Is there a New iPad in your Legal Toolbox?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Introduction:

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 366 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 visited with Microsoft’s Dennis Garcia. As part of our Fresh Voices in legal tech interview series, Dennis gave us perspectives from the law department world. We highly recommend the episode. In this episode we wanted to look at Apple’s latest iPad announcements and revisit the role iPads might play in your tech toolbox. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report, we will indeed be looking at the new line of iPads and what they might mean for lawyers and whether that might mean that you should buy one In the second segment. We’ll be having our good friend chat, GPT, ask us a question it has generated from our audience’s point of view, 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 want to do something we haven’t done in a while and that’s talk about new gadgets and specifically new iPads. For those of you not paying attention, last week Apple announced some new iPads for the first time in a while, and so we thought we might take the opportunity to give our thoughts on whether we ought to buy one and by connection you ought to buy one. Dennis, did you immediately order a new iPad like I did? Just kidding. My answer might surprise you.

Dennis Kennedy:

It’s funny, Tom, you should know me well enough that I’ll always wait until Apple’s back to school sale to save a few bucks, but the new line did get me thinking about iPads and their sort of place in my technology world and whether a new iPad might fit into that and the reasons why that might happen. How about you?

Tom Mighell:

Well, of course, and it is no secret on this podcast that I’m always thinking about buying the latest and greatest gadgets. I have very much the need to have new things and it’s just a knee-jerk reaction that I have when I look at things. I’m going to talk more about this later, but I might eventually buy one of these iPads, but I am in no rush right now. We’ll talk about the reasons why, but I am excited to see new technology, but I’m not drooling either

Dennis Kennedy:

And I think that it is worth mentioning. I just want to point people to, Jeff Richardson wrote a really comprehensive post about the new iPad line and lawyers and also talked about the same thing in his podcast with Brett Bernie and I think he did a really nice job of explaining the options and why a lawyer might want to buy one or the other, or anybody might want to buy one model or another. So I definitely want to point people to that. So I don’t know if you had the same reaction to what Jeff and Brett did time, but I thought it was really helpful.

Tom Mighell:

No, I think that not only Jeff’s blog post, but in the news podcast I will put links to both in the show notes and we are both big fans of both Jeff and Bernie, but I’m going to be real for a minute. They are Apple’s ultimate fan boys. I mean they are. I say this with all love to both of you, Jeff and Brett, but you are unabashedly enthusiastic about Apple products. I think there are some other things we need to talk about with regard to these iPads that might also help people decide about whether to buy one or not. I think that the use case for purchasing an iPad depends on more than just the features that that iPad has. There’s more to it than just, here are the things that you should love about the iPad. There are other pieces about it, and so I think we need to cover those and that’s why I’m glad we’re talking about ’em here.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, and I would say that although we think Jeff’s analysis is really good, we think we can add a little something to it, and I think that what we bring to it is, and for me is I just think it’s a good time to think about the place of an iPad in your tech toolbox and then that also why I like to go back to the fact that you are really the iPad pioneer for lawyers and frankly are the author of possibly the most successful legal tech book ever, which was on iPads. So I’m curious to get your reaction or your current thinking on iPads, which I know we’re going to dig into and I have a suspicion that you like me have kind of mixed opinions on iPads these days.

Tom Mighell:

I think that’s probably accurate. I blush when you talk about my expertise on the iPad and I will say that at one point in time I paid a lot more attention to iPads than I do now. I think that when the iPad first came out, there was a lot of interest generated in how can these tools work for lawyers. At the time, there were a lot of use cases that made sense. I’m not a hundred percent convinced that all of those use cases still make the same sense. I will say that if I were still a practicing lawyer, as a litigator, as a litigator, having an iPad would be a no-brainer. Being able to take an iPad into a Courtroom or another place to do presentations is a must have because it makes you your own legal technologist in the Courtroom or wherever you happen to be going.

You don’t have to rely on bringing someone with you to show evidence or do anything. I think it’s a no brainer if I’m a transactional lawyer or some of the lawyer, I don’t know that I’m automatically convinced about that. I think that to a certain extent, again, we’ll talk more about this a little later, laptops do a better job than iPads do. So I think that my ultimate thought about lawyers, and I’ll just come out and say it and then I’ll explain more about my thinking in a little bit, is that for lawyers litigators, I think an iPad is a solid buy and one of these iPads, if you either don’t have an iPad or you’re looking to upgrade from an older one, then I think that these are awesome choices and I think you should make that if you are not a litigator and you’re going to be, you want an iPad, it’s really going to be because you want to take something light with you on a vacation or when you don’t want to bring your laptop with you, but you still need something to edit a document or look at email or do something, but it’s not going to be a heavy working device that you’re going to do a lot of work on.

I just feel like for lawyers and lawyers who are not litigators, that there are better options out there and everybody can hate me for that, but I’m just how I feel these days. How about you, Dennis?

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, I think that’s right. The other thing that I’ve always thought about iPads is that once law firms decided that they were luxury items that they weren’t going to pay for and that lawyers and others had to buy them themselves, I think that had a big impact on the development of the use of the iPad in the legal industry because if a laptop does, especially the laptops that have touch on them can do basically what you’re talking about there and you have to dig into your own pocket to buy an iPad which you may not get support from the IT department for and other things like that, then I think it’s a difficult decision to make. I also think that for me, the last iPad I bought was right before covid and I had the perfect use case for it. I understood exactly what it was going to do for me, it had a lot to do with travel and other things like that.

And then once the travel portion of what I was doing just faded away to nothing, I hardly even used that iPad anymore. And that has been a really significant lesson to me and I see that piece of it as this almost like a bridge device where it can do certain things really well, but there are times when you want a laptop, there might be times when you desktop and the iPad makes sense as is in between device and for some special uses, like you say, Tom and Litigator go to court, those kinds of things. And I think unless you have those specific uses, it is hard to justify paying your own money out of pocket for that. Not that I’m not considering that and may very well do that. The other thing, Tom, is kind of we’re going back to the original thinking about iPads and some of that stuff actually does come back out, which is I think if you went to this podcast in the earliest times we were talking about iPads, we had this big discussion about whether it was a consumption device and not a creation of device, and I think that’s still an important issue.

Tom Mighell:

It is, but it’s funny because my best use case now for an iPad is as a consumption device. That is how based on the work that I do, I primarily, and you and I have I think very different use cases these days because I use the iPad mini exclusively. I have another iPad that I use in the kitchen for recipes, but right now that’s basically all I use it for. I take it on vacation so we can watch videos, but I don’t use it very often. I use my iPad mini every single day. It’s the same size as a Kindle. I read books, I read articles, I read RSS feeds. That’s what I use it primarily for. Sometimes I’ll watch videos on it, but usually not. I am usually consuming text-based content and it’s perfect. The larger iPad as a reading device is I believe hazardous to my health.

I would read in bed and I think I’ve talked about this before on the podcast, I would fall asleep and have the iPad just bon down onto my head when I fall asleep. Can’t happen with an iPad mini doesn’t happen. The announcements though, as I saw things, the announcements made me think more about content creators and artists video and audio editors and people who would be doing more creative things than what I would consider knowledge workers, like lawyers, people who would be creating Word documents and Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint files and things like that. So while lawyers I think can certainly use the new iPad successfully, I’m not convinced that they were part of Apple’s target audience in this particular release. Now, there are some things about the new iPads that will make it useful for lawyers, but I still think that the target use case for these new iPads are people who are going to draw on it or be creative or do something that is technically complicated using a medium that they wouldn’t ordinarily use.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I think that’s right with the focus on a new version of the pencil that definitely has some features along those lines. I see that as well. I also noticed, and people have commented on that the new line has larger devices and much thinner devices, but no update or no new version of the iPad mini what I became. And so I think that consumption piece is one of the things that I was really interested in to read on, but then I sort of shifted to, so then iPhone is fine for me for that, but as I want to do note taking and other things like that, and ultimately I see an iPad in my future as being an AI device that the larger iPad feels like it makes more sense to me. And so I think that size piece is important for the reasons that you say Tom. And I think that’s part of the reason I’ve struggled with finding a place for my iPad mini because probably the larger one does make sense because it didn’t turn into the reading device that I expected it to.

Tom Mighell:

Well, it’s interesting because I’ve been going to some, the charity that I work with, the show that we put on every year, I’ve been going to rehearsals and I in the past had brought my iPad because I needed to pull up a spreadsheet or work on it, but this week I knew I was only going to be taking notes and I decided to take my remarkable tablet with me instead because I find that the writing experience on that is to me a lot more natural than writing on an iPad. It feels more like writing than doing that. So that’s not even something I’ve been less inclined to bring it along to do something like that, but I think it makes sense. That’s a use case that just doesn’t work particularly well for me.

Dennis Kennedy:

I would say also, I noticed phones got bigger, their screens got better. You had such a big choice of apps that where the iPad actually fit into your tech stack became a little bit harder to figure out. And because it is definitely not a laptop replacement, it’s hard to see situations, especially in the legal world where it could be, so you still need a laptop. So then you’re saying like, oh, do I take two devices with me? Even if one’s very light and small, a number of issues there. And I think it is once you get past that, like, oh my God, new gadgets, they’re so cool, they have all these advances. I have to have one to actually start to think it through. It becomes, I mean, you really have to do a lot of thought I think to figure out where this is going to work for you and where it fits in. So Tom, I wanted to ask you about, maybe just talk about what compelled you to write your first iPad books and then what you’ve learned and how you’re thinking has maybe evolved about iPads since those early days.

Tom Mighell:

Well, when I wrote the original books, it’s because the iPad at the time really represented kind of a revolutionary technology. It was a different way of interacting with technology and a way that was I think really more accessible to lawyers than other technology at the time would’ve been is that this was something that a lawyer could easily learn how to do and use and be productive with in a law practice where working with a laptop or other computer would be more challenging. Knowing lawyers and their unwillingness to adopt technology, I thought the iPad is actually that great. You call it a bridge device. It’s that great bridge device that is easy to use and that people could actually start maybe if I learn how to use the iPad, maybe that also helps me be better with other technology. And that’s really what kind of excited me about all of it.

I think that I mentioned this before, so I won’t go into it too much, but my thinking has evolved a little where I still think that the iPad is a must have for litigators and then other lawyers. I think they’re a nice to have, are they a must have? They’re not a laptop replacement. I’ve tried many times to use Microsoft 365 on an iPad and I can get things done, but it’s just not the same experience as on a laptop. I have a lot more power, a lot more things I can do. I just can’t use the iPad in the same way. So it’s never going to be a laptop replacement in that regard for me anyway. And I don’t think for a lot of lawyers who are used to working on laptops, so my thinking has changed a little bit. I think we’ve moved on that the people who have wanted to learn about that technology and iPads have bought an iPad, they’ve taken it. I had be really interested to know how many lawyers just haven’t bought an iPad who are really looking at this new offering for the first time and deciding to do it. I sort of feel like the time you either bought an iPad and you’re ready to upgrade or you, you’re just not part of the iPad family.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I’d also say that for me, I think my dad loves his iPad and is almost like how I think of him now is with his iPad. And I think for kids, the iPad’s absolutely amazing, but I think in the legal profession, the people who are in the iPad world probably have been in there for a while and you don’t see people jumping in there, and I think it’s because the firms are just not supporting it and buying it for people. But I want to wrap up this segment a little bit, Tom, which is reflecting on what about these new products change their thinkings or this incremental why does it? And I’ll start by saying that you can talk about thinness, you can talk about better screens, you can talk about all these different things, but with what got me on iPad and why I’m thinking about it is the M four chip and it’s as a platform for ai. And that’s the only version of the iPad I’m thinking about is one that has an M four chip. And I just see it as a potential easy to use AI device. And that’s what’s got me excited about this and in a way, don’t, I’m not going to go to the high end on this because they do get fairly expensive, but that’s where I’m headed and it’s all about the chip, which is kind of a weird place to be in technology these days.

Tom Mighell:

Okay, I’m going to say some unpopular things now to some people. What I’m just going to say, I view the change with the exception perhaps of the M four chip. I view the changes to the new iPads to be a spec bump. There’s nothing revolutionary. And we’re going to talk a little bit about are there ever any truly revolutionary tech announcements these days when people update a phone or anything, it’s just not happening. So I’m, it’s not unusual to me, but I mean there’s more brightness here. There’s more speed there. There’s lightness. We’ve reduced the size of the battery, all spec bumps. The M four chip I think is a pretty impressive spec bump. And when you think about the speed as well as the capacity for ai, although I’m going to say what are they going to do? AI on an iPad that’s going to make it a more compelling device than what you’re using AI on other devices for.

I mean, if it’s the capability to be actually able to do all of it on the device itself without an internet connection, then that’s interesting and compelling. But I’m going to be interested to see what Apple’s case for AI on the iPad is going to wind up looking like. Before I’m probably going to buy one whether or not the AI comes out, but I’m interested to see what that happens. But let’s be fair, do any of these spec bumps really help out the lawyer who’s drafting a Word document or an expel spreadsheet or answering email? Probably not. It’s great if you consume videos and depositions. Like I said, this is great for litigators, but I’m just not convinced that the new products change my thinking. Em, I think they’re great. I love them. I’m going to buy one eventually, but it’s not the next sliced bread. We need to take a quick break. We’ve been talking way too long, so we’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors and then we’ll be right back to talk more some of the new iPads

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back. Tom, really simple question. What are you planning to do? What are you going to buy? And when

Tom Mighell:

I’m holding steady for right now, my problem is is that I’m coming up for vacation in the middle of July, and boy, it sure would be nice to have a new iPad to watch TV shows or movies while I’m flying on a long distance flight. I’m not rushing out right now. My iPad mini serves me just fine. I sort of wish they’d come out with a new iPad mini because this one’s getting a little old, but right now I am holding steady. Dennis, what about you?

Dennis Kennedy:

So my plan is that when it comes to August or whenever it will be that it’s Apple back to school sale and I have an education discount. I’m treading in my iPad Mini and I’m going with an 11 inch M four iPad, or I may let chat GPT help me make that decision. But of course you’ll, that’s my basic plan. I mean, I think about everybody else I sort of go with where Jeff Richardson’s came down is to say that the iPad error in terms of price point and what it does is seems to make a lot of sense. If you have the right use cases and you want a new iPad,

Tom Mighell:

I mean, I think it does make more sense. That’s one thing that I didn’t mention in the first section, which is none of these devices are particularly inexpensive. So if you are on a budget or you’re looking to save money, the heirs are definitely great. Although as Jeff and Brett point out, the last version of the pros are the new version of the heirs, I think is what they mentioned and that’s how they described it. So these heirs are the last generations pro versions. But what’s interesting to me is if you decide to go all in on an iPad Pro and then you also decide the accessories. So they announced also an Apple pencil and they now have four apple pencils, which I’m like, what is that about? Why four pencils and make it really hard to use pencils across the devices? I think it’s great.

I like that they’re opening up the pencil to developers so that they’ll be able to do interesting new things on an app by app basis. But my gosh, four pencils, do they really need that? The new magic keyboard is also very nice, but they tend to be pretty expensive. I bought a nice keyboard from Logitech that serves the same purpose and was a lot less expensive. But let’s think about this iPad Pro plus Apple Pencil plus Magic keyboard equals approximately the cost of a MacBook Air 13 inch. And so the question is could rather, what can you get done? Would your money be better spent on a MacBook or on an iPad? Again, it depends on your use case, but the cost is interesting is that you could buy a MacBook Air for that you’re buying for this iPad. I just find it interesting about how they’ve set their price points on all this.

Dennis Kennedy:

And that is an interesting thing because to me, the idea of having a keyboard or a mouse with an iPad is just strikes me as being really bizarre and that I would want to use it in ways where I take advantage of that very small form factor. I commute to Michigan State from Ann Arbor by the airport bus, and that to me, I would would like to just use it for that commute time.

Tom Mighell:

So you’d buy a pencil but not a keyboard.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I just don’t see,

Tom Mighell:

That makes sense to me too.

Dennis Kennedy:

And then I’m like, well, why do I want to type? And then if I have it’s AI enabled, then I should be able to dictate and take advantage of the pencil. Why would I want to be hauling around a keyboard if I wanted a keyboard, I basically have two laptops these days, one for work and one at home. Why would I want to configure an iPad in a way that was like that? So I think it’s one of those things where you say, let’s think about what it does. And I have this big focus now on wanting to take more notes and some of the things I want to do, I don’t want to sit there and type things. I’d rather just jot things down and to use, take advantage of ways that I might use the pencil to make that more helpful to me. But I guess, Tom, I have this question for you. Is that, and I think I know your answer from what you’ve been going is, would you ever consider writing a new edition of your iPad book based on these new releases?

Tom Mighell:

I sort of feel like the hype has come and gone for the iPad to a certain extent. It’s still good to get new devices and those who are in are in, but usually writing books about those things has to follow its own hype cycle to be successful. And I am really curious to know, are there really any first time iPad purchasers out there these days? Or is everyone someone who’s had an iPad in the past in which case they had an opportunity to learn how to use it, then they’re not going to pick up a book at any time to look at it. And I wrote about what the best apps for X, Y, and Z are. It might be a good time to talk about that these days now actually, because at the time when we wrote that apps were coming and going so fast and furious that it was hard to keep up. But I feel sort of, even though there are new apps that keep coming out, I sort of feel like the pace has slowed down and we’ve gotten a better idea of what really the best in class apps are for certain things. So interesting idea. But again, no thank you.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, even alternatives I don’t think make all that much sense. And I feel like a device, an iPad becomes a lot more personal. And so the way that I use it is going to be way different than you use it. And the apps I use are probably going to be different. And then how do you do education and other things like that in a way that’s like a book as opposed to just saying like, oh, here’s something I’m doing with an iPad that’s kind of cool, and you do a YouTube video or a TikTok or something like that and you’re going to be able to find that stuff. And then you could also ask the AI tools to say, how could I do this? Or other things like that. And so I think the whole notion of a tech book becomes really difficult these days.

I guess the other thought I had Tom about the iPad is I think about it and why I am going to take some time is not only the savings that I anticipate is that I don’t want to say like, oh, M four chip ai, iPad and I have this solution. Now I’m looking for a problem and I just want to justify buying the iPad. And so I want to, as an all tech, I really wanted to take that opportunity to get very clear on the job to be done and why I’m really doing this because I had the iPad Mini that I used some, but I can’t really say that I used a lot. And I’m not saying it was actually a good purchase at all. So I think that sort of avoiding that have to have an iPad and looking for something to use it for is one thing that people will definitely want to do.

Tom Mighell:

Well, and I hate to say it, but even though we talk about jobs to be done, even though I talk about how this is just a spec bump, I am going to buy one because I want to have a new iPad. And so I’m going to kind of go against everything that I’m saying here, but I really think it’s important is decide what you need it for. And I think you’re totally right is make sure that the use case that the iPad makes sense for, don’t just make it a compulsion purchase like mine. Make sure you’re using it for the right reasons.

Dennis Kennedy:

There is always a place for compulsion. Don’t get us wrong, but that brings us back to the question that you raised time, which is can new hardware ever seem world changing or even get us excited anymore?

Tom Mighell:

I have a couple thoughts about that. Over the past few weeks, we’ve had two new devices roll out that had the potential to be truly world changing or revolutionary. There were AI tools, one is called Humane. It’s a wearable pin that you can talk to and that it has a little projector it’ll show in your hand. And it’s had some of the worst reviews I’ve ever seen for hardware ever. Just roundly hating everything that it does saying it’s not ready, it doesn’t do what it’s promised. And then there’s another one that came up at the Consumer electronic show, CES, and I actually went and bought one, I think I probably talked about it on this podcast. It’s called A Rabbit. And it is similar. It’s a similar type device. It’s an AI device that you can do all sorts of interesting AI things on. And I bought it because it wasn’t all that expensive and everybody else seemed to be buying it, so why not?

And it has received almost as bad reviews. So I think that yes, if the tool can work, it has the potential to be world changing and game changing for us. I’m hoping that that is still in the future. I’m not convinced. The same thing is with technology that already exists with phones, with tablets, with laptops, with televisions, I’m not sure that I think we’re getting to that point where there’s not much more they can do with it that won’t be just evolutionary and revolutionary, but I’m still holding out for those wow devices that actually work as promised.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, I think we’re to the point where it’s hard to imagine what that device or what that hardware would be like and what it would do that would actually, that is not already part of our imagination. I mean, what excites me these days about hardware, whether it’s Vision Pro, potentially this iPad with the M four chip is how it works as part of a platform. And so the iPad is potentially becoming a significant part of my AI platform is interesting to me, but still it’s not like, oh my God, I see it happening today. I see it happening over time in the future. So I dunno. Tom, if you want to wrap it up, I think we’ve kind of talked our way through these new iPads.

Tom Mighell:

I think we’ve said about as much as we need to say, we’ve put a lot of notes in the show notes. Go and check out again, Jeff and Brett’s review. They talk a lot more about the specs than we do. Definitely worth a read, but for now we are done with iPads. So let’s move on to our next segment. But before we do that, we’ll take a quick break for a message from our sponsor. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Tom Mighell

Dennis Kennedy:

And I’m Dennis Kennedy. We want to remind you to share the podcast with a friend or two that helps us out in our new B segment. We are prompting or Tom would say, I am prompting JGPT four in a sophisticated way to stand in for our audience and ask a question that our audience might want us to answer that would make us think and push us a bit. So here’s what we have for the show. You recently mentioned that you wanted to redo your podcast or intro. Are you thinking about using an AI tool to generate new intro music for you? Tom, what do you think?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, again, I’m shocked and amazed. I’m just always amazed that chat GPT, the questions that it asks because it’s actually something that we’ve been thinking about for a while now and we’ve been talking about it. It’s been in some of our teams chats that we’ve been having and I’m just amazed that it knows us so well that it asks those types of questions. What’s also interesting is that there’s actually an AI tool that might help us. There may be more tools. There’s so many different AI tools out there, but there was one that you saw, and I had been familiar with it for some time I used a little bit, which I think is really intriguing. It’s a tool called suno. We’ll put the link in the show notes. You can just provide it with a description of what you want to hear and it’s going to create some music for you, even with lyrics involved as well.

For what we’re looking for. I think it does a pretty darn good job. It can imitate just about any music style. You put a prompt into it and it created a song called Metaverse Melody. That was not bad. It was pretty good. The best thing I think about tools like suno and other artificial intelligence tools is that unlike other music we might decide to use that we find on place on the internet, I believe that we can use anything we create there royalty free, which is nice, and we can continue to iterate on it and see if we like what we get. But it’s a free tool for the most part. You can get some credits if you sign up for it, Dennis. I don’t know. I say we go for it. What do you think?

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I think so too. And at worst, even if we don’t get completely what we want, it’s like a first draft and we could then say, oh, here’s something we like and this is close to what we want. Now we can go to the royalty free music side so we can actually find something that fits what we want better. And so I think it could either create a force or it could lead us to the music that we choose. And I think that both of those things are some of the uses that AI has become really interesting for these days. But now it’s time for our parting shots. That one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it

Tom Mighell:

Away. Alright, so I have a tip this time, and this comes from my own panic and terrible moment that I had with my computer and I’ve talked about this before. I use a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and Bluetooth mouse with my desktop and my laptop computers. I love them. They are great. They allow me to switch back and forth from both computers. I don’t have to have separate hardware for it. And they are workhorses, they’re great tools, unless by some chance your Windows computer decides to just turn off Bluetooth entirely, in which case you have no access to your computer. I could not get to it at all. I couldn’t access anything. I don’t have a touch screen, I don’t have anything. I was completely locked out of my computer because it would not connect to any Bluetooth devices. It was turned off. So my tip for you is always have a wired mouse or keyboard or one that you can plug a USB dongle into a port in your computer, have something available just in case. If you want to use something that’s Bluetooth, that’s great, but don’t be without something basic because I happen to have a USB dongle that I plugged a mouse into and was able to get to my computer, and it only took me about 15 minutes to think about that. So keep it around. You’ll be glad you do.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, that’s a great idea. And for those of us who hate to throw out these devices and stuff, you’ve given yourself another reason to give it. So I was not surprisingly doing some experiments with chat GPT and I had this idea that wouldn’t it be cool if I read a book. So say for example, a business book. And in that book there were some ideas of some methods or approaches that you could do. And wouldn’t it be cool if I could just do a prompt that would say, here’s the name of the book, here’s the name of the author, look at what’s in that book, and then suggest the types of prompts that I could create that would apply some of these techniques and create little prompt tools for me. And so I wrote this prompt and which I call books to prompts. I could have called it articles to prompts as well. But the whole idea is say like, oh, here’s this book. Now let’s just turn the checklist, the other things in there into a tool and it does it automatically for me. And it’s a really cool use that I’ve found. And if you want to experiment with some of the things that you can do with Chad GPT-4 and this new Chad GP four oh this just come out, this is an interesting approach where you’re just not only getting summarization, but you’re turning into a tool that’s reusable.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on Legal Talk Networks page for our show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes on the Legal Talk Network site or in your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can reach out to us on LinkedIn or remember, we do love to get your questions. Leave us a voicemail at 7 0 4 4 1 6 8. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy:

And I’m Dennis Kennedy, and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. If you like what you heard today, please rate us an Apple podcast. 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.

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