Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Adriana Linares

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

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 423 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Garrett, Indiana.

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:

In our last episode, we continued our Fresh Voices series with Julia Montgomery, Director of Practice Enablement at King & Spalding, in which we discussed strategic technology adoption within large enterprise law firms, collaboration tools, and change management. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices on LegalTech series. In Fresh Voices, we want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. 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 one of our very favorite ever fresh voices. Adriana Linares, law practice consultant and founder at LawTech Partners. 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 right now. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website, our observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, Adriana, welcome back to the Kennedy Mall Report.

Adriana Linares:

I’m so happy to be here with both of you, two of my oldest, dearest, coolest friends. And if I may, the original first and only president of the Adriana L and Aires fan club, Dennis Kennedy.

Tom Mighell:

Exactly. So I want to take a step back and I want to explain to our audience, because it’s been a while. When Dennis and I started the show, Adriana was part of it. She was a third co-host. I do not remember how many episodes you were with us, but you were one of our original co-hosts, which means you bear at least partial responsibility for whatever it is this podcast eventually became. So this is not only a Fresh Voices interview, this is a homecoming, in my opinion. Dennis and I have known Adriana for more than 20 years going back to ABA Tech Show and the Law Practice Division. In that time, she’s chaired tech show in 2017. She’s hosted new solo on this network since 2014. She has spent more than 20 years running LawTech Partners doing what I think is genuinely the hardest job in legal technology, which is actually training lawyers on what to do.

Anybody can go on a podcast and talk about legal tech. Adriana is one of the very few people who actually gets to sit down next to a working lawyer and try to get that lawyer to change how they do their job and then come back and find out whether it’s stuck or not after that fact. Adriana, it is really great to have you back.

Adriana Linares:

I’m so happy to be here. Thanks you guys. I can’t believe you’ve done 423 episodes and you actually count them. So that’s awesome. I have no idea what episode number my podcast is at.

Tom Mighell:

We’re happy that the Legal Talk Network helps us count for it, so that’s good. So bring us up to date. What is LawTech Partners today and what has changed? And has anything changed in what firms need from you these days?

Adriana Linares:

So overall, no, which is sad for me because it just means I’ve been doing the same old thing, same old thing, just maybe different audience, right? Isn’t that what they say? Same joke, different audience. So LawTech Partners still does a lot of technology consulting and training. I feel as I think about it that at this point, most law firms have made the move, the conversion or the migration to being all cloud-based. I’d say up until COVID, that was probably 80% of my work was helping lawyers get rid of desktop applications, servers in their offices, and move to cloud-based services. So pretty comfortable that most of them have done that. I still occasionally run into a firm or in-house counsel. A couple weeks ago I had one that still had servers. So we got over that hump and that’s been great. We have gotten better at collaborating and working remotely again thanks to COVID that thankfully stuck.

What has not changed at all, and I still continue to do, is teach lawyers how to use Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, and Outlook. And no amount of AI seems to reduce that work, which I’m grateful for.

Dennis Kennedy:

I remember, Adriana, that you started with us and then you went on to your. You had to do your solo albums and your solo

Adriana Linares:

Career. My solo man.

Dennis Kennedy:

Which we facilitated.

Adriana Linares:

Totally.

Dennis Kennedy:

Because that’s what you had to do. I

Adriana Linares:

Had to do. I had to go out on my own. I had to get away from the man, man.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yep, exactly. So I always like to say it’s not easy to talk with lawyers about tech, and there is no question whatsoever that you are a world-class communicator on legal technology. Would you talk about your approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology and what you’ve found works well for you?

Adriana Linares:

Sure. I will tell you that I think my superpower all these years has been that I’m not a lawyer. So I think the threat of someone standing in their office saying, “You’re doing this wrong, or you could be doing this better, or you’d be serving your clients better if you did it this way,” is lowered when you’re not a lawyer. So that’s the first thing I think that has really helped me communicate with lawyers. And I’ll never forget the first job I ever got at a law firm. The firm used to be called Broad & Cassell. They got merged, I think, with Nelson, Mullins, Shepherd and somebody. But the first guy that gave me a chance, his name was Kim Russell. I was 20-something years old, and he looked at me and he goes, “You know what, kid? You don’t know much, but you’re trainable, you’re likable, and I think my lawyers are going to like you.” And that’s I think something that’s always stuck is not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m likable.

I’m nice. I’m fun. I’m casual. I think I approach technology for attorneys in a way that is very helpful. I don’t ever say, “Well, you’re doing that wrong,” or, “You could be serving your clients better if you did it this way.” And I definitely approach them with very quick, very fast, let me solve the worst problem you have right now, right now. And it’s usually simple things like still today, why is it that when I put a C in parentheses, it turns into the copyright symbol? I mean, if I can solve that for a lawyer, if that’s the first thing that I solve –

Tom Mighell:

Euro or a Euro sign.

Adriana Linares:

Or a Euro sign. I’m immediately solving a problem that I know they have. I’m trustable because I actually walked in and solved a problem and I still think I’m likable, but I can still pretty much almost predict the questions that lawyers are going to ask me when it comes to the tools that they’re using. Of course, AI has made it a lot of a different conversation because lawyers are often looking for shortcuts and the easy way out. We still don’t want to learn how styles work, but guess what? AI is still not going to help you with styles. So there’s that part of the conversation that it’s been added onto.

Tom Mighell:

AI has totally made it that there is an easy button for everything

Adriana Linares:

Now,

Tom Mighell:

And that they think that that’s exactly what they can do. So Dennis, since you were last with us on the podcast or since you were with us, I think that Dennis and I, to a certain extent, have become the Statler and Waldorf of the legal tech community in terms of we’re the grumpy old men in the balcony –

Adriana Linares:

Oh, heck yeah.

Tom Mighell:

Who are complaining about technology competence among lawyers. So we like to ask all of our guests what they’re seeing out there about technology competence. How has that changed and what are you seeing now? And maybe the better question is, what does a technologically competent lawyer need to know about tech today to be successful?

Adriana Linares:

Well, I still think you need to be an expert at the tools that help you hone your craft, which back to Microsoft Word, it’s just an endless conversation. I get emails every week with a lawyer that’s struggling with a master form or I think I got one the other day, some organization and their bylaws trying to create a good living document that could live on. So nothing has changed there. I think the AI tools are not helpful with formatting and whittling away at that document, but I do think it’s become super helpful in email. I think AI has helped me a lot dealing with Excel spreadsheets, which I’m going to also interject this. As a small business owner, I still do not understand how anyone can run a business without having basic Excel skills. And lawyers who are business owners still have zero Excel skills.

So that’s another thing that hasn’t changed. And if there’s one thing I would want to change in a flash, it would be just being a better Excel user. Even lawyers who mostly work in Word documents, there’s always a place for Excel, even if it’s on the business side, not your practice side, and they still don’t know how to use it.

Tom Mighell:

I’m still terrible at Excel. I will just say I’m better than most lawyers, but I’m still terrible at Excel and

Adriana Linares:

Freely acknowledge that. Better than most lawyers is better than. I’ve never even opened a spreadsheet. So it’s just one of those things. But I say that more to lawyers from running their business than running their practice, that they need to be better at using Excel.

Tom Mighell:

100%.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, and I think that it always amazes me, first of all, that lawyers and law students all went to law school because they never wanted to do math again. They could somehow avoid it. But it seemed like you would want to learn Excel just to figure out your billable hours and compensation and things like that. I want to get you to tell a story and then to update it about the impact you had on the legal profession in Florida on technology competence and helping to get them to implement some rules and requirements and where that stands today. And then in that context, what do you see are the areas in the legal profession that need the most attention now? And how can we actually get people to pay that attention and then continue to keep paying that attention?

Adriana Linares:

I think when you’re talking about bar organizations or any organization that wants to make impactful and helpful changes to the profession, you’re often looking at the regime at the moment. So when I was doing some help and work with the Florida Bar, it happened that there were a handful of attorneys in leadership there who really recognized the importance of technology and how many of their peers were struggling with it. So because of that regime at the time, it was not hard to get somebody to go, oh my gosh, right, we require 30-something hours of CLE on all kinds of things, but why have we not made it a requirement for, again, the basic tool that they use to hone and whittle away at their craft? So that happened, and I don’t even know what year that was, but it was a while ago, and they continue to have that requirement.

And then a lot of other states have adopted it, and I think that’s great. It just seems so obvious that you would want your attorneys, yourself to be technologically competent. But now where I think the conversation can really shift and why that’s even more important than ever is the legal assistant pool continues to get more shallow just every day. And I have been saying for 20 years to all attorneys, how many of you have a daughter or a son or a granddaughter, grandson, godchild? And how many of you just hope that they grow up to become legal assistants? The answer is none. And I’m not ashamed to say that or embarrassed to say. It’s an honorable profession and it’s been a great profession that has certainly served many people for years and years and years and years. But we’re in a different world now. And I’m telling you right now, I have yet to meet a young person who’s going to leave high school and go to college to become a legal assistant.

They want to become engineers and astronauts and doctors and nurses, and nobody wants to be a legal assistant. It’s a terrible job. So if ever there is a time for attorneys to really get to being able to manage their own practice without being able to say, “Well, I have an assistant that can do that,” it’s now because you’re out of time. And I’ve been saying this for 20 years. It’s here. Guess what? The future finally arrived. It’s here. No one wants to be your secretary anymore.

Tom Mighell:

Well, there’s AI to help with that, right? I mean, come on.

Adriana Linares:

Yeah. And I will say it can. There’s a lot of things now that it can help with.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I met somebody recently who I thought would be a great paralegal and was interested in a legal career. And I had them talk to a lawyer about the career potential. And the lawyer said, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea because I think AI will be doing all of that.” And it blew my mind.

Adriana Linares:

I have a friend who is the technology director of a very good-sized law firm in one of the many states that I have offices in. And I met with him a month ago and he said, “We don’t have paralegals anymore. We got rid of all of them.” And not that they fired them, but through just natural attrition. When a paralegal left or was replaced or got moved, they didn’t hire someone to replace them. Now, this is an IT director who’s very tech forward, has been for a long time, slowly pushing the firm to become more modern, more cloud-based, more mobile, more secure. But part of being a good leader in your law firm is also realizing where you can save money or where you can move finances and funds to a more helpful place. And that is certainly what AI has been doing for these mid-level positions and lower level positions in legal.

Tom Mighell:

A lot of changes.

Adriana Linares:

A lot of changes.

Tom Mighell:

A lot of changes. So we usually have, at this point in time, we usually have our collaboration question, because as you know, Dennis and I are obsessed with collaboration

Adriana Linares:

And collaboration

Tom Mighell:

Tools. I usually ask the question about what is your favorite way to collaborate? But I’m going to flip the question a little bit. And I want to say that you spend so much time working with firms on improving their day-to-day operations. When it comes to collaboration, real world collaboration, what are the baseline technology tools that small and mid-size firms are completely underutilizing right now?

Adriana Linares:

Sure.

Tom Mighell:

And how can they bridge that gap without buying new software?

Adriana Linares:

So I hate to sound like a broken record player, but the answer is the same that it has been for many years. Which is you are not taking advantage of everything you are paying for with your Microsoft 365 subscription. There are tools in there that you get, I’m going to say for free, but obviously they’re part of your subscription, that you’re paying for otherwise. And the typical example I use all the time is people who are using Acuity or Calendly and paying 16, $20 a month while – Using

Tom Mighell:

Bookings.

Adriana Linares:

Yeah. Where Bookings has existed. Now, in all fairness, it existed pretty poorly about five years ago. It was actually quite terrible and I wouldn’t recommend it then, but now it’s grown up. It’s a modern tool with got its training wheels off. And Bookings is a great service. It can do most of the things. I haven’t looked at it in depth in a long time or in a while, but everything Acuity and Calendly can do. And it’s already directly integrated with your suite, including things like Teams, which back to bring it home to your collaboration tools is I think Teams is a great collaboration tool because it’s already part of your infrastructure, you’re paying for it. I do warn firms that people can get team happy and start creating Teams left and right, and that becomes a little bit of a management nightmare on the back end with SharePoint.

But 10 Teams is better than no Teams. So to answer your question, I still think that if you’re listening to this podcast, and this will become my parting shot, so I will repeat this. So if there’s one tip I can give you when you’re done listening to this podcast is to log into your Office 365 account, find the little apps button that shows you everything you’re already paying for, and look at some of those tools in there. That’s where you’ll find bookings. Forms is in there, of course. And a highly underutilized tool that I think is just magic is one called Lists. It’s a terrible name, but it’s something that allows you to create documents, tools, platforms, kind of dashboards. And it’s as if Access and Excel had a baby, but made it really easy to use. So I think all the time about ways that attorneys could use the tools and lists for trial prep.

Tom Mighell:

Yeah, we use lists all the time. And for each of our clients, we give each of our clients a booking page of their own that they can go and. Because we have multiple consultants, and so we say schedule time with so-and-so, schedule time with so-and-so, and they have a booking page for the whole consulting group. The only downside to bookings is that once they book something, they lose control of the invite. It becomes our invite, and sometimes our clients want control of it so they can invite other people

Adriana Linares:

To it. Or cancel it or change it.

Tom Mighell:

Exactly. But that’s not an issue. Be able to see availability is all that matters. It’s a great tool. And yeah, if you don’t need something like Calendly, bookings is a great type of tool.

Adriana Linares:

It also just reduces the friction and the pain of having to find the time to meet, which is there no bigger waste of time than the jerk in your office that is still sending an email out to 20 people that says who can meet Monday at three o’clock, if not Tuesday at four? I mean, come on.

Tom Mighell:

Yep. And then having to do it multiple times again because somebody forgot to answer the email and comes back in after you’ve already agreed and says, “Oh, I can’t make that time.” Here’s another whole list of times.

Adriana Linares:

I say that laughing at myself because our audio engineer just received that email from me this morning.

Tom Mighell:

All right. We’ve got a lot more to talk about with Adriana Linares, but we need to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Bio Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy.

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Miley, and we are joined by our special guest, Adriana Lenaris from LawTech Partners.

Dennis Kennedy:

Adriana, we founded Fresh Voices that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience does as well. You have a great career story. Would you talk about your own career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus? And I think our audience might be interested in how you got involved in what I’ll call the legal tech speaking circuit.

Adriana Linares:

So reminding everybody that I’m not a lawyer, I started my career just by happened circumstance. There was an ad in a newspaper. Yes, the good old-fashioned Orlando Sentinel back in, it must have been 1996 for a law firm that was looking for a trainer. And I was fresh out of college, hadn’t worked much, but I was like, oh, I have a computer, which I did, which is hilarious. It had two megabytes of RAM by the way. And I had read the entire Microsoft 95. Is that what it was called? Windows 95 manual. I was like, “I know how to use a computer.” So I showed up at this interview and I coincidentally just told you the story about my first boss that said, “Well, you don’t know much, but you’re likable. And I think my lawyers will like you, kid.” And that’s literally how I started.

And a few years after that, being at that law firm, I got tired of that job. So I went to a different law firm thinking I was getting a new job where really all I had done was move my office from one place to another. And I didn’t like working at Big Law, and these were two large law firms because I felt like I could never finish a project. It was a lot. And man, did I learn a lot too though. So I got on the speaking circuit, again, I can’t remember how, who or where, and I started speaking at the ABA Tech Show. And one day after doing maybe my second year at Tech Show, some office administrator emailed me and said, “Hi, we’re looking for a trainer to come and help us for six to eight weeks. Do you know anybody?” I was like, “Oh, do I know somebody?

Holy moly, lady. You just helped me launch LawTech Partners.” And that’s what happened there. And so I’ve had this little company since 2004. And a lot of my success is thanks to the ABA Law Practice Division, which I’m still active in and a member of. And I regularly say on my own podcast, if you are an attorney, especially a younger attorney looking to network and get your name out there, the Law Practice Division is always looking for writers, contributors. I’ve been a member of the Women Rainmakers Committee for a long time. It’s one of the best groups in law practice. And I just feel like it’s one of the easiest doors. Those doors are always wide open. So if you’re looking for a place to put your voice, that’s a great place to start. And it’s certainly been an important part of my little journey through legal technology.

Tom Mighell:

It’s a great group.

Adriana Linares:

Indeed.

Tom Mighell:

All right, we have some AI questions. We want to talk a little bit about AI, dip our toes in, and then talk about other stuff. You have spent your career teaching lawyers about different types of software. Is AI actually different to teach? Is it something that lawyers, is it different for them or is this the same type of adoption problem in a brand new outfit?

Adriana Linares:

No, it’s not the same type of adoption problem. I think this is the easiest to do because honestly, there’s not that much training to do. What are you training a lawyer to use AI for? I just tell them, “Just try it. Just ask it. Just put the data in there. Tell it what to do with it.” I think really what they need to be trained on, and I’m not going to be the one to do this, is how not to be stupid when they’re using it. So I’m not even going to get into that conversation. But for me, when it comes to AI, I’ll say to someone, I go, “Well, show me your inbox.” Let me look at their inbox. I go, “That email right there, do you?” Because yes, I see in email inboxes, which by the way, attorneys, for God’s sake, clean out that inbox.

It’s just awful. There’s 64,000 unread emails in there as a lawsuit waiting to happen. But anyway, I’ll say, “Okay, that one right there. That looks like you’ve got, what, 20 people copied on there? Yep.” I go, “Do you have a list of all those emails and those contacts that you can use in other places?” “Oh no, my secretary retired and I haven’t had anybody to convert those to contacts for me. “I go,” Okay, let’s do this. Copy that whole list of the CCs and everything. Let’s drop it into Copilot in Microsoft Word. That’s an easy place to start. Most of you are probably paying for Copilot already anyway. “I go,” Just paste it into the prompt and tell it to create a table parsing that data. Literally just say, parse this data. “You don’t have to say anything else. You just drop it in there and you say,” Parse this data.

“And this robot will spit out a spreadsheet, not a spreadsheet, but a table. It says first name, last name, and email for you. Done. And it’ll get rid of all the little brackets and everything else. And I think that very simple example of way is just the gateway kind of drug experience that they need to start experimenting with it and trying different ways. Of course, they still have to use their own knowledge and experience if they’re going to go deeper and ask it for a question.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I will ask you my favorite AI question these days. So I keep reading about AI native law firms. AI is the legal OS. Agentic AI in law, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I hear a lot. So I like to ask people, so what have you seen where AI actually seems to be working these days? And you gave one great example. And where do you think there’s actually action and outcomes on the ground and not just people talking to each other?

Adriana Linares:

My husband is a very experienced commercial real estate attorney. And one of my favorite AI tools is the one that’s built in an Adobe Acrobat that I think you pay $4 a month for. And if you’re paying for Adobe $20 a month, you add on their AI tool and it’s pretty amazing. So we have a lot of things going on. We own a multifamily unit. We have legal. Oh, actually, when we got married, I put the script that I wanted into AI and had it do it like a merger. A whole nother story. It should be another podcast. But anyway, so we actually sit together in front of the computer a lot of times doing legal work that is related to our lives and our businesses, and we have a small business unrelated to technology. So a lot of times he will know, especially when it comes to a commercial real estate agreement, a lease, where the information should be or sort of what he’s looking for.

But maybe he’s driving or maybe he’s drinking his coffee. And I’ll ask the question to Acrobat and he knows what the answer should be. And so we’re talking to it, but he’s expecting a specific answer knowing what it should be and his experience and his knowledge. And that’s where I think it can be also super helpful is in using it as an aid to what you expect to hear or want to hear. Or a couple of things that we’ve done after we’ve put together a commercial lease is we say to it, and this is the one in Acrobat, “Is there anything we’re missing or we’ve forgotten?” Because at the same time, while he’s been an attorney for 30 years and commercial real estate has been his thing, maybe his mind or his thought process left something out or maybe there’s something new, and I’ll give you an example.

So one of the ideas that AI presented that we should add to this commercial lease or whatever it was we were working on, was the ability to hold meetings over Zoom. What are the official communication forms that we’re going to use? Oh, maybe we were forming some bylaws. Maybe that’s what we were doing in order to register a business. And it seemed so obvious, but for him, because he’d been doing things so, “This is how a lease looks, this is how a lease looks,” he was like, “Oh, that’s a great idea. We should totally add that.” Or being able to receive notices only by email and not by mail, which of course seems so obvious today. But when you just look at the same thing over and over, yeah, it’s kind of like you don’t notice a mole that’s growing on your face because it’s been growing so slowly and somebody goes, “What’s that mole?” Oh, I have a mole.

So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for very obvious uses for these tools that attorneys aren’t even trying or thinking about.

Tom Mighell:

So Adriana, one of our past guests, and I think a friend and acquaintance of yours, Mark Loritson, said on an earlier podcast that he finds that it’s getting harder and harder these days for lawyers and firms to make good legal technology decisions. And so I want to ask you the same question. For solo and small firm lawyers who are listening, who have a harder

Adriana Linares:

Time

Tom Mighell:

Copying peers like large firms who are making decisions themselves often without the same level of support, what does intentional decision making about legal tech actually look like these days?

Adriana Linares:

I would have to wholeheartedly disagree with my dear friend Mark, because as I have been saying for many years, I don’t think there is a better time to be a solo or a small firm practitioner with the amount of tools that actually offer the same features that a big firm has and can be paying for. I think the playing field got leveled years ago with technology between big and small firms. As a matter of fact, I think a lot of times small firms are better positioned to adopt and use technology than a big firm. And I’ll give you an example. Case management, good old Clio, one of my favorite tools. It’s been one of my favorite tools for 15 years. There are still big firms that don’t use tools like Clio. They’re too big, so they think they don’t need this little case or project management system.

But when I show Clio to one attorney in a big firm, they shift themselves. They’re like, “Wait, what? This is out there?” I go, “I’ve been out here a long time.” And by the way, the little guy across the street, he’s been using this and being more efficient, more effective, more secure, and a better collaborator and communicator with his clients than your big ass firm has ever been. So I think there’s no better time. And I think the technology is affordable. I was doing, I think I did a bar association talk, I don’t know, last year. And I had rattled off, “You want to start your law firm super easy. Here are the five things you need.” Microsoft Office 365, Adobe Acrobat, a practice management system, one seat of QuickBooks. And some wise guy in the chat goes, “You’ve rattled off a lot of technology.

I just see the dollar signs adding up. Are there cheaper options?” And I lost it. I lost it. I had it. I said, “No, there are literally no cheaper options. 40 to $50 a month for a practice management system, 100 and 20 for the creme de la creme version of it. No, there are no cheaper versions. Cheaper is free. And you know what free does? It gets you in trouble. So no, you cheap skates? I mean, for $500 a month, you’ve got everything you need to run a perfectly efficient law firm. Just got to learn how to use Microsoft Word.

Tom Mighell:

And with that, we’ve got more questions for Adriana Linares, but we need to take another quick break for a word 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 Milan. We are joined by our special guest, Adriana Allenaris at LawTech Partners. We’ve got time for just one more question. Dennis, what is that question?

Dennis Kennedy:

So when I taught, I would occasionally have Adriana as a guest speaker to talk to students about what to expect with technology when they actually went into the workplace. So that’s one thing that I think that law schools should do more of, but I have a slightly different question, which is a lot of students aren’t so sure that they want to practice law these days after law school. So how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find new career paths in legal tech and other non-traditional careers that are law related?

Adriana Linares:

So again, broken record, but I will say this. If you have a thing that you love, surfing, Mahjong, music, whatever thing it is that you love, they need lawyers and they need someone to help them with that business, that operation. And I would encourage any attorney, even an older attorney today that’s kind of burnt out to shift their practice into supporting something that they love. I’ll give you an example. My husband has become really important in my little side business and helping other people in this business because he’s gotten into it too, and has become really supportive and super into it and really has revived a little bit of the burnout he had with commercial real estate in helping small businesses write bylaws and create agreements, lease agreements and stuff like that. So I think that today, back to there’s no better time to be a lawyer, there’s so much opportunity that once someone has a law degree, you’ve literally reached the upper echelon of professional society.

And that just means you might not want to be a lawyer, but anybody who looks at it knows that you are dedicated, hardworking, smart, and you can take something that’s really hard and get it across the finish line. So I think a lot of times attorneys might think to themselves, “Oh, I’m overqualified for that.” And maybe you are, but you’re probably going to find a lot more joy and have a lot better look on life if you’re supporting something with all the hard work you went through to go to law school. So I think there’s so many ways to use that law degree, and it doesn’t have to be going to a big law firm and sitting behind a desk and being tortured, watching your hours rack up and trying to meet that hourly thumb by the end of the year. It just sounds so barbaric these days.

Tom Mighell:

And with that, I think, Adriana, you’re ready to launch your soon-to-be-announced lawyer coaching

Adriana Linares:

Service,

Tom Mighell:

It sounds like. Keeping lawyers on track.

Adriana Linares:

I think I’ve had that service going for almost 30 years.

Tom Mighell:

All right. We want to thank Adriana Linares, law practice consultant and founder at LawTech Partners for being our guest on the show. Adriana, please tell us where people can learn more about what you’re doing and get in touch with you if they want to talk more with you.

Adriana Linares:

At lawtechpartners.com. And thank you, Dennis and Tom. I’m honored to have been asked back on this wonderful show, and congratulations to you guys for having such a long running successful show.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, thank you so much, Adriana. You were a fantastic guest, which is why we consider you as a part of our ever fresh voices on legal tech. So as usual, so many topics to discuss and so little time we all have to catch up at the mutual fan club meetings in the near

Adriana Linares:

Future. I

Dennis Kennedy:

Hope so. But now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Adriana, take it away.

Adriana Linares:

I’ll just repeat what I said earlier, which is if you are a Microsoft 365 subscriber, which you probably are, and hopefully it’s the business, not personal version, I encourage you to go visit the apps section of your account and learn about some of those tools that you’re paying for and probably not using.

Tom Mighell:

All right, my parting shot. I was going through my RSS reader, reading the latest legal stories, and a story came up in my feed that just had the title, No Specific Legal News Story Provided. And that confused me. So I went to go look at the post and I will read part of it. I will not read the whole thing to you, but it says, “I’m missing the underlying news story, needed to write the post as requested. Your prompt refers to a specific legal news story and mentions broadening it to the past seven days with a strong six to eight item list, but no story details, case names, court filings, party names, jurisdiction, or links were included. Once you provide this information, I can turn it around into a 300 to 500 word HTML post with a concise specific story title, clear explanation of legal significance, blah, blah, blah.” The parting shot here is if you are going to use AI to automatically post to your blog, a human needs to make sure that you are looking at it in case, and this is still as of today, this was posted five days ago, four days ago, and still up there.

Nobody knows – Nobody knows. That AI has posted something up there and poor, cool. It just wants to be helpful. It just needs information. Please put a human in that loop somewhere.

Adriana Linares:

It just needs information.

Tom Mighell:

It just needs information.

Dennis Kennedy:

So we are the profession who believes that agentic AI is just going to happen magically. So yeah, anything, Tom and I have talked about this offline on a number of occasions, but everything that I do that’s more or less agentic with AI is just a disaster area. But more about that in the future. So my parting shot this week is a reaction to how volatile our power structure can be here in the US. So with the US electric grid facing more strain and unpredictable weather, a standard surge protector that everybody has had for a while simply isn’t enough for a home office. So my tip is to invest in a dedicated, uninterruptable power supply or a UPS device, and specifically for your network connection and so everything that the routers and things like that. So if you get this sudden voltage drop or a full blackout, your local wifi and network infrastructure will stay alive for hours on battery backup.

This gives you plenty of times to save your work, wind down online client meetings via laptop, and avoid the sudden data corruption that comes when structural systems instantly lose power.

Tom Mighell:

Yeah, we’re just waiting on a day-to-day basis for the power grid in Texas to fall apart another time.

Dennis Kennedy:

I had you in mind,

Tom Mighell:

Tom. And well, that’s 89 degrees right now. It’s actually cool. It was 107 two days ago. And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mighell Report.

Dennis Kennedy:

A big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing the show. You can find the show notes and transcripts on the Legal Talk Network website.

Tom Mighell:

If you like what you hear, please subscribe in your favorite podcast app and leave us a review.

Dennis Kennedy:

You can also connect with us on LinkedIn with your questions or to share your thoughts about this episode.

Tom Mighell:

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 for more than 20 years.

Announcer:

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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