Mark Donald is an attorney who provides technology, knowledge management, workflow, and licensing consulting to his clients....
Jilayne Lovejoy is a consultant providing services relating to open source policy considerations and licensing compliance. She...
Boups the Beerman brings the non-legal perspective to the FOSS+beer podcast and makes sure that his co-hosts...
Eric Nichols is the head brewer at Beryl’s Beer Co. which is a craft brewery that specializes...
Trent Carlyle is the co-founder and chief technology officer for Lawgical, the parent company of Legal Talk...
Chad Jolly is the senior software developer for Legal Talk Network and its parent company. He enjoys...
Bob Ambrogi is a lawyer, legal journalist, and the publisher and editor-in-chief of LexBlog.com. A former co-host...
Published: | May 21, 2015 |
Podcast: | Lawyer 2 Lawyer |
Category: | Legal Technology |
During a recent trip, Lawyer 2 Lawyer host Bob Ambrogi visited Legal Talk Network headquarters in Denver, Colorado. While there, he interviewed hosts from another legal podcast called ‘FOSS+beer’. With their general focus on law, technology, and open source software, hosts Mark Donald, Jilayne Lovejoy, and the mysterious Boups the Beerman navigate potentially irreverent topics while sampling local libations on each episode. In an effort to respond in kind, we decided to adjourn from our comfy studio in favor of our neighbor’s craft brewery establishment, Beryl’s Beer Co.
Tune in to hear this spirited discussion about the indemnification, intellectual property, and ethical issues associated with open source software and the practice of law. In addition, listen to our very own Trent Carlyle, owner and chief technology officer of Legal Talk Network, and Chad Jolly, senior software developer, as they join the conversation and talk about the world of modern software development while Eric Nichols, head brewer from Beryl’s Beer Co., gives the rundown on the craft brewery industry sweeping the RiNo arts district in downtown Denver.
Mark Donald is an attorney who provides technology, knowledge management, workflow, and licensing consulting to his clients. He is a frequent speaker and presenter for topics relating to software in law practice. Mark maintains an open source project called oslawtools.org, which is dedicated to building on existing projects to make them useful and easy for legal practice.
Jilayne Lovejoy is a consultant providing services relating to open source policy considerations and licensing compliance. She co-leads the legal team for Software Package Data Exchange and is a regular participant in open source industry groups.
Boups the Beerman brings the non-legal perspective to the FOSS+beer podcast and makes sure that his co-hosts don’t get too serious about the legal issues. Although his identity is mostly a secret, his tastes as a beer connoisseur and fashionista are well-known?
Eric Nichols is the head brewer at Beryl’s Beer Co. which is a craft brewery that specializes in barrel-aged products. He started as a home brewer but eventually went to brewing school to pursue his passion.
Trent Carlyle is the co-owner and chief technology officer for Legal Talk Network. Prior to founding Legal Talk Network’s parent company, Trent earned his MBA from Colorado State University and went on to build and grow a number of software and internet start-ups. Trent works very closely with the technology and marketing teams overseeing product development.
Chad Jolly is the senior software developer for Legal Talk Network and its parent company. He enjoys building and fixing all types of things while striving to find simple and elegant solutions to complex problems.
Special thanks to our sponsor, Clio.
Lawyer 2 Lawyer: ‘FOSS+beer’ at Beryl’s Beer Co. – 5/29/2015
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Welcome to the award-winning podcast Lawyer to Layer, with J. Craig Williams and Robert Ambrogi, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You’re listening to Legal Talk Network.
Bob Ambrogi: Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. This may be a Lawyer 2 Lawyer unlike any we’ve recorded before, and I’m not even sure if it’s Lawyer 2 Lawyer or if it’s a different podcast called FOXX+beer. But we are here at Beryl’s brewery in Denver, Colorado, which happens to be adjacent to the world international headquarters of Legal Talk Network which hosts Lawyer 2 Lawyer. And with me are some folks from the Legal Talk Network and also the entire cast and crew and productions, supervisors and everybody else from the podcast FOSS+beer.
We just call it FOSS beer.
Bob Ambrogi: Why do you have the plus in it, then?
I don’t know. Why do we have a plus in it then?
Boups the Beerman: It’s a silent plus sign.
Bob Ambrogi: Well they are here, they do a great podcast about FOSS – and we’ll explain what that is, maybe, at some point in this podcast – and about beer, which we all do know what that is. So maybe I do want to just quickly vow to tradition and go around the table and have you all introduce yourselves so we can associate the name with the voice. So who wants to go first? Boups?
Boups the Beerman: I’m Boups the Beerman, thanks so much for having me, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Bob Ambrogi: Now we’re going to stop right there because Boups, your anonymous on your podcast. I heard a rumour that we could actually out you on this podcast today and identify you by your name other than Boups the Beerman.
He’s a figure of mystery, this has never happened before.
Boups the Beerman: You can say my real name, and most people would say, “Wait, is that Boups?” That’s the way I travel a little bit, so yes. We’re welcome to put it out there and we can post it online. Go online and find my real name.
Bob Ambrogi: And you’re even on LinkedIn, I understand.
Boups the Beerman: I’m on LinkedIn, I turned my 3 profiles into one.
Bob Ambrogi: Does LinkedIn let you list as Boups the Beerman?
Boups the Beerman: Oh, actually I should add that, thanks for the reminder.
Mark Donald: Because you need another LinkedIn profile to go with the 3 that you already can’t manage.
Boups the Beerman: We like to call them aliases, my friend.
Mark Donald: They’re all aliases with your actual name.
Bob Ambrogi: And then next, also from the FOSS plus or minus beer podcast…
Boups the Beerman: Boo!
Trent Carlyle: Hey, easy, easy. Hi Mark.
Mark Donald: Hi, this is Mark.
Bob Ambrogi: Can we get a last name?
Mark Donald: Yeah, Mark Donald. I’m one of the 3 hosts of FOSS+beer, and we have this kind of running joke about legal podcasts and resumes. I will say that I did win the 4th grade class prize for the bike rodeo at Kellond Elementary in 1977.
Bob Ambrogi: And you’re a recovering or not recovering lawyer?
Mark Donald: No, I’m still a lawyer, no recovery.
Boups the Beerman: Congrats on that win by the way. Big win, big win.
Mark Donald: My friend Kevin Turner beat me for the school overall prize. He got a giant trophy, all I got was a sad little plaque, but I still have it.
Jilayne Lovejoy: And I’m Jilayne Lovejoy. Also a current and not recovering lawyer, and the 2001 winner of the Boulder Short Track mountain bike series. So that’s all I’m going to give you on my resume. I also like ballroom dancing and long walks on the beach.
Bob Ambrogi: And now from the Legal Talk Network.
Chad Jolly: I am Chad Jolly, I am a software developer with Legal Talk Network, and I most certainly understand what FOSS means and what the plus is for in that name.
Trent Carlyle: I am not familiar with either, my name is Trent Carlyle, I am one of the founders of LAWgical, the owner of Legal Talk Network. And this is my podcasting debut, believe it or not. So thanks.
Bob Ambrogi: Also sitting with us is Laurence Colletti, our producer who produces all of the podcasts for the Legal Talk Network and does a really great job at it. Well that about eats up all of our time.
Mark Donald: Your episodes are a lot shorter than ours, Bob. I think we have an initiative this year to keep our episodes under two hours. It actually coincides perfectly with the average commute in the United States for a lawyer.
Bob Ambrogi: It probably does! So I guess the next question has to be how’s the beer and what are you drinking?
Mark Donald: So on our format, Bob, what we do is we tease the beers. So we talk about the brewery first, we try to add a little color and history about the brewery itself. And then at the end of the episode, we talk about the specific beers we’ve been drinking and what we think of them.
Boups the Beerman: If we’re not too drunk.
Bob Ambrogi: Should we invite the bartender over? Is he right here?
Mark Donald: He is here.
Bob Ambrogi: Can we bring him over?
Jilayne Lovejoy: I didn’t do the research on this brewery, which is normally my task. But I’m guessing that you guys, being that you share a wall with the brewery, must mean you guys – I’m pointing at the Legal Talk Network guys – might know a little bit about the history at this brewery. Maybe you can enlighten us.
Trent Carlyle: Well what I can tell you is when we first moved into this space, this was just an empty warehouse. I can give you more history on the business that was here, but this mostly served as a temporary office space for us and a wiffle ball stadium. We spent a lot of time playing wiffle ball and homerun derby and racquetball games. But luckily, someone came in and decided they wanted to rent this space and since then, we’ve had a wonderful neighbor who served us amazing beer and it’s delightfully and scarily too close.
Bob Ambrogi: Okay, rather than have us explain the history of the brewery, we have an expert, the head brewer. So tell us, who are you?
Eric Nichols: So hello everybody, cheers. My name’s Eric Nichols, I’m the head brewer here at Beryl’s Beer.
Mark Donald: What’s your dad’s name?
Eric Nichols: My dad’s name is Richard, aka Dick, Dick Nichols – which we’re eventually naming a beer after and we’re excited about. But we’re excited to have you guys here for this podcast. So do you guys want to hear the quick and dirty history?
Mark Donald: Yeah, the history and what your distribution is and so on.
Eric Nichols: Sure, sure. So the original concept was developed by a couple out here who have been together for a long time and grew up in Colorado. They fell in love with this neighborhood a couple of years ago and have a big passion for barrel aged beers. So our focused has always and more and more will be on barrel aged products. So we’re real excited to be rolling out more and more barrel aged beers as we mature as a company. We’re about 10 months old, excited for our year anniversary coming up here. But they were home brewers and just like myself was a home brewer. They became passionate about the beer industry, the craft beer industry in specific, me as well. So they hired me after I finished up my brewing school and had a little stint at Avery Brewing Company up in Boulder. And since then we’ve been brewing anything that we like to drink and that’s always been our focus. And more and more we’re going to be putting that beer into barrels and expanding the varieties of barrel aged beers that are available to the market.
Mark Donald: So can our listener find your beers anywhere outside of Denver?
Eric Nichols: So no, right now, we are just starting to slowly distribute. We’re definitely going to be focusing on instate and even more specifically, Denver. So it’s going to be a while before we’re out of state. That’s a little ways away. It’s not out of the question when it might happen but until now, we want to focus on our local community.
Boups the Beerman: We’ve spoken a lot about this about the neighborhood brewery, that becomes the lifeblood of a neighborhood and that’s brilliant. I love it. It seems like there are a lot in this neighborhood.
Bob Ambrogi: Yeah, there are a lot of breweries here, it seems like you walk up the street and every other block there’s a brewery.
Eric Nichols: They absolutely are, yeah. And we are all friends and we love the fact that there’s so many breweries in this neighborhood.
Bob Ambrogi: You even have a brewery here that you’ve collaborated on.
Eric Nichols: And we’ve collaborated with all of the breweries in this neighborhood and we’re excited about it. And we want this neighborhood to be not only a neighborhood brewery, but also a destination for all of Denver and all of Colorado when they want to go out and drink a bunch of fun, unique, different craft beers. Because all of us have a little bit of twist, whether it’s a brewery roasting their own malts or a brewery focusing on sours or a brewery focusing on aretio, we have it all in this neighborhood. So that was one of the draws of this neighborhood for the owners to want to open up this brewery in this area.
Bob Ambrogi: Any thoughts towards bottling or canning?
Eric Nichols: So packaging is a tough game and we want to make sure we maintain the integrity of the beer. And before we package, we’re going to make sure that we have enough capital to make sure that we have the best packaged beer we can.
Bob Ambrogi: Makes sense.
Eric Nichols: So until we at that point, we’ve been holding off on packages other than kegs.
Bob Ambrogi: So you have to come to the source.
Eric Nichols: Yes. And that’s the point, we want you to be able to come to the source and walk around this neighborhood, look at all the local artists as well as have the beer from the neighborhood.
Mark Donald: Well this is a really nice space, we really are glad you guys had us here.
Eric Nichols: Cool, we’re happy to have you here.
Mark Donald: And also this makes our job much easier.
Boups the Beerman: I’ve got a quick question. And this actually probably towards the legal side of things. Beryl’s Brewery, with the spelling is actually a last name at this point, right? So have you had any legal issues surrounding?
Eric Nichols: Yeah, it’s an element in a mineral, beryl, in which the state gemstone is aquamarine. So it’s spelled completely different than the barrel that you actually are aging things in.
Boups the Beerman: But there’s a confusion issue that potentially, if somebody were to say, “I’m going to Beryl’s Brewery,” have you had any of those issues arise?
Eric Nichols: Generally not, I’m pretty sure we bought the domain name or at least something with “barrels,” so if people type in “barrels beer company” I think it will punt you to “Beryls.”
Bob Ambrogi: Do you need a lawyer to handle your intellectual property issues?
Eric Nichols: Probably. By the way I’m the one at the table who’s not the lawyer.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Why are you bringing up the legal trademark issues?
Eric Nichols: No but it does help with the trademark issue because whenever we come up with a beer name, if we throw “Beryls” in front of it, we’re pretty much secure because it’s spelled completely differently. And it is actually a unique name because nobody out there actually spells it like that.
Bob Ambrogi: Who would name a brewery “Beryls?”
Eric Nichols: Exactly, it helps with that, and that’s kind of a happy side effect of us wanting to bring in the Colorado aspect of it and aquamarine being the state gemstone. So we don’t have to worry too much about the legal issues yet, fortunately.
Bob Ambrogi: You think.
Eric Nichols: Fortunately.
Mark Donald: Well that saved us a ton of research because usually we have to learn all these facts about the brewery that we feature on each episode on our podcast, so very handy. Thank you for the explanation, appreciate it.
Eric Nichols: Of course, I’m glad you guys are here. Thanks for coming in tonight.
Bob Ambrogi: Thanks for hosting for us, we really appreciate it, this is great.
Boups the Beerman: It seems like we maybe should let this come back to you two, to Bob and Laurence, and maybe you guys redirect this conversation.
Bob Ambrogi: Oh, I like it when I don’t have to ask any questions, it’s great.
Laurence Colletti: Yeah, that’s the best.
Boups the Beerman: I’ve heard your questions, your questions are great.
Bob Ambrogi: Well, do you want to talk about the beer? Do you want to go around and say what you think of the beer?
Mark Donald: So usually we do that at the end.
Bob Ambrogi: The end?
Mark Donald: Yes.
Bob Ambrogi: Okay.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Who’s running this podcast anyway?
Bob Ambrogi: My next question is Word or WordPerfect.
Mark Donald: That’s very funny based on our prior conversations. As a guy who’s dealt with legal technology for 20 plus years – through you, honestly, Bob, getting exposed to more of the Legal Talk Network offerings, it’s interesting to hear that despite the large number of intelligent people and smart lawyers that you guys have podcasting on the network, they’re dealing with the same horrible questions that I’ve been banging my head against the wall since 1995.
Bob Ambrogi: Lawyers are still talking about this stuff and that’s what’s funny. It’s that the WordPerfect debate remains at least sort of alive. I’m not sure how many lawyers out there are talking about it.
Jilayne Lovejoy: It’s not alive in the space I live in, I’ll tell you that much.
Bob Ambrogi: I don’t know whose space it’s alive in, I’ll go along with that. But the fact that people are still talking about it means that somebody’s still talking about it.
Mark Donald: It does kind of lead into something that we thought about talking about from the open source perspective for this episode, and that was a teaser and tippet and bit of information that Jilayne got a lead on in I believe in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago regarding LibreOffice.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Well it was in the news-
Bob Ambrogi: I’ve got to stop you right there because we are going to have listeners who have no idea what FOSS stands for, so let’s stop right now. Let’s rewind and say, what the heck is FOSS?
Jilayne Lovejoy: So FOSS stands for Free & Open Source Software, which is really a combined term, I would say, and there is a term you often hear which is just open source software. And you also hear free software. There are sort of philosophical differences and history behind those two terms. Practically speaking, it’s usually referring to the same thing, which is software offered under a copyright license that grants a lot of freedoms and has some conditions on them, so it’s still a license, not public domain. But “free” is a problematic word in the English language because we usually think of free as in no cost. In other languages we have a different word to talk about free as in freedom, like “libre.” So sometimes, you’ll even see FLOSS, which would be Free and Libre Open Source Software. But there’s also a very famous-
Laurence Colletti: Free beer, as well.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Exactly, thank you for the lead in.
Bob Ambrogi: “Free beer” is the most powerful term in the English language.
Jilayne Lovejoy: There’s a very famous quote, or I think it’s a famous, famous quote, by Richard Stallman who’s considered the father of the free software movement in the US. And trying to explain what the free and free software means-
Bob Ambrogi: My part of the country?
Jilayne Lovejoy: Yeah, exactly, from MIT, originally. And his quote was, “It’s free as in freedom, not free as in beer.” So hence the lovely tie in to our podcast name and the tie in to beer because we needed such an excuse. And I find myself a lot of times just throwing that out there when I’m talking to people like, “You know that license is actually kind of free as in beer, not free as in freedom” and so forth and so on, and sometimes people look at me like, “What the heck are you talking about?”
Mark Donald: And the genesis for our podcast really comes from a couple of sources. A, my wild and ridiculous podcast addiction in general. B, there is a very, very good, very substantive podcast called Free as in Freedom, that deals with open source legal topics in a very substantive way. And we semi-intentionally picked the name FOSS+beer to focus on the funner side of doing a legal podcast. We wanted to-
Jilayne Lovejoy: We have to mention Linux Outlaws.
Mark Donald: Yeah, Linux Outlaws was the other big inspiration. Dan and Fab did a podcast for years. They sadly quit, and I will guiltily admit that my 12 year old son – Linux Outlaws was his favorite podcast, which is a little bit-
Bob Ambrogi: Where could that go wrong?
Mark Donald: -considering that these guys drink heavily on their podcast and go into these long rants which are only aided by one of the hosts’ very thick German accents. But a very good podcast based on open source topics and very fun. So we wanted to meet maybe be in the middle ground there and we actually came up with the concept for the podcast at a Colorado craft brewery. And we thought, hey, this will be our kind of angle we’ll add in. We’ll talk about open source legal topics in a substantive way for our main topic each episode. But we will also talk about the beer that we’re featuring and we have a couple other segments that we regularly do. Nerd and Tell is one of them, as well as talking about using open source software in projects. So I’ve worked as an in-house lawyer, I’ve worked in a law firm, and in both of those contexts, I’ve managed legal technologies and I’ve also worked as a consultant for other in-house departments and with a big focus on using open source solutions. Mostly because they were actually just the best solutions for the issues that I was facing. I had lots of use cases where open source was better than the commercial solutions. So we feature an actual hands on tech piece. Not quite as useful as some of the other Legal Talk Network sections where they say, “Here’s the hint or tip you can use within the next 2 minutes after you turn off this podcast,” but some of mine are a little bit esoteric but kind of the same idea, here’s something you can actually use. And it’s been a fun journey, we’ve been doing it for about 14 months now.
Bob Ambrogi: So let’s bring Jilayne back to Barcelona.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Glady.
Bob Ambrogi: I just want to get that background before we start talking about that because I wasn’t sure everybody understood what we were talking about. So what is LibreOffice?
Jilayne Lovejoy: So the Barcelona reference is to a very awesome event that I have been privileged enough to attend for the last five years. It’s a free software foundation that Europe puts on every year which is a legal and licensing workshop. It’s held under the Chatham House Rule, which means that I can tell you about what was talked about but I can’t tell you who said what. Mark is pointing at his T-shirt because I brought him back one from another event over there, he’s proudly wearing his “I love free software” T-shirt.
Mark Donald: It was a cool T-shirt.
Bob Ambrogi: Yours is pretty cool too.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Yeah, we’ve got our nerd out for tonight. So anyway, I was just at this workshop two weeks ago and just before that, LibreOffice, which is an open source or free software alternative to things like Word and WordPerfect, announced that they were going to develop an online version. And so we got talking about this over lunch with some of the other attendees at the conference, and actually-
Bob Ambrogi: You mean like a Cloud-hosted version?
Jilayne Lovejoy: So here’s the thing; actually, to be honest, the way the conversation started was – I was going to save this for our podcast but I’m going to put it here, maybe completely lost on the attendees – but one of the lawyers who I know who was attending who lives in Berlin and he had flown over on some local airline that I had never heard of. And he had with him the tourist-
Mark Donald: The Inflate Magazine?
Jilayne Lovejoy: Yeah, right, that’s totally all about highlighting different tourist destinations.
Mark Donald: Not SkyMall though, right?
Bob Ambrogi: That went out of business, right?
Mark Donald: I think the one company services every airline.
Jilayne Lovejoy: So yeah, he had this very slick, beautiful, high-gloss magazine, and it had all these all these sort of profiles of different cities. And Munich was featured as the open source city, and the reason Munich was featured that way was because Munich did a very amazing thing as did another city in Germany which I don’t know the name off the top of my head. And they actually just severed ties with Microsoft and implemented LibreOffice.
Chad Jolly: Well they went further than that, didn’t they? They implemented Desktop Linux as well.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Yes, I think that’s right. So anyway, just to bring it back to what we were talking about. So we started the conversation with that and we were just commenting that open source has really gone mainstream if it’s mentioned in the chair back pocket on an airline. But then we started talking about what was going on in Munich because there was a few people from Germany who had interesting insights, and then we started talking about LibreOffice in particular. And then I said, I’m wondering, as a lawyer, how are the attorneys in Munich dealing with using LibreOffice to negotiate contracts because lawyers are so married to – I would say Word, not even WordPerfect. And so then we got talking about that and the troubles that-
Bob Ambrogi: Word, we are married to Word, that’s the standard.
Jilayne Lovejoy: And just the troubles that lawyers have. I mean, someone had a great example of trying to negotiate a contract and actually even deciding, we’re going to use this version of Word, and that’s what we’re going to pass the documents around in. And even still deciding that, they had formatting and return document problems because the lawyers they were dealing with spanned several different countries. And so there’s different country versions and it still didn’t be loyal to the version number. And so then we started talking about LibreOffice online and the possibility that you could have an instance of LibreOffice online on a private server and then I provide you my login info and so we’re negotiating a contract and you don’t have to worry about integrity of the document changing as you pass it back and forth.
Bob Ambrogi: But how feasible is that? Given how much lawyers are-
Jilayne Lovejoy: That’s my question, Bob!
Bob Ambrogi: -how extensive Word is in the legal community, how likely is it that we’re going to see this mask version to open source Libre?
Boups the Beerman: Mark, so I remember hearing you talk about having a list of standards for our communications in these legal talks. Does that fall into that range?
Mark Donald: So what I was talking about is a list of technology standards and practices for engaging outside counsel when you’re in-house and you have a lot of platforms and you want them to work within them. I can imagine the screaming and revolt if you tried to say we’re going to use ODF as our document exchange format and you had to translate your Word docs. Even though Word now will ingest ODF documents just fine.
Jilayne Lovejoy: But you can’t spit out ODF from a doc from Word.
Mark Donald: I don’t know if that’s true anymore, Jilayne.
Jilayne Lovejoy: I’m pretty sure. So just in case we lost a few listeners on that, your document has a suffix-
Bob Ambrogi: We’re losing them fast, it doesn’t matter.
Mark Donald: Foss+beer has one user and he’s very loyal.
Bob Ambrogi: We have Chad sitting here who is a programmer. And I’m just kind of wondering how much you’re using open source software in the work that you’re doing and to what extent is open source software the form of basis for stuff that you’re doing and work that you’re doing.
Chad Jolly: The stuff we do is majority based on the web. And so I would say almost 100% of our software that we utilize is based in open source.
Bob Ambrogi: So your stacks are open source based.
Chad Jolly: Yeah, we use a framework called Ruby on Rails, primarily, which – for the lawyers out there – is licensed under the MIT license, which basically means-
Mark Donald: A very permissive license.
Chad Jolly: It is a very permissive license, you can take the source code and you can change it and make it your own and you do not have to make those changes open to the community. Whether or not you want to-
Mark Donald: Whether or not you want to is a different question.
Chad Jolly: Exactly. And so we encourage our team – if we find something that could be improved or a bug for instance in Ruby on Rails – we encourage our team to fix that bug and push the fix back up to that team for them to review and potentially integrate into the framework.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Why would you do that, Chad?
Chad Jolly: Well, we get it for free, we love the framework, and it helps us, let alone the hundreds perhaps millions of other people that are using this framework.
Jilayne Lovejoy: But Chad, wouldn’t you normally want to protect that proprietary IP and just only use it for yourself as some differentiator or advantage competitively?
Chad Jolly: Great question, Jilayne. So there is a part of our software that we protect as our proprietary intellectual property. However, we build on top of a set of libraries and frameworks that we can all agree as like when you’re starting to build a house. We need to plumb this thing and we need to frame up the walls and put some drywall on the walls. The things that everyone has agreed on, this is the way we do this. Behind those walls, we have some stuff that is things that we would never share. However, for the majority, it’s good to give back to the community because we benefit greatly from contributions from other people around the planet that are putting back into this framework. For instance, security fixes, speed improvements; mundane things that don’t have to do with our business model.
Mark Donald: And to the extent that you contribute that code into the community, there’s always a possibility that those various issues, efficiencies and security may be improved by someone else.
Chad Jolly: Absolutely. And when you have, let’s say, 10 eyes versus 100 eyes versus a million eyes or the world’s eyes on this code, you are going to identify places in that code that can be improved by the community, especially in regard to security.
Mark Donald: Jilayne, buy him a beer.
Jilayne Lovejoy: So for the non-techies in the audience I would call that upstreaming your code or your changes and that was an awesome explanation so thank you very much. I just think that captures perfectly the reality that we are in today and I think maybe 4 or 5 years ago it was all about consuming open source software or free software. I think now companies – small and large, you guys being a relatively small company – are realizing the benefits of engaging with the community and upstreaming the modifications you make even if it’s not required by the license. Because maintaining that fork – meaning that modified version that you took and pulled the code down – you modified it. You’re not required to upstream those or contribute back those modifications but then that means that you have to maintain that change or that fork, that different version on your own. And so I think you just really captured the reality which is really hard probably for a lot of IP lawyers to understand the benefits of that. That if you put that back up then everybody benefits, so it’s a public common good factor, but then you also benefit that everybody can build then on top of that.
Chad Jolly: Yeah. It’s really not about reinventing the wheel, basically. To use a horrible cliche, but when you have a lot of people working on that wheel, that doesn’t matter in terms of the business use case that you’re putting that software to. Everyone is starting out 100 yards ahead of if you had, for instance, just built a software from the ground up – which no one is doing anymore, that would be crazy to do that, actually.
Mark Donald: That’s a great kind of insight on to the process there for developing. But Bob, getting back to stuff that’s probably more core to your audience-
Bob Ambrogi: Well before you get back to that, we need to take a short break. We will be right back, so stay with us.
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Kate Kenny: Hi. My name is Kate Kenny from Lawyer to Lawyer, and I’m joined by Jack Newton, President of Clio. Jack takes a look at the process of moving to the cloud. Now how long does it take to move to the cloud, and is it a difficult process.
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Kate Kenny: We’ve been talking to Jack Newton, President of Clio. Thank you so much, Jack.
Jack Newton: Thank you, and if you’d like to get more information on Clio, feel free to visit www.goclio.com. That’s G-O-C-L-I-O.com.
Bob Ambrogi: Welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. We are talking today about free and open source software, about beer, about podcasting, about the fact that two of our guests on this show have the names Jolly and Lovejoy as their last names, and about other topics. But on a semi-serious note, I guess, Chad, you just made a point in your comments just before we took a break about the idea that pretty much any software out there these days has open source software as part of it. And so for the open source software attorneys on this panel, I’m kind of wondering, a standard requirement for commercial developers of software is they indemnify their software. Is that they talk about the fact that this is free of any kind of infringement, that this is theirs and they developed it. So when their software incorporates open source software, are they required to somehow indemnify the open source software?
Jilayne Lovejoy: That depends on the bargaining powers of the parties, Bob.
Mark Donald: And I will say that subject to some nuances, that’s generally correct. When you license commercial software, it is generally within the realm of. And I’ll say this sort of historically, commercially acceptable terms that you require indemnity for certain kinds of claims. That said , I think there’s a fair tradeoff at any negotiation. Would you really like us to charge you the full cost of developing something from the ground up versus we can leverage this open source stack. And it is more and more common that I’ve found that your warranties and indemnities will actually disclaim the open source portion. So you understand that the solution that you’re buying or licensing from us is built on an open source stack, it includes a bunch of Ruby stuff, it includes a bunch of client side Javascript stuff, and as for our original code, we’ll warrant that. I realize that’s not terribly actionable for a licenser in that they don’t necessarily have a lot of clarity. You can almost always find a commercial alternative for most of the stuff you want to buy. It’s just that the cost is kind of outrageous in terms of paying for those insurances.
Bob Ambrogi: But even the commercial software, there is open source software in that commercial.
Mark Donald: Yes and no.
Jilayne Lovejoy: I would just assume that there’s open source software in any software. That’s probably my starting point assumption.
Bob Ambrogi: So is this coming up?
Jilayne Lovejoy: Absolutely. I think obviously, it depends on which side of the fence you’re on. If you’re purchasing software, then of course you want that indemnity. And you can imagine the lawyer kind of saying whatever, give me the indemnity, you put it in there, you know you should be vetting what you put in your code even if it’s developed by a third party which open source software would. And if you’re on the provider side, the licenser side, you’re saying, like Mark said, no, I’ll indemnify you against what I have control over, what I built, but I’m not going to carve out any indemnities over any third party code, which is mostly going to be open source. And then you just sort of fight back and forth over that and maybe there’s various ways to do that. I think that the industry standard – and Mark may disagree with me – would be to carve it out. You’re going to carve out the open source software anyway over other license terms, you’re probably going to carve it out of that too.
Mark Donald: I will disagree a little bit in that Jilayne, in a largely sausage-making side of doing enterprise solutions that may or may not include – and frankly, they all at this point include – some open source components, even if it’s just client side stuff. It’s that there is definitely a risk calculus internally on the nature of the project. So if you want to go out and you want to license a solution that includes the apache server, you can have a high degree of confidence. If you want to go out and you want to license a solution and indemnify for a solution that contains code from two Russian guys in a garage, then that’s obviously a very different kind of calculus. And in some cases, enterprise developers will make the conscience decision, we will encounter this risk, and we will stand essentially as an insurer for this widely accepted open source project. And that gets down to the very, very fine strokes of allocating risk that people should hire you and me to help them with.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Well right, I think that just bubbles up to your governance of open source in your company. So if you’re talking about indemnities and how that’s going to save you in the end, to me that’s like backend lawyering. If you’re relying on those indemnities, it’s already hit the fan. But better yet, like Mark just said-
Bob Ambrogi: But companies are asked if they’re licensing software for somebody, they want to protect it themselves.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Sure, but to Mark’s point, if part of your internal governance process and your open source policy is, when we decide to include any open source software in our product that we’re going to ship and sell to you that we bet that project not on just the licensing terms but on superiority and also on the viability of the project like where is it coming from and how trustworthy is that. And as the developer, you might feel okay giving that indemnity because you’re like okay, I think that project has things together and I’ll take that risk calculus; but it goes back and forth. The more you know about what’s going in your code base and the better your processes are on the front end and the better educated your engineers are and your developers are, then the better position you are, when you come to that negotiation table to be like okay, we’ll give you that indemnity because we’re not worried about it because the risk calculus is low.
Mark Donald: And of course there’s a huge difference between an indemnity from a gigantic, highly capitalized software company and some startup vendor in terms of their ability to just stand behind it. And then there’s the giant spector behind all of it of some ridiculous patent control.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Right. Which you don’t ever want to indemnify against anyway.
Bob Ambrogi: Yeah. A lot of the issues we’ve been talking about are limited to either software developers or the companies that are doing licensing. Talk about maybe smaller firm lawyers and whether they should be thinking about stuff like LibreOffice and open source software and why they should be talking about it.
Mark Donald: I heard an episode and regrettably I forget which of the Legal Talk Network podcasts it was on, but I heard an episode about a husband and wife law firm that was the union of two older lawyers. One of them who was a devoted Mac aficionado and the other was a hardcore Windows user, never exposed to Apple products.
Bob Ambrogi: Were they divorced lawyers?
Mark Donald: They were, actually, yes. I think they were in North Carolina and they merged two practices together as they merged their lives together and it was a really interesting story. And I think that the thing that is never considered is that there’s another alternative out there that is certainly growing in usability and gaining slowly, but definitely gaining share in that there are Linux operating systems that are widely available in a very, very rich environment of tools that exist there too. That said, you certainly do not have to migrate all the way into some strange new operating system to take advantage of the very usable desktop tools that are created as parts of open source projects. And for many years there’s been an effort to be able to free folks of the tyranny of the Microsoft Office license. And I note, probably with some degree of admiration, the ability of Microsoft and certainly Adobe to take their old business of you buy a box of software, or you buy licenses to a piece of software to no, just pay us every year-
Bob Ambrogi: Every month now is the model.
Mark Donald: -as a recurring revenue stream for these desktop products.
Bob Ambrogi: Right. Microsoft 360 and the new Adobe, it’s a monthly subscription.
Mark Donald: Right. Cheaper if you buy them annually. But there are alternatives in for those of us like me who have kind of a ridiculous number of computers in our household running on lots of different operating systems, the idea – even with very permissive kind of subscription licensing or even with the old TechNet licenses for Microsoft, that makes sense if you have 2 or 3 computers. But if you are like me and you have 27 computers running in your house-
Boups the Beerman: Just FYI, everyone needs 27 computers running in their house, because you absolutely need 27. If you have anything less than 27 computers running in your house, you’re way behind the times. Sorry, carry on Mark.
Mark Donald: Yes, and I do fanatically manage my network structure at the house.
Jilayne Lovejoy: I just want to say that normally at this point in our podcast, we make some odd reference to the weird things around us in the mad lab, AKA Mark’s office space, which has a collection of various computers and “mantiques” as we’ve probably mentioned them previous episodes. However, here, I am happy to say we are gladly surrounded by kegs and barrel-aging beer and other fermentation paraphernalia. It’s really quite a wonderful environment, you should get some of these in the mad lab.
Mark Donald: I should have brought like 7 laptops with me.
Bob Ambrogi: This is what I always thought was your environment. Listening to your podcast, thinking you guys are going off to you guys are going off to different breweries and sitting there.
Mark Donald: Well we do recon the breweries but typically we bring all the beer back to the mad lab.
Jilayne Lovejoy: We don’t have a Laurence in our case.
Mark Donald: When you have a ridiculous number of computers, the idea of actually-
Bob Ambrogi: We need to add you to the Legal Talk Network.
Trent Carlyle: I will rent Laurence to you.
Bob Ambrogi: I’m differing to Trent to this but Trent, we’ve got to bring him in to the Legal Talk Network.
Mark Donald: The idea of buying a bunch of software licenses for the fleet of machines. My kids have desktop computers, laptop computers, I and my partner have desktop computers, laptop computers, workout computers-
Bob Ambrogi: But most of our listeners do not have more than one computer per attorney in their office.
Mark Donald: True. That said, in the context of making the switch to Mac, making the switch to Linux is just as easy.
Bob Ambrogi: It’s just easy but why? The question is why.
Boups the Beerman: Ethics, ethic. I know there are some ethics requirements for lawyers. Wait, wait, wait. Different subject, I apologize.
Bob Ambrogi: No, I like it! Talk to me about ethics, what are the ethical issues for why?
Boups the Beerman: There’s probably a proper separation of work versus life.
Mark Donald: We’re going to rewind to our presentation yesterday, Bob, and talk about OneDrive and having your client confidential materials in a Cloud you don’t control and encryption protocols and things like that. But seriously-
Jilayne Lovejoy: Wait, wait, I want to hear what Boups thinks of lawyerly ethics requirements are for technology.
Boups the Beerman: Oh, well I actually really enjoyed the presentation you did yesterday. I listened to it today-
Bob Ambrogi: I was going to say, you weren’t there, that’s why you enjoyed it!
Boups the Beerman: I listened to it in my car and on the way down to Aurora, so it was actually quite nice that a lawyer has responsibility to be on top of the technology. I thought that was a brilliant point. I kind of hoped that some of that would be spliced into this process. My comment before was about-
Mark Donald: It’s already going to be the longest Lawyer 2 Lawyer episode ever.
Bob Ambrogi: It’s already way over.
Boups the Beerman: My comment before probably was a little bit off key, was a little bit on the dark edge that a lawyer who’s doing professional business on one computer, should probably be doing the Facebook, YouTube, Tinder, et cetera et cetera, on another computer.
Mark Donald: We will mention the recent Drexel law school scandal of a professor posting a rather interesting link and sending it out to all of her students, which actually prompted a very, very crappy response. So long story short, law professor – I think it was Drexel – posted out in their student communication system a link to some kind of porn site. It involved beads of some kind or another. In any case, all the students got it, it was a huge scandal, it was all over the place.
Boups the Beerman: Pardon me, did she mean to post that to the biology feed?
Mark Donald: No, no.
Bob Ambrogi: Hopefully one of our panelists can explain this beads issue.
Boups the Beerman: They don’t go around your neck, my friend.
Bob Ambrogi: I’m kidding, I don’t want you to, not on this show.
Mark Donald: I think even the word “beads” will have to be bleeped out. In any case, she posted this very horrible response about how it was beneath the dignity of her students and the world to comment on this salacious and interesting topic. So obviously, a bit of a fumble there, but we also showed an example at our session yesterday about a lawyer who was a trial lawyer who showed in front of the jury an unredacted deposition video recording that included information in a medical malpractice trial about insurance coverage, which you can’t show to the jury. And he was immediately summoned up to the bench after showing this video to the jury, realizing he had simply clicked on the wrong icon on his laptop and played this video in front of the jury. He went up to the bench for a bench conference to be scolded by the judge, promptly fainted in the courtroom, and then the defendant, doctor, in the medical malpractice case that he was suing, came around to tend to him and check and make sure that he was okay. So there are lots of ethics issues around.
Boups the Beerman: Or maybe make sure that he was dying.
Mark Donald: We’ll call that a prescription for an instant mistrial.
Bob Ambrogi: Mark and I did a panel yesterday for the Association of Corporate Counsel of Colorado on the ethical duty of lawyers to be competent in technology, and it’s a scary issue, it’s a fascinating issue in one we could do a whole ‘nother show on.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Yeah, I mean I think that just to try to bring it back and gather up the stray strands we’ve thrown out there-
Mark Donald: Do that, because I want to talk about LibreOffice.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Yeah, yeah, I do too-
Bob Ambrogi: Let’s talk about LibreOffice!
Boups the Beerman: Two hours ago we were talking about LibreOffice and we’re going back to that now?
Jilayne Lovejoy: Thank you Bob for explaining what the panel was and reference and that Boups reference and I think that ethics training for lawyers tend to be-
Bob Ambrogi: Now a word from our sponsor, LibreOffice.
Jilayne Lovejoy: To Boups’ point, I always find them to be – especially usually involved social media and usually involving this “Oh my god, just don’t be an idiot” kind of messages. So I think that the topics that you guys talked about were a little more closer to bone and a little more relevant to people who just don’t have any integrity or ethics what so ever.
Mark Donald: She means just a little bit nerdier.
Jilayne Lovejoy: But anyway, back to LibreOffice, I think the interesting thing to me, based on the ethical duty of lawyers to be up to date with technology – and that’s not the right wording of the various opinions you guys cited, which I think it could be interesting in itself because it could be interpreted in many different ways. But what would it take if emailing word documents with track changes back and forth and no one has even consistency in the document formatting, the way you do – so now we’re in the context of a contract negotiation – the way you record your changes and how you annotate them. I mean, everyone has their own method, right? I think I remember getting a PDF from one lawyer – this is not that long ago – who printed the document I had sent him and then literally redlined it in handwriting and then scanned it and sent it back to me. And I thought, “Oh my god, really? You don’t know how to use track changes?” I mean I remember people being like, “What’s this track change, how did you do that?” And this is just within one program, Word. And I understand and I’m sympathetic to whatever program you’re used to – assuming you’re used to a software program – that it’s hard to change. So even as someone who’s pretty adept in Microsoft Office Word – because that’s what I’ve used to go and then switch to Libre document, whatever it’s called, LibreOffice document version – it takes a little bit of a learning curve for sure.
Bob Ambrogi: But Libre is fully compatible with Word.
Laurence Colletti: It’s borderline fully compatible.
Mark Donald: LibreOffice is compatible with Microsoft Office I think as perhaps Mac Office is with Windows Office.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Well, it’s not too incompatible. This is what we started to talk about before the break. You can’t start a document in Microsoft Word and save it in ODF, which is the free standard. ODF is the suffix, I was trying to queue Chad up to explaining that, but Doc, or DocX is your suffix on your documents that you save in Word. ODF is the format for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
Chad Jolly: So I’m way out of my league here, but at some point,and I feel that this was in the recent past, let’s say five years, was there not a situation where – this is where my lawyering is of course totally irrelevant because I’m not a lawyer. Was there a decision that public documents or government documents had to be in a format that was readable in a non-proprietary format?
Mark Donald: In some countries.
Bob Ambrogi: There have been some states that have been talking about that.
Chad Jolly: Not to get too nerdy, but I think the DocX formats are actually XML formats. And so currently, Microsoft is not bound to this particular standard. So Jilayne, as of Microsoft Office system service pack SP2, you can save in ODF or in ODT format from Word.
Bob Ambrogi: So are you saying that lawyers should be using LibreOffice instead of using Microsoft Office or that they should be knowledgeable about it to use it as an adjunct in some way?
Chad Jolly: What I’m saying is that – especially if you have a large fleet of computers and you want to save money and make 27, there is a viable alternative to Microsoft Office or even to the Mac-
Bob Ambrogi: A viable and free alternative.
Chad Jolly: Viable and free, and the compatibility I think at this point is far greater than it has been in the past year. So LibreOffice is a full featured office suite.
Bob Ambrogi: How does Libre handle PDF?
Chad Jolly: LibreOffice actually dumps PDF quite nicely. But of course, Office has done that for a couple of versions as well.
Mark Donald: PDF’s not a proprietary format, right?
Chad Jolly: PDF is a weird format. PDF is a controlled but public format from Adobe and there’s so many. I’ve worked in advertising for 15 years, so there’s many flavors of PDF, including for color separations and things like that. But for lawyer work, for documents and document exchange, OpenOffice or LibreOffice both dump to PDF far more readily than anything did in the past. Of course, again, in the past, Office does that fairly well on its own now. That said, yeah, it’s an alternative office suite. And the idea of having this available as part of a hosted or online based solution is super interesting, because there are a bunch of tools within LibreOffice, including their database product. And one of the limitations really, for the open source office suites has been that there is no online component to compliment their alternative to access. And the idea if the developers that are working on this can build a backplane for that that makes it server-based, that opens a wild world of shortcut development that could be terribly useful for lawyers to implement a contracts database or implement a client database on the fly hosted on a free software platform that can be shared amongst many people, as opposed to just sending around files. So I think it’s pretty exciting for that potential.
Bob Ambrogi: So we are breaking the world record for the length of a Lawyer 2 Lawyer podcast.
Boups the Beerman: You signed up for it, Bob.
Mark Donald: And we’re on the record for the shortest ever FOSS+beer podcast.
Bob Ambrogi: Well, we’re not done yet. So okay, you said that you wrap up your podcast by talking about the beer. So is this a good time to talk about beer and talk about Beryl’s beer? Who wants to go first? Who wants to talk about beer and what we’ve been drinking? Boups the Beerman?
Boups the Beerman: Well, I think I better start because I’m pretty sure that the beer’s going to hit me pretty soon.
Bob Ambrogi: When we said we have a Jolly and a Lovejoy last name, we also have a Beerman last name, so that’s perfect.
Mark Donald: He’s also a Wisconsin native.
Bob Ambrogi: He can also talk to us about cheese.
Boups the Beerman: I’m a big fan of the beers and I think I love the fact that Beryl’s is a bit of a barrel-age, that’s kind of a little bit of the stick they have.
Mark Donald: That’s the pun.
Boups the Beerman: Every beer has a little bit more flavor at the end than you would expect. So if you come to Beryl’s Beer expecting a Coors Lite, you’re probably in the wrong spot, because there’s the initial flavor that’s solid and then it’s-
Jilayne Lovejoy: If you come to Colorado expecting Coors Lite, you should just leave.
Mark Donald: Just head up to Golden and do the brewery tour.
Bob Ambrogi: Wasn’t the general counsel from Coors?
Mark Donald: Yes, he did one of the sessions yesterday. It wasn’t the GC, but actually, that guy was super interesting.
Bob Ambrogi: He was really good.
Mark Donald: He was probably the best speaker on that panel.
Bob Ambrogi: But Boups, go on.
Jilayne Lovejoy: So Boups, what beers did you have?
Boups the Beerman: Oh, I had a coffee which was – oh shoot, now there’s all sorts of words and names and things. Okay, so there was a coffee, there was a smoke, there was a nice mix, there was a wine barrel beer. At this point I’m about 12 in, so to recall all of them would be fruitless. And the fact that you can’t get them in a store means that you have one place to find them, and this is a really nice neighborhood. And this is a nice brewery to, really, a beautiful place. Bathrooms are probably the cleanest and nicest bathrooms I’ve seen in a brewery ever.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Coming from a man.
Mark Donald: Boups, can I just say that this is the fanciest restrooms in any tap room I’ve ever seen, including, I felt quite posh, with the cloth towels.
Boups the Beerman: Cloth towels! Yes, yes! Cloth towels!
Jilayne Lovejoy: Oh my god.
Boups the Beerman: It was amazing!
Jilayne Lovejoy: Anyway, Mark, tell me what beers did you have?
Mark Donald: I had first the wine-barrel aged saison. It was delightful, you could definitely taste the wine overtones to it.
Boups the Beerman: Ooh, delightful, nice word, by the way.
Bob Ambrogi: Did you say there were Merlot barrels here?
Mark Donald: I see a Malbec barrel right over your shoulder there, Bob. After that I had the Rye Belgian, which was really, really nice, you could definitely taste the rye.
Boups the Beerman: You can’t remember them past that point.
Mark Donald: Oh sure I can.
Boups the Beerman: Really? Wow, alcoholic right here.
Mark Donald: Yeah, then I had the Coffee Stout, was really nice, and the one that’s in front of me is the mild English ale. I don’t remember the name-
Jilayne Lovejoy: The Antero.
Mark Donald: The Antero, but it’s extremely good and it’s nice as opposed to the usual FOSS+beer episodes where we’re drinking all 10+% of all beers. This one is very, very drinkable and quite nice. The only one I didn’t like was one of Jilayne’s. Four out of five, I didn’t like the band-aid beer, and that’s just a smoked beer preference thing. But all four of the beers that I actually had myself were fantastic, and I encourage a pilgrimage to Beryl’s.
Boups the Beerman: Nobody spoke of band-aid, nobody thought band-aid until it was brought up by our Jilayne.
Trent Carlyle: I feel like the band-aid is like those super tastes that can taste the blue in the blue M&M’s. I got nothing.
Mark Donald: There’s just something about smoked beers that taste like band-aid to me, so my apologies for throwing that out there.
Bob Ambrogi: It’s your boy scout past that brings that.
Mark Donald: Jilayne, you had some kind of a fruity thing, didn’t you?
Jilayne Lovejoy: Yeah, I started with a peach and blondage, which had a peach nose, it was very nice. And then I moved on to the Seasonal Wald, AKA, the smoky band-aid beer, which I didn’t really capture the band-aid thing until Trent said that. And I finished with Antero ale which I agree with Mark was really, really good.
Boups the Beerman: So Jilayne, three beers all night. Well done, way to live up to our name. Three beers. Seriously.
Jilayne Lovejoy: Thanks, Mark just handed me a band-aid.
Boups the Beerman: Mark just named seven to eight beers, I had 13, and you had three?
Jilayne Lovejoy: You guys are bigger than me.
Boups the Beerman: I’ve seen you have at least six. Bob what did you have?
Bob Ambrogi: Wait a minute, Chad works next door, so he knows what beer to drink here.
Chad Jolly: I do indeed, and it is an equal level of awesome and danger working next to a brewery, having one door between you and a brewery.
Boups the Beerman: Amen, brother.
Jilayne Lovejoy: They do, they share a wall, I’m so jealous.
Chad Jolly: We share a door and there is a point of entry between here and there. We intentionally keep it locked so we have to actually go outside to come into Beryl’s. We can’t just stumble in, it’s intentional.
Mark Donald: I saw the infrastructure in your guys’ office, I’m not buying that there’s not a direct feed into one of those refrigerators over there.
Chad Jolly: That’s a fair assessment, Mark. So when I walk into Beryl’s, I immediately go for the Paper Moon, which is a pale ale. And that is how usually Laurence, our producer and I – we call this conference room B, actually. So we have conference room A over in the real office, and conference room B over here and we’ll usually start out with a pale ale and it’s a dynamite way to end the day.
Bob Ambrogi: How do I get a job like that? I’ve got to go to more meetings like that. Trent, what’s yours?
Trent Carlyle: Just like my Michael Bolton collection, I celebrate it all. So anything on the chalkboard, I’m down with. But typically, it’s the Paper Moon or the Lightcatcher, the stout, which is phenomenal. But these guys don’t do a bad beer. The Firecatcher, if you like barrel-aged beers, is ridiculous. I don’t know if you guys tried any of that, but it’s silly if you like barrel-aged stuff.
Bob Ambrogi: Can we get a weight in from our producer, Laurence Colletti?
Mark Donald: The night is young, I’m going to try one of those.
Jilayne Lovejoy: And featuring debut on the producer of the Legal Talk Network.
Boups the Beerman: Laurence, this will probably be a 30 minute recap and a touch on every topic because you are probably at least in the top 6 most educated people at this table. In my experience, you seem like the most intelligent who’s been quietly recording all of these crazy episodes. Okay so let’s make this happen. One minute touch on every topic tonight. Laurence, ready, go!
Laurence Colletti: Okay, so we opened up with a discussion about technologies-
Bob Ambrogi: Louder Laurence, louder.
Laurence Colletti: -technology and law-
Bob Ambrogi: Closer to the mic, Laurence!
Laurence Colletti: Yeah, Bob’s giving me a hard time here. But we started with law technology and then there was something about Ruby on Rails which I’m not sure exactly what it is. It sounds nice, and then we had a digression from this table to a reload for beers and then I remember something about ping pong. Was it ping pong? Maybe that was when I fell asleep. And then we come back to this and we’re talking about beers. But my favorite beer – and they don’t have it right now – is Afternoon Delight. I hear rumors it’s not coming back but it is my favorite. But my second favorite is definitely Paper Moon, and that’s all I got.
Bob Ambrogi: Alright. Good.
Jilayne Lovejoy: So Bob, back to you.
Bob Ambrogi: Well, I just boringly drank the same beer all night, the Paper Moon. I liked it and this was sort of a lightly, hoppy, sort of IPA. They don’t have an IPA here, but it was good. It was a hoppy pale ale.
Mark Donald: That’s a very rebellious stance for a brewery to take in these days and ages.
Bob Ambrogi: You advised me to a double IPA last night that was very, very good.
Mark Donald: Have you recovered?
Bob Ambrogi: What was that?
Mark Donald: That was a Titan.
Bob Ambrogi: Titan, that was very good.
Laurence Colletti: Is the Titan a double?
Mark Donald: Yeah.
Bob Ambrogi: That’s what the label says, if you believe what you read.
Mark Donald: It’s only 10% alcohol though.
Bob Ambrogi: So I think that wraps up this episode, I have no idea, I’m lost in the course of this. But I want to really thank-
Boups the Beerman: What a derailing kind of podcast, by the way.
Bob Ambrogi: Yeah, nobody’s going to listen to this but us and our parents, maybe.
Mark Donald: Hey, FOSS+beer has a listener.
Boups the Beerman: Can we give a shoutout to our listener?
Bob Ambrogi: Of course.
Boups the Beerman: Hey listener, we’re looking at you because we’ve managing to take some IOT, pop it in your bedroom and we’re watching you as you listen to us, so thanks for listening.
Bob Ambrogi: Well FOSS+beer, or as I call it FOSS “plus” beer because that’s what their name says, is a great podcast to listen to. I really appreciate them taking the time to be with us and I’m really happy to be sitting here with the people from the Legal Talk Network and have them join us tonight. This has been a lot of time.
Mark Donald: This was a great kind of convergence of things, Bob. I was super happy to know that you’d be on my panel and then when we figured out we could all do this together and bring your podcast to our podcast and do it with Legal Talk Network and do it in a brewery, wow.
Jilayne Lovejoy: In a brewery, which we talked about, but thanks for making that happen.
Mark Donald: Yeah, our first episode so thanks to Legal Talk Network and thanks to you, Bob.
Bob Ambrogi: Here, here. I guess that’s it. Cheers!
Boups the Beerman: Cheers!
Jilayne Lovejoy: Cheers!
Mark Donald: Cheers!
Bob Ambrogi: Join us next time for another great legal topic. When you want legal, think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.
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Lawyer 2 Lawyer |
Lawyer 2 Lawyer is a legal affairs podcast covering contemporary and relevant issues in the news with a legal perspective.