, but I went to a tech conference and mentors told me you should use tech absolutely needed a hundred percent. So I kind of Dhir rooted and I said, okay, I’m going to explore tech. And I started building a tech tool. It was a prototype and I showcase it at the event and I realized that nobody wanted the tool and I was so grateful I got the feedback because otherwise I would have had to find investors and gather millions of dollars to make this thing happen that people didn’t want.

So it’s hard to get the feedback, it’s hard to ask and receive the feedback, but it’s a blessing. It’s a blessing because you’re going to save so much time and I just find it so useful. So ask for the feedback. It doesn’t have to be a complex process. You can just pick up the phone or send an email to one of your client and say, Hey, remember that legal opinion I gave you? I would be very curious to know how did you like it, how useful was it? Is there any ways we can do the service better for you? What is it you wish was possible? And you’ll see what people tell you. Maybe say, I wish it was faster, I wish it was easier, I wish it was, I don’t know, whatever. And you use that to fuel your creative process so that you can brainstorm ideas based on the feedback received and then go back to the customer and say, Hey look, we’ve implemented this thing, can we show you?

And well, of course you won’t bill for that, but this is just so valuable because then this is how you can enhance your legal service delivery, asking for the feedback, using that feedback as a starting point to ideate. And once you have ideated, do a simple prototype of that new version of that legal opinion or whatever it is you’re doing, and then show it again to the same client or to another client. It doesn’t even have to be a real client. You can just go out in the world and found users as we call them, so that people who would potentially become your clients and ask them for the feedback, ask them what they think about this thing. So I do that all the time. Sometimes it’s not so formal, it’s just, Hey, I have people take my courses and oh, I’ve seen you’ve complete this module. Super curious to know how did you like it? What is it you like the most about it? It can be just three lines and then people will say, oh, I love that. Oh, I wish this was possible. So you’re starting to a conversation. So I think this is the most valuable thing. Absolutely a hundred percent not easy, but really important. What do you think, Tom? Since you agree?

Dennis Kennedy:

No, I totally agree. I think that’s so valuable and I think that people don’t do it often enough and that’s something people should do a lot more of. I agree. So two questions. So how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths and innovation and design and non-traditional careers in law? That’s the first one. And then second is we like to ask who are the fresh voices in legal tech? And I would say in legal innovation as well that you would like to single out and maybe see as part of our Fresh Voices series.

Tessa Manuello:

Awesome. Well, to start the journey in innovation, non-traditional career path in law, I think the first thing to do is to find a community, a community of people that do the thing you see yourself potentially doing in the future. You may not know right now exactly what is it you want to in legal tech or legal innovation. And so that’s why communities are great. You go out and meet people and ask them questions and be curious, be open-minded, ask them what is it they do, what does it define super exciting about their job? What is it they define challenging? What are the skills that are required to do the job? When we think about legal operations that are becoming so much more popular compared to a few years back, legal operations is very different from legal design. You work more with numbers, you analytical, legal design is more creativity. So you ask questions, be curious, go meet people, join communities, take some online or in-person courses, attend events, and just get curious to know what are all the possibilities and eventually that will lead you to where you want to go. This is how I did it in the beginning. I just tried so many things until I found what I really loved. So that would be what I recommend. Fresh Voices in Legal Tech. Marie Whitmer, she’s created a Lou community, legal ops and censored community. Have you seen them? No, but that

Dennis Kennedy:

Sounds cool though.

Tessa Manuello:

Yeah, they just created this community of legal ops. They just had a two day summit in Dubai right now, I think today was day two. And they’re building a really cool community of legal ops professional around the world. And she’s a powerhouse. I think she would be

Dennis Kennedy:

Great. We do not do a lot of legal ops talk on the podcast, so I think that would be great. Alright, well we want to thank Tessa Manuello at Legal Creatives for being a guest on the podcast. Before we go, Tessa,

Tom Mighell:

Tell our audience where people can connect with you or keep up with what you’re doing.

Tessa Manuello:

Well thank you so much for the opportunity to have me on the show. It’s been really a pleasure. For the folks who want to reach out, you can find me on LinkedIn, Tessa, you can also send me an email [email protected]. And if you want to see my new surfing stories, why I’m in South America, it’s just for the surfing, just find me on Instagram. Tessa, that’s all I post there.

Dennis Kennedy:

Thank you so much, Tessa, you were fantastic guests, great information and advice for our listeners. Now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website, our observation you can use the second this podcast ends, Tessa, we’ll ask you to take it away.

Tessa Manuello:

Alright, so a piece of advice. If you don’t know where to start, just start somewhere. That’s how I started in 2013. I know it sounds crazy, but I was like, I love creativity, I want to do more of that. And I just went to a local organization at the time I was in Montreal, it was a nonprofit helping people find jobs, people seeking jobs. So I went there and said, Hey, do you want a workshop on creativity? I would love to put one for you. And said, well that would be fantastic. So I did the workshop and I had people in person and online, I can’t believe it was so innovative like 10, 15 years ago. And then people loved it and got great feedback, great reviews, and that just gave me more confidence to do it. So sometimes we’re just getting a little bit overwhelmed of trying to do it in our professional environment. We are not yet super confident about our skills. So just reach out to a nonprofit organization in your region and just say, Hey, I’d like to put a workshop on design thinking or creativity or legal tech, whatever you’re doing, and just ask if people are keen to have you and just do it, collect feedback, gain confidence, and then repeat.

Tom Mighell:

That’s awesome. Alright, so I’m going to continue what I did in the previous podcast. I am starting to experiment with copilot in Microsoft 365 and I want to report on things that I find useful or interesting. I was originally going to talk about getting creative with PowerPoint in the fact that PowerPoint will, you can create slides in PowerPoint, but I’m not going to use that tip because I’m not real happy with it right now. I’ve spent a lot of time in chat GPT creating images with Dolly and I like the quality of the work that I get from that. But if you ask PowerPoint to create an image, it’s just stock photography. It’s really boring. I need them to improve that process. So instead, what my tip is going to be, if your firm, your legal group is a Microsoft Teams user and you are using copilot, go into copilot and just ask for an update on what your teams are doing and say what is so-and-so doing, or give me an update of what I missed in the last day.

And it will give you a summary of here’s what this lawyer is working on. It’ll tell you the different documents they happen to be working on if you want to catch up with somebody that reports to you or if you just want to understand here are all the messages, I’m working on three different legal matters and I haven’t been able to pay attention to them. And copilot will tell you back here’s what you missed since you have been away. It’s a very useful I think way because with all the projects my company is involved in, I can’t keep track of everything. So it’s a great way for me to keep track of what’s going on in all those projects. Dennis

Dennis Kennedy:

Like the best day, it seems both fantastic and slightly creepy at the same time. So I’m going to do two because I thought of one while we were recording. And that is that in the lawyers kind of get freaked out with the idea of coming up with the ideas and design and stuff like that. And as Tessa pointed out, there really is kind of a science and structure to this. And so you can actually find, there are techniques out there for creating ideas and structure them like the diamond technique and other things like that. And you can use chat GPT to essentially ask it to use those structures to help you sift through ideas or generate ideas can be a really useful thing. But you’re right, Tom, I have a gadget for a change and it’s the Hessan SE or H-E-S-O-N-D, pillow speaker, bone conduction stereo, Bluetooth, wireless music, sleep headphones, which is, it’s not really a

Tom Mighell:

Mouthful at all.

Dennis Kennedy:

They aren’t really headphones because the problem if you wanted to listen to background music, so ambient music or ambient sounds to help you sleep, putting on headphones or earbuds tends to be really uncomfortable. So I tried this thing, it’s like a slim rectangular thing. You put it under your, depending on what part of the country or part of the US you’re in under your pillow slip or pillow case. But it is touching you on your head and it doesn’t even have to be that close to your ear. You hear it, but your spouse won’t hear anything because the sound is going through bone conduction and you don’t have stuff in your ears. And it’s a really interesting solution to the problem. And I think it’s, Tom will put this in the show notes, I’m sure, but I think it’s around $30 maybe less,

Tom Mighell:

Not too bad. I contributed to a Kickstarter almost a year and a half ago for a bone conduction set of earphones that are bone conduction related and I still don’t have them. It’s been a year and a half and I cannot wait to get them. But this was a Kickstarter I probably shouldn’t have funded. Alright, so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mall report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Networks page for the show. You can find all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts on the Legal Talk Network site. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can always find us on LinkedIn or remember, we always love to get your questions for our B segment. Please leave us a voicemail at 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. 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. We wanted to remind you to share the podcast with a friend or two that really helps us out. And as always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. We’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy Mighell report on the Legal Talk Network.

Speaker 1:

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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