Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Dennis Garcia

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Web 2.0 innovation collaboration, 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 365 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 spoke with Sarah Glassmeyer, director of data curation at Legal Technology Hub, and well-known as the world’s Okayest legal technologist. As part of our Fresh Voices on Legal Tech series and this episode, we’ll stay on a roll and 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 Dennis Garcia, who among other things is Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft and a visible and insightful contributor to the legal tech world. 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 in legal tech that you need to be paying attention to. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website and observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Dennis Garcia to the Fresh Voices series. Dennis, welcome to the Kennedy Model Report.

Dennis Garcia:

Well, Tom, thank you so much. It’s a real honor and privilege to be with both of you today. I mean, you’re both legal tech luminaries and I’ve listened to you guys a lot in the past and it’s been a while since we connected, but thanks so much for this opportunity.

Tom Mighell:

It’s been a while. Looking forward to it. Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit more about yourself, what your role at Microsoft is, what our audience should know about what you do?

Dennis Garcia:

Sure. Well, my name again is Dennis Garcia. I’m an assistant general counsel for Microsoft. I’m based in the Chicago area. I’ve been at Microsoft now for about 21 and a half years in my role. My team and I provide a wide range of legal support to our Microsoft America’s region sales team. Specifically, we focus on our partner solutions segment as well as our sales enablement segments of our Microsoft America’s team. I also dabble a little bit in the legal operations space as I have the privilege to lead a small team of terrific program managers and paralegals who do a lot of initial legal support, what we call our scale solution support to our Microsoft America’s region sales teams. As I mentioned, I’ve been at Microsoft for 21 and a half years. I’ve had different roles in the Microsoft Legal Department, but always in the field supporting our sales, our marketing, our technology professionals.

And I really like being in the trenches, if you will, helping our sales team close deals, try to navigate through any difficult or thorny compliance related issues or matters, really helping to solve problems, if you will, for our clients so that we can advance sales and revenue with our customers and partners. Before working at Microsoft, I worked in-house at Accenture for about five years and worked on lots of mega outsourcing and business process outsourcing deals. And before that I started my legal career back in the 20th century working in-house at IBM. Of course IBM stands for, I’ve been moved and they moved me around a little bit between Connecticut, Boulder, Colorado, and also to Chicago. And so I’ve had a unique distinction of my career and that I have always worked in-house. I have never worked for a law firm. I’ve worked for three terrific technology companies during my time, although I haven’t worked in a law firm.

Of course, I’ve partnered with lots of terrific law firms over the years. And so as I reflect upon this in my career, I’m probably more excited than ever before in this sort of era of AI and working for a company like Microsoft who of course has made massive investments in this space. And being a lawyer in the field, we’re seeing the opportunities real time with our customers and partners regarding our AI solutions and also the opportunities within our legal department as to how do we deploy our solutions to redesign and re-engineer how we deliver legal services to our business clients.

Dennis Kennedy:

It’s great, Dennis and our audience will understand why we’re so excited to have you on. But first of all, I just got to say it’s so awesome to get the dentist of legal tech together on this podcast. I remember there was a while back where people were talking about, I think it was the Davids of legal tech. There’s like a dozen Davids in legal tech or maybe more, and we realized that we were the two dentists of legal tax. So it’s always fun when we get the chance to be together. So first thing I have for you is sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology old and new and its benefits to those in the legal profession. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology, especially from the in-house perspective?

Dennis Garcia:

Sure. Happy to share a few ideas. I start off with this notion that technology is a lawyer’s best friend. And I think in this environment, especially from an in-house legal perspective where it may be the case that legal teams may not be growing in headcount where it may be the case where legal teams or budget constrained, I think there’s great opportunities to use technology to be able to help free up time and save time for us as lawyers and legal professionals to get involved in other mission critical high impact activities and to better serve our clients. I also think I view technology as really an enabler and helping us to be able to provide more value to our clients. I mentioned a few things to lawyers from an in-house perspective whenever they ask me about technology and they’re asking me more and more about AI tools, especially our latest AI tool at Microsoft known as Microsoft Copilot, which is really a digital assistant sort of a coach, which can help business people and lawyers be more productive and save time.

But I say a few things. Number one, not to be afraid of technology. There’s lots of great tech out there, but I encourage folks to try them all out, see which one may work for you and for your organization. So don’t be afraid of technology. I also encourage lawyers to when they use and deploy technology, think about how to use technology to be able to solve particular opportunities or challenges or problems. Don’t think that you have to go all in. I mean, think about smaller discrete projects to be able to solve issues. And I also believe that when you think about technology, in order to be able to get the most out of it, you have to be of course human centered. You have to use the technology. You can have the greatest technology out there, you can spend a lot of money for a technology license for certain types of technology, but it’s only good enough if people are actually using it and consuming it and being able to share information and knowledge. So you have to really get your hands dirty, if you will, and use technology and get those repetitions. And it takes time. It takes time for us to become power users of certain types of technology.

Tom Mighell:

So when we talk about learning about technology, that sort of inevitably leads us to the idea of competence. Dennis and I talk about that, about competence all the time. We tend to be grumpy about it in general about the general state. I want to ask a specific question about in-house lawyers, law department and competency. I work with lots of law departments and I want you to tell me if the way that I see it from outside is accurate. I saw that the law departments of the past were in some ways very innovative and future looking because they were the first groups in the company to come up with document management tools and things like that where the rest of the company wasn’t even doing anything. And then I sort of feel like they fell into a little bit of a lull where the IT departments and the rest of the business was catching up and being innovative and the law department was a little bit more conservative. But now since, and I don’t know if this is related to the rise of legal operations in so many companies, but I see that innovation is really coming back again to a lot of law departments, but I’m still interested to know how does that impact their technology competence? What are you seeing? And I guess I don’t know that Microsoft counts, I would expect the competency level at Microsoft to be greater than at other companies, but what are you seeing either at Microsoft or other law departments?

Dennis Garcia:

Well, and I have a fair amount of opportunities to speak to in-house lawyers of various different law departments that our customers and partners. And for what I could tell at least over the last few years, I think generally speaking, that technology competence has increased and I think it’s increased for a few reasons. Number one, I think dealing with the pandemic and being more conversant in using leading technology so that we could work in a virtual fashion and still get things done. I think the whole pandemic experience made us feel more confident and comfortable in using technology and trying out different technology. We had sort of no choice. It was sort of a forcing function. So I think that has helped enable greater technology competence. And in-house legal teams, from where I sit, I see more and more seminars and CLEs where it seems like legal technology or technologies being taught or trained to lawyers more than ever before.

Of course, we’re seeing big financial investments in the legal tech space and industry, right? We’re seeing more legal tech conferences and events. So I think there’s just more opportunities for in-house lawyers to share ideas and to learn from others through different forums. I also think when you look at legal departments all up, I mean the reality is a lot of legal departments are getting younger, right? And you have younger lawyers who grew up with technology and very comfortable in using technology, very conversant in using technology. So that’s another reason why I think tech competence has generally increased. I think you’re seeing more law schools, although we’re not there yet, but we’re seeing more and more law schools be open to teaching more about the intersection of law and technology and data and AI and how to use technology to be more of an enabler. And I also just see from this, we like to call Microsoft this sort of era of ai.

I just see a big buzz going around the sort of in-house legal community where people are really interested in trying to understand how to use AI tools, how to consume them, how to put it to work for them to be more productive. Also, how to embrace responsible AI practices to make sure that they’re using AI tools in a highly informed and thoughtful way. So we’re seeing just lots of questions and conversations from our customers on this topic of ai. I think a lot of in-house legal teams realize that there’s big investments in this space. There’s big investments which their business clients are making. Wall Street is almost sort of requiring companies to make investments and to show return on your AI investments as well. So I think a lot of in-house legal teams understand that AI is sort of here to stay and how can they use these tools in a thoughtful and smart way to be able to drive more business outcomes.

It was interesting, like last week, I’m a big fan of using social media and I put together a post on LinkedIn. It was a post of a slide, which I received from my business clients about the top 10 use cases if you’re starting to use copilot of how you can get to use copilot to work for you. And I posted it out there on LinkedIn on a Saturday morning and a few days later, I think I had about 40 something thousand views of that post. And I was a little surprised, but also not so surprised because people are really interested in learning how can they use these tools to be able to help them and to free up time for them. Quite frankly, as I mentioned earlier, as in-house lawyers, we’re constantly looking at opportunities to save time and to free up time for us to do more high impact work and to try to outsource some of the routine repetitive, maybe sometimes mundane work that we have done for such a long period of time. I think AI provides us with a unique opportunity to do just that.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I come back to this notion that I often talk about is that technology, including AI, helps lawyers practice at the top of the license, and I love that term. I want to circle back just a little bit to the ethical duty of technology competence and take a little bit of a different take on it from your perspective. What do you think the duty of technology competence should mean when you look to your outside counsel? And then people often ask me, why aren’t law pushing their outside counsel forward on technology? And I’m really interested in your perspective on both of those questions.

Dennis Garcia:

Well, on the second question, I’ve got a unique perspective being a Microsoft lawyer and we work with a number of different terrific law firms. I would say that to be an outside counsel firm for Microsoft, I mean, I think we’ve got a reasonable expectation that you should be highly conversant in being able to use leading technology, hopefully Microsoft technology to help us in providing legal advice and counsel to us. I think, I wouldn’t say we’re pushing our law firms, but we’re sort of partnering with our law firms and trying to educate them about our technology and our ways of working, which is grounded in important great Microsoft technology, which helps us to enable collaboration. As an example, Microsoft Teams. So for many of our outside council firms that we work with, they’re using Microsoft teams and we can post content with each other or we create teams, channels, and it’s a very seamless experience.

So I would say from a Microsoft perspective, we have an expectation that our firms are going to be up to speed when it comes to using leading technology so that we can serve our clients the best way. Fashion as to why maybe other legal departments may not incentivize their law firms to do the same. I’m not totally sure, but when I think of the ethical duty of technical competence, to me it comes down to understanding the risks and the benefits associated with using technology. And what that means to me at least, is that as lawyers, we need to really try to understand what a technology does, its limitations, how it can serve you. If that requires you to get some outside help from a consultant or from other folks to skill you and your team up, then you really need to do that. We saw this with regard to the cloud space several years ago where there was a variety of different ethical opinions on states from various states on using cloud computings in a legally ethical fashion.

And they talked a lot about understanding the risks and benefits associated with the cloud and getting sort of deep in that area. We’re starting to see some, I think, legal ethics opinions in the area of ai. I think we’ve seen some guidelines from California. I think we’ve seen something from New York. I think we saw something from Florida a few months ago. And again, these opinions are requiring lawyers to really spend the time to understand the technology. It doesn’t mean you need to be an expert, but you need to be, I think, highly engaged and conversant regarding that technology. You need to do the appropriate due diligence in selecting the appropriate technology providers. You need to make sure that those providers really earn your trust that they’re protecting your data and your client’s data, and that they’ve got hopefully a very strong reputation for doing so in the marketplace.

Tom Mighell:

So let’s shift directions a little bit and talk about another subject that is near and dear to our hearts here at the podcast, which is collaboration. We love to talk about collaboration technologies. So in our Fresh Voices series, we always want to learn what our experts, our guests are using to collaborate. What are your favorite ways to collaborate, whether that’s with your coworkers or colleagues or family? I already agree that Microsoft Teams is the correct answer to that, but you may have a different opinion. So go ahead.

Dennis Garcia:

Well, thanks Tom, and I agree with you wholeheartedly. Microsoft Teams is what I view as being the backbone technology and platform as to what we use every day in the Microsoft Legal Department to collaborate. And when you look at the Microsoft Legal Department, that’s a very large legal department. Many respects is like a large law firm where you have about 2000 lawyers, legal professionals, business folks scattered across the globe. And it’s really important for us to be able to collaborate at a high fashion. We want to try to reduce as many silos as possible, and all of us are using Microsoft Teams every day. I’m part of a group, which is our America’s legal support function. We’ve got about 70 or so folks across the Americas. We’ve got our own team channels on various different topics. We’re constantly posting information, lessons learned, best practices. It’s really one of our primary ways of communicating with each other across a sort of decentralized area.

We’re constantly sending instant messages to each other. We will be on conference calls with our customers and partners maybe as part of a contract negotiation and instant messaging with my colleagues, with our business clients on certain positions and how to address certain matters. So I look at Teams as sort of our backbone technology for us to be able to really collaborate and share as much information as we can with each other. And I think we do a good job. The reality is there’s more which we can do. When I think of collaboration, to me, you can never be a good enough collaborator. There’s always more opportunity to do so. And I think in a legal department, if you’re a strong collaborator that shows that you’re a terrific leader. I know that’s something which we’re really focused on in the Microsoft Legal Department. We’re also using Microsoft SharePoint.

We’ve put together a number of SharePoint portals and tools which we’re using. We have a SharePoint portal, which we use with our business clients known as Sila Web. It’s a portal which our clients can go to, which contains a lot of self-help resources do-it-yourself resources. And our clients can go there first to answer a lot of their common questions without having to engage a Microsoft lawyer or legal professional directly. And then we’ve got SharePoint portals that we use within the Microsoft Legal Department to keep track of some of the work which we’re doing to share other information and knowledge to keep track of the deals we’re working on with customers and partners. And we’ll input data into that tool. We’ll share our practices, maybe fallback, alternative language, which we use from deal to deal, and we’re trying to be even better collaborators. And then a final point I’ll say about a collaboration tool, which I’m a big fan of course, is something, well, Microsoft owns it, it’s LinkedIn and I think LinkedIn is a great way to learn from others.

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, on my LinkedIn feed, I see what people are posting. I get a sense as to what’s on the hearts and minds of our customers and partners. We have an opportunity to evangelize Microsoft’s latest thinking on issues. As an example, yesterday we issued our first ever transparency report regarding responsible ai. I share that LinkedIn post this morning, but I look at LinkedIn as a great vehicle to communicate with a wider set of stakeholders and also a great opportunity to maybe crowdsource certain issues and to hear from outside voices. Sometimes at Microsoft, like a lot of large institutions, we can certainly be in our own echo chambers. And I like the fact that with LinkedIn, hopefully you can listen to others and you can contribute and share knowledge with each other across a range of industries.

Tom Mighell:

I think it’s funny, I was trying to think about what it was like before Teams was around as a collaboration tool, and I just don’t know how we got any work done when that happened. It, it’s so hard to think about it. It’s kind of weird now. Alright, we have a lot more to talk about with Dennis Garcia at Microsoft. But before that, we need to take a quick break for a message from our sponsors. And we’re back with Dennis Garcia at Microsoft. Dennis, we found in our Fresh Voices series that our audience really loves to hear about our guest career paths. We love to hear about it as well. Would you talk about what your career path has been? What are the things that you’ve done to get to where you currently are and what your focus is at Microsoft?

Dennis Garcia:

Sure. Well, I’ll give my focus first. Maybe I’ll answer that to the second question first. But as I mentioned earlier, my team and I provide legal support to our Microsoft America’s partner solutions team, as well as our sales enablement and marketing and operations team. And I also dabble a little bit in the legal operations space where there’s folks on my team who are delivering what we call legal services at scale, basically to our 10,000 strong Microsoft America’s sales team where they’re answering a lot of the sort of common repetitive questions that we see from our customers, from our clients, excuse me. First, we want our clients to use our self-help resources whenever possible to answer those questions and we redirect our clients to our self-help resources. Then my team will get involved if there is a deeper need for a tier two level legal support function.

But in terms of what my team and I do, it’s a little bit of a general counseling sort of function. We probably spend about 25% of our time putting contracts in place with our partners, many of whom are also our customers. So we’ve got a variety of partnership agreements that we put in place with our partners slash customers. When you look at the Microsoft partner ecosystem, it’s a large ecosystem. It’s really an extension of our sales force. And in order for Microsoft to be successful partners make things very possible for us basically. So our ecosystem with our partners is very, very important. But when we work with our partners, we need to be smart from a compliance perspective to make sure that we’re treating them in an equitable and proportionate fashion. We need to make sure that when they’re sharing, when we’re sharing information pertaining to our customers with our partners, that we’re doing so in a thoughtful, responsible way in accordance with our contracts.

So there’s a lot of general legal source of issues which can come up in supporting our partner team as well as supporting our sales enablement and operations team. We see a lot of marketing related collateral and material which is being created to help our salespeople in the field sell our solutions. So many of the collateral and documents needs to be reviewed from a legal perspective, and we have sort of standard self-help practices, which our clients can also embrace as part of that review. So I would say that my practice is varied in nature from a general legal perspective. In terms of my career path, although I have largely been with one company for most of my career, 21 years and six months, I will say that what I’ve learned is the importance of change. Microsoft has changed a lot over the past 10 years or so in the Satya Nadela era as is been our CEO, our legal department continues to evolve and change, and I’ve had different roles as a lawyer in the field.

I’ve had now three different managers in the past three years or so. So to me, even though I’ve been at one company for a large portion of my career, I have found that I have had to really embrace a lot of change and be comfortable in dealing with change, change in business clients, change in leaders, change in teams, which I’ve been leading. And I do believe that an important skillset for any lawyer to be successful over a long period of time is to be comfortable in navigating through change. Change is hard. Change is hard in our profession and our personal lives, but I think the lawyers who could be most successful in driving most impact or those who recognize that they have to be comfortable in navigating and embracing change.

Dennis Kennedy:

So Dennis, let’s jump into the AI question or the whole AI issue. So it’s top of mind for everybody these days. So I want to get your sort of unique perspective on this and welcome you to focus on Microsoft copilot because I’m interested in learning more about that. But so couple of questions that are related on this, but sort of what role do you see these tool AI and the AI tools actually playing in legal technology and maybe some specific examples. And then again from the in-house side, and you talked about this just a minute ago, but what are the uses that seem really exciting to you in the in-house setting? What are you seeing that outside counsel is bringing to you and the lawyers who are afraid of losing their jobs are being replaced by ai? What are they missing if they’re thinking in that way? So complicated question, but I’ll let you run with it.

Dennis Garcia:

Yeah, no, there’s a lot there. It’s a great set of questions. I mean, I’ll try to answer a few of them to the best of my ability. I will say that what excites me is the ability to save time. I do think AI tools, maybe if it’s not just legal tech AI tools, but general AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot can really help us save some time and effort. And I’m seeing that every day as to how I’m using copilot. As an example, I use Microsoft Copilot to help review my emails. As a Microsoft lawyer, I send a fair amount of emails, but a lot of my business clients, of course, do not want lengthy emails, which of course is to be expected. So I use copilot to run a quality assurance through some of my emails to make them more succinct to review them from a tone and sentiment area.

I also sometimes when writing my emails, I may be stuck. I may have writer’s block and it’s hard for me to generate a new idea. Copilot can help with an initial draft of some of my communications in the emails. I also use copilot, as I mentioned earlier with regard to PowerPoint presentations. As Microsoft lawyers, we deliver a fair amount of PowerPoint presentations. I can put together a detailed Word document as to what I want to cover, and then copilot can transform that into an initial set of slides, and it’s using aspects of PowerPoint, which I probably wouldn’t be using on my own. As I use that function more and more, it becomes more familiar with my tendencies and what I want to see in my slides. And then once I have that initial version, I can sort of hone that slide deck and evolve it and change it over a period of time, but it’s saving me time from having to start my slides from ground zero.

I also have been using copilot as part of our teams meetings, and there’s a lot of team meetings which are recorded. I may not be able to participate at all those meetings, but what’s nice about copilot, there’s copilot will provide you with a summary of the key takeaways from those meetings. So a lot of times I may not have to listen to those meetings sort of on demand. Instead I’ll get the output as to what was covered in those meetings, and that’s saving me some time and effort. So I think number one, the opportunity to save time and give back time by using generative AI tools, I think is very compelling. I think there’s also great opportunities to use these tools to serve your clients by using them as chat bots to answer discreet repetitive questions that we see time and time again. We serve a team of 10,000 sales professionals across the Americas, and we’re getting the constantly similar questions time and time again, a lot of repetitive work.

And there’s a way which we can automate that work to be able to address those questions or iterations of those questions. A lot of those answers and questions may be sort of a lower risk from a legal perspective, but to the extent that we can automate 10, 15, 20% of that work through AI or through chatbots or through copilots, again, that will free us up time to do more mission critical work, which our business clients want us to do. I’ve also, in my experience as a lawyer, my sort of skillset, if you will, is in the area of shaping, negotiating and closing deals, contracts with customers and partners. I think there’s great opportunities to use AI tools to do just that. We see there are some really good tools out there which can help. I think these tools will advance over a period of time, but there’s great opportunities for these AI tools if you’re in the midst of a negotiation, to be able to offer up alternative provisions to maybe give you negotiating strategies on how to position address issues which come up from our customers or partners.

And I think using these tools can help us practice law at sort of the highest level of our license from a strategic perspective to get us out of some of the routine grunt work, which we may do as part of these negotiations and to provide even higher value. So to me, that’s another area. I think these tools also can help us engage in smart risk taking. We talk a lot in the Microsoft legal department about smart risk taking, how to enable our clients to take very thoughtful and smart business risk. I think as these tools become even more advanced and based and you look at the patterns or data of certain issues or matters and the tendencies of issues, you may be able to quantify what’s the potential risk of making a decision and what’s the impact of that and that you can provide better legal services to your clients. So I think there’s a lot which you can use these AI tools for. I would just say I wouldn’t be overwhelmed with all the possibilities. I would go back to trying to figure out how to use these tools to solve particular issues or matters for your clients, and then use those tools in that fashion.

Tom Mighell:

I think that is so important and that’s great advice. We’ve got a lot more to talk about with Dennis Garcia at Microsoft. But before we do that, we need to take another quick break for a message from our sponsors.

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 are joined by our special guest, Dennis Garcia at Microsoft. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. This is what we call Dennis, our best advice question, which is what’s the best advice either that you have for our listeners or that you’ve been given in your lifetime, or maybe both if you’ve got both?

Dennis Garcia:

That’s a great question. Best advice. I think it’s this notion about being able to embrace change and to feel comfortable with change. When I think of change, the ability to be confident in dealing with change, the ability to make sure you’re continuing to collaborate, the ability to be very communicative and make sure that you’re communicating with impact. But I think this whole notion of feeling comfortable with change and dealing with change head on basically is an important skill set for all of us.

Dennis Kennedy:

Then I have the two final questions we ask our guests. I’ll do this a little bit of a lead in the law. Students I teach have become really interested in going into corporate law departments or legal operations and looking at alternative career paths to the traditional law firm approach. So I know that you get asked that question a lot, but how do you typically encourage today’s law students to find career paths in those areas? And then the last question we have for you is, who are the other fresh voices in legal tech that you might like to single out and see as part of our Fresh Voices series?

Dennis Garcia:

Sure. I mean, I would encourage all of your listeners, law students, maybe more junior lawyers to really be very active on social media, LinkedIn, X slash Twitter. A lot of the leading voices in the legal tech space are active on social media. They’re posting content, they’re demonstrating their thought leadership. I would say follow those folks. Also, be bold and don’t be shy in reaching out to them directly, seeing if they’d be willing to make themselves available for a chat and to kind of pick their brains, if you will, as to how they progressed in their careers. The other thing, in terms of fresh voices, I have a few. Number one, I would say, and maybe not a fresh voice, people who’ve been around for a while in our area, but I’m a big fan of Ari Kaplan. Ari has a lunch, a virtual lunch every day.

I try to attend that lunch once or twice a week where he brings together a number of legal tech leaders for a conversation on a variety of topics. But Ari is definitely at the epicenter as to what’s going on in our industry. Also, David Cowen, I have participated in David’s events recently, the Cowen Cafe and the Solid Event, and I was really very impressed by the speakers he had and the range of topics that they’ve talked about. And I’ll also just mention a few other folks very briefly at David’s event, the solid event a few weeks ago in Chicago, I had the opportunity to connect with Anna Richards, who was a guest speaker at the Solid Event. She’s a director of legal operations at John Deere, had a wealth of knowledge and has worked for different companies, and I would definitely encourage you guys to connect with her as a fresh voice. I also know the chief legal officer at Exterra. Her name is Jennifer Hamilton. She actually used to work at John Deere several years ago. I remember working on a deal with Jennifer, but Jennifer is also a terrific thought leader in this space. And then I’ll give you one more, Stephanie Curcio, who is the CEO and founder of a company called NL Patent, which is an AI enabled patent search company. Stephanie is certainly an up and coming leader in the legal tech space. I think she’s a great fresh voice as well. Well,

Tom Mighell:

You just stocked our podcast for the next six months. So those are awesome suggestions. We want to thank Dennis Garcia, assistant General Counsel at Microsoft and a legal tech consigliere for being a guest on the podcast. Dennis, tell our audience where they can get in touch with you or learn more about what you’re doing.

Dennis Garcia:

Sure. By all means, please connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. Just check me out, Dennis Garcia and would love to connect with you. You can also connect with me on Twitter at Dennis C. Garcia. That’s my handle. And then finally, if you want to reach out to me directly at work, my email address is Dennis, D-E-N-N-I-S-G-A, Dennis [email protected]. So feel free to reach out to me.

Dennis Kennedy:

So thank you so much, Dennis. You’re a fantastic guest. Great information, great advice for our listeners, and it’s so great to get the dentists of Legal Tech together. Now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends, Dennis, we’re going to let you take it away.

Dennis Garcia:

Oh, that one tip. Well, of course, being the Microsoft lawyer, I’m a little biased here too, but check out Microsoft Co-Pilot. Please check it out. Perhaps your company may have a license to it, an existing license to it, or you’ve just acquired it, but try it out. Don’t be shy. Put it through the test and hopefully it can help you save time and be more productive.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, my tip this week, and Dennis Garcia, close your ears because I’m about to say an anti Microsoft thing for one second. For the longest period of time, I have used a Microsoft USBC hub to connect ethernet cables, USBC, everything to my laptop. It’s great and it’s wonderful. However, I needed two USBA plugs and that didn’t have it. And so I needed to find something else and leave it to anchor. Anchor has got the hubs that have like 4,000 different plugs on them. The Anchor 5 5 5 USBC hub. It’s only 30 bucks, and it got me what I needed. So it’s a good option if you’re not using the Microsoft tool. And you need, I know I’ve mentioned the Microsoft Hub on this podcast before, but if you need something with two USBA hubs, this will get her done, Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:

And it’s springtime. We’re headed into summer. And that always means for me that if you work in a big building that they cannot get the H-V-V-A-C working in a way that’s acceptable to you, and usually it means it’s just too dang hot. And so I found something called the Gaia Top, G-A-I-A-T-O-P-U-S-B desk fan. Three speeds Small, really has strong airflow, and it’s already making a world of difference, and we’re just at the difference in order to at the 1st of May.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up, this edition of the Kennedy Mall Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on Legal Talk Network’s page for our show. You can find all of our previous podcasts with transcripts on the Legal Talk Network website. If you’d like to subscribe to our podcast, you can do that also on the Legal Talk Network site in Apple iTunes, or in your favorite podcast app. If you want to get in touch with us, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn or remember, we still love to get your voicemails to talk with questions for our B segment. That number is 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 podcast with a friend or two that helps us out. 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.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for listening to the Kennedy Mighell report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, the Lawyers Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, smart Ways to Work Together from a Books or Amazon. And join us every other week for another edition of the Kennedy Mighell Report, only on the Legal Talk Network.