Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Marc Lauritsen

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 401 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor,

Tom Mighell:

and I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:

In our last episode, Tom and I celebrated episode 400 of this podcast. Yes, the Quadra Centennial with a fireside chat with our friend and friend of the podcast, Debbie Foster of Affinity Consulting. We reflected on podcast, past podcast, present and podcast future. Be sure to give it a listen and hear our answer to how to keep a podcast going for nearly 20 years. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices on Legal Tech series in Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. Tom, what’s all

Tom Mighell:

On our agenda for this episode? 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 favorite ever fresh voices on legal tech. Marc Lorenson, president of Capstone Practice Systems, and a knowledgeable and insightful contributor on legal technology, innovation and ai. 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 they think you should be paying attention to right now. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Marc Lauritsen to our Fresh Voices series. Marc, welcome to the Kennedy Mighell report.

Marc Lauritsen:

Thank you, Tom. It’s so great to be here, especially honored to be the first of your next 400 episodes.

Tom Mighell:

Absolutely. Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit more about you? What do you do at Capstone Practice Systems? What’s your role? What should our audience know just to get started, get kicked off?

Marc Lauritsen:

Yeah, I conceive myself as a legal knowledge systems architect. In other words, I design and build tools for people to do legal work, whether they’re lawyers or consumers. And my pinned tweet on Twitter is that I serve as a arms dealer to legal knowledge warriors, but Capstone is my consulting company. It’s been around for almost 30 years. I’ve got some wonderful colleagues who are world-class experts in document automation and expert systems. We have a very diverse client base of law firms, law departments, courts, nonprofit organizations, legal aid programs, law schools, anywhere from solo practitioners up to multinational corporations. And basically we help organizations consider design, build, improve systems to help people practice law and to dom legal work. Sometimes that involves training, sometimes it involves mentoring, helping people choose technologies on the side. I act as an adjunct professor personally at Suffolk Law School teaching courses where students build apps as part of their coursework. And I spent too much time writing articles and trying to stay up with this crazy space,

Tom Mighell:

A lot of work.

Dennis Kennedy:

So Marc, first of all, it’s so awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast. I always say that one of the pivotal moments in my own legal tech career was the generous way that you responded to an email question. I asked you about document assembly programs many, many years ago, and the influence that your response and your approach had on me, especially your generosity, it’s not always these days easy to talk with or teach lawyers and law students about tech. Sometimes I get frustrated about how difficult it’s still is to explain technology and its benefits to those in the legal profession. I think you do a great job at it and you’ve been doing it for a long time. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession as well as consumers of legal services about technology and what you’ve found works well for you? When you’re talking to people about technology in law,

Marc Lauritsen:

It’s always great Dennis to hear that story. I don’t remember the specific context, but it’s nice to be remembered for that. I don’t think of myself as a great explainer, but I do think that the best way to help somebody understand something is to have them do it. As a clinical teacher and experiential educator, I’ve always felt that there’s a lot of power in just doing things and having personal experience. We used to talk about in the medical space how doctors would be encouraged students to see something, then do something and then teach something. So do one, see one, and teach one. And I think the same thing goes true for learning about technology. I tend to be kind of a lazy guy about teaching, and so most of my courses I involve throwing students into the deep end of the pool and saying, okay, figure this out. Make some sense of it. Build something meaningful and learn as you go. So that’s my short answer. I don’t have a great way to explain things, but I think drawing on people’s innate curiosity and enthusiasm when they find themselves in the midst of working on it tends to be a good formula.

Tom Mighell:

So that leads to my question, which is we always ask our guests about their position on the state of legal technology. You just said that your approach with law students is to throw ’em in the deep end. I don’t know that the average practicing lawyer would react the same way about being thrown in the deep end with technology. So what’s your thought about that? We have laws around the country. We have rules that talk about this duty of technology competence only until the past maybe two months saying that now that there are so many AI generated hallucinations that lawyers are quoting in court opinions, maybe we ought, I’m hearing maybe we ought to enforce these rules, but it’s the first time. And how many years did the rules have been in place that we’re starting to hear that? So what’s your view of the current state? And I’m going to ask you to compare and contrast it with the students you’re seeing right now who are just coming into the practice versus the ones that you seeing out have been practicing for a while.

Marc Lauritsen:

Yeah, that’s a good point, Tom, about the difference between law students and post law school lawyers. I think it’s, frankly, my answer is it’s impossible to remain competent at the moment because the pace of change and the velocity and the quantity of stuff somebody would need to know to be truly competent is overwhelming. It’s like drinking out of multiple fire hoses simultaneously. So my answer generally is I think it’s more important for law students and lawyers to learn how to be good humans as opposed to be great users of technology. Those are not in opposition, but I think nowadays, especially with the advancing of ai, focusing on human capacities and what we can do on our side of the ledger when we got these intelligent assistance. But in terms of competence, I think a couple skills that have been historically important in relation to other humans, namely how do you manage delegate, are increasingly critical for interacting with our new superior intellects that live in the box. So I would just say focus on the humanistic side of law and do a good job there. Understand the technology’s got benefits and problems, not only the old issues about inadvertent metadata exposure that used to be the equivalent of hallucinations 10 or 15 years ago, but focus on lifelong learning, expose yourself continuously to the new developments and embrace it with some caution but enthusiasm.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, to me, what’s interesting is I agree with you, it’s impossible to have this sense of total technology competence and it doesn’t make sense. And so I always talk about there needs to be some element of reasonableness and it needs to be directed to what your work is and to what your clients need. And it really does come down to lifelong learning. I think that is one of the skills that lawyers, lawyers have that we need to make more use of. So I know we’re going to get into AI and your historic perspective on that I think is really, really significant. But right now as you look out there, what are the areas in the legal profession in terms of technology and I would say innovation need the most attention now, and how could we actually get people to pay that attention when there is this general sense of overwhelm out there?

Marc Lauritsen:

Yeah, man, I wish I had a better answer for that. I come back to this point of it’s more important to know what needs to be done rather than exactly how to do it. It’s more important to know the right question to ask rather than being a wizard prompt engineer. And I think a lot of people get distracted by the mechanics of interacting with our new intelligent agents as opposed to the substance. So obviously it varies greatly depending upon your nature of your practice, litigator, transactional, what kind of space you’re in. But I think stepping back from the immediacy of this machine conversation to what’s the job to be done? What are we doing? How do we do it, and how can I enlist this new phenomenally helpful personality, artificial personality to move me along in the process?

Tom Mighell:

You’re speaking our language. So when you talk about that, when you mentioned talking with our new AI friends, let’s pivot a little bit to collaboration. It’s a form of collaboration, but I kind of want to break out of the collaborating with an artificial and maybe getting back into the human part of collaboration. We love to talk about collaboration on the podcast. I confess that my questions that I ask about collaboration tend to lead toward tell me about the cool new tools that you’re using. But really most of the guests that we have, they see right around that and they really want to focus on the people or the process rather than on the technology. So tell me what’s important to you about collaboration? How do you successfully collaborate and what really makes a difference for you?

Marc Lauritsen:

Yeah, no, I’ve certainly used a lot of tools over the years. I got way back, I may mention it later, but one of my first projects was this thing at Harvard called Project Para. And one of our strands of research back in the eighties around technology was computer conferencing. We got a system called Party A-P-A-R-T, I believe from Sweden, which was one of the first computer conferencing tools for a vaxx mini computer. And we spent a lot of time trying to stimulate people to have collaborative conversations on this medium, on this new medium of technology. And like many of these, and I think you guys would agree, they tend to fail, they tend to dissolve. And so I’ve been through, there was Council Connect for a while, which is a big thing. David Johnson and Company, I’ve spent a lot of time on tools like Basecamp and Slack and

Jira, and they all can do a job, but it requires human energy to sustain them, and very often they’re not very sustainable. I think the email list, the so-called listserv, frankly, is often the most successful way to just get people to react to each other as much as they’re willing to. But one little twist, Tom, I think is, you’ll hear me mention Choice boxing, which is one of my favorite ideas, but the whole spirit of that is one of collaborative deliberation. How can we build a framework, an online environment where people can see the considerations at play in a decision and express opinions about the relative goodness of things in the relative facets. So I think there’s room for that. It hasn’t really taken off anywhere yet that I know about, but I think the whole idea of collaborating deliberately to have a deliberation, which means giving time for other people to talk, listening respectfully and then having some sort of mechanism to record and sustain what you’re building so it doesn’t just evaporate when the conversation is over. That’s why I mentioned this idea of an interactive visualization as a new form of collaboration.

Tom Mighell:

Wow. Yeah, I totally agree with everything there. We have more questions to ask and I want to get into the choice boxing conversation in a little bit more detail in a minute, but we need to take a quick break. So let’s take a break for a word from our sponsors,

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Marco Orson at Capstone Practice Systems. We found in the Fresh Voices series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience does as well. Would you talk about your own career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you to your current role and focus and you have a really interesting career path, Marc,

Marc Lauritsen:

That’s one word for it. I think it’s been about 41 years now since I first got seriously into legal tech. So it goes way back. I’ll try to be fast about this, but I went to MIT as an undergrad. I got two Bachelor of science degrees. Unfortunately, they were majors in music and philosophy and minors in literature and history. So I was not especially marketable. Went to law school. I started practicing law as a two L because I joined the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and I had a caseload that I carried for the next two years. So to me that was an amazing experience. To actually be a lawyer for people while in law school sort of helps both improve your confidence and to improve your humility. After law school, I clerked for a judge in New York City, a federal judge, a senior federal judge.

Got to see a lot of cool trials and that kind of stuff. I learned many years later that one of my predecessors as his clerk was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I happened to meet her at a dinner for the judge. I turned down a job at a law firm in New York to serve as a legal aid lawyer in Worcester, Massachusetts. And I spent the next five years doing poverty law work, representing tenants and handling divorces and doing voting rights litigation and one national class action around government benefits calculations. Got recruited back to Harvard as a clinical teacher at the Legal Aid Bureau where I’d been a student and I was supervising students for a number of years, which was very satisfying. But then the school got this grant from the Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid eighties, which was one of the main players in high tech those days, and they gave us a mini computer that was worth about $900,000 and some money.

We collaborated with the Ford Foundation and the Center for Computer Aid Legal Instruction and launched this project called Project Pericles. It was a play against MIT’s Project Athena. And the idea idea was let’s explore how we can use technology to do law and to teach law. So I found myself curiously interested in that. Next thing I know, I was the director of that project and ended up being at Harvard for another 12 or so years as a senior research associate. Around that same time, I got involved with the A BA, I think that’s when I met Dennis and you Tom with Jim Kane and Richard Granite. We set up the e lawyering task force, which is probably the longest running task force in a BA history. Just kept going on and on. And I formed my own consulting practice capstone back in the day. I took one year off to work for a.com company called Ameri Council, which again had good funding, but ran out of money and disappeared.

And so I reverted back to my consulting practice. A couple of years later I started teaching as an adjunct, mostly at Suffolk Law School, although I also did a summer course tennis at MSU in London. That was kind of fun. And so I’ve bounced around in that way. There’s an international conference series called The International Conference on AI in Law that happens every two years. And I’ve been to every one of those, ironically, except the very first one in Boston, which was right across the river when I was doing that kind of stuff. Anyway, so that’s kind of what got me. It’s more of a stumble than a career. I’ve just sort of bounced from one idea to another, and frankly at the moment I’m looking for a next chapter. I’m really interested in doing something different, talking to a variety of organizations to find some role to continue all this crazy pattern.

Tom Mighell:

Let’s dive into ai. We’ve been tiptoeing around the corners of it. Let’s dive into ai. A lot of the fresh voices that we’ve had on the podcast are people who are working with ai, companies who are dealing with the boom in the capabilities of generative ai. You come at this from, I think, a slightly different perspective, or at least in terms of what we’ve talked about on the podcast and that you’ve seen most of the history of the law and AI and how AI works in law and have been, as you just described, really a leading pioneer in that. So tell us a little bit about what you see as our current chapter, our current evolution in ai, which is having the moment, how does it fit into the context of AI history and maybe where do you see it going?

Marc Lauritsen:

That’s true. I come mostly from what they refer to as good old fashioned ai back in the seventies and eighties, project Peres had some serious efforts on those days. Of course, that was expert systems, so-called symbolic ai, and we built a lot of applications using those. The International journal on AI and law got started in 1992, and I was the inaugural technology correspondent along with Richard Suskin. So the two of us were the two correspondents for the journal and would occasionally, periodically would attempt to interject practical reality into what is mostly an academic journal. But that went on and on, and a lot of us expected AI to transform law, and we keep waiting for that to happen.

So there’s no question for me, for an old timer like me who’s been doing it for so long, this is by far the most exciting time. I mean, you can’t begrudge the incredible power we’re seeing with generative ai. I did a second edition of my book, ironically, in 2021, and by the fall of 2022, it needed a serious rewrite, but I am not sure I have the energy to do it. But for me, I think besides it being the most exciting period, part of me thinks we may be approaching a plateau. There’s a lot of thinking that there’s limits to the scaling no matter how much money we throw at more server forms, et cetera. The basic model behind diffusion models and large language models may run out of steam, and there’s also the danger of an economic or a financial balloon popping in. But I think the main dynamic is really the receptivity of the legal profession itself to the changes necessitated by this new technology. I think the main constraint is human, especially among lawyers, and the sociology and psychology of the legal profession right now is not one that gives one confidence that it’s going to stand up to the plate and really hit it out of the park. With ai. It’s going to be a slow process and it may hit to a plateau and plateaus can be happy places. In some ways, we should enjoy the possibility that change may change into relative change. Lessness for a bit and give us a chance to catch our breath,

Dennis Kennedy:

Ethan Molik has this great point that he makes that even if the evolution and improvement in AI stopped today, that we would still have several years to work through to catch up to where we might be able to go with it, to really learn where the constraints and what the possibilities are, which I think is really an interesting point. So AI is both a challenge and an opportunity for the legal profession. So from your own point of view, what are the new developments and new perspectives you find most interesting in AI today? And what are you personally moving towards? I mean, another way of saying this is what is actually working in AI these days. From your point of view and given your perspective, I think most interesting to me is how is AI impacting access to justice and how might it, and so what actually gets, you say this is an exciting time, but what actually gets you excited about ai?

Marc Lauritsen:

Yeah, I coincidentally had a new article just came out called New Directions in Machine Assisted Drafting, which encapsulates most of my ideas on this topic. And the basic ones are we have this embarrassment of riches. Now, I think you’re exactly right, Dennis, that it’s going to take the legal profession years, if not decades, to metabolize all the stuff that we already have. But the developments that I find most interesting in relation to legal work are two. One is the increasing presence of multiple personalities, artificial personalities being added to the mix, and this idea of cognitive diffusion among the various players, human and artificial in the legal workplace. How are we going to manage those things? I mean, there are obviously benefits to it. And secondarily, how can we go into what I would refer to as deep context? And we presently, we have an expansive role of the context window in relation to these chatbots, for instance.

But what we really need is a machine or a collection of mechanical personalities to understand the full context of the human environment in which legal work is being done on behalf of the full environment of humans that are out in the world facing their legal opportunities and challenges. So this idea of combination of multiplicity of minds that need to be organized together and the depth of the context within which a rich collaboration can be framed, to me, that’s the most exciting. Now that’s the general answer on the access to justice space in general. I always observed that when I began practicing as a legal aid lawyer, we were astonished that only about 20% of people who needed legal help could get it. And we thought that’s got to improve and there’s all kinds of ways to improve it. But here we are 40 some years later, and man, we’re still holding steady at 20%.

Tom Mighell:

So

Marc Lauritsen:

Something is wrong. Technology has not saved us. I don’t think technology will save us. There are political and financial and economic and other challenges to doing it, but there are also bright spots. And as you guys both know, there are a lot of really happy, amazing things happen in the access to justice space. One of my favorites that I helped develop and I’m most proud of, is this thing called Law Help Interactive. And it began around 2001, 2002. It’s now managed by pro bono net in New York, and it’s using quite old technology. It’s using hot docs and a DJ author and a few other tools. But man, this thing has been serving a million people a year, a million free sessions of bespoke document packages across a whole range of states and practice areas. So on the one hand, it’s like, wow, look at all we’ve done, all the service we provided at a fraction of a cost of what it would cost to provide a human to do it. On the other hand, it’s just a drop in the bucket. I mean, I think easily a million a year, we could do a million a day and still not meet the legal needs.

Tom Mighell:

Still not give the demand, right?

Marc Lauritsen:

Yeah, I can go on and on about that, but I think we’re in a good place. I’ve written a lot about UPL. We could talk about UPL in a whole show. It’s an unauthorized practice of law. I think that has become a constraint. It’s inappropriately applied to humans trying to help other humans who can’t otherwise get legal help. And it’s especially inappropriate as applied to technological solutions. So I’m not expecting a quick turnaround about the judiciary’s attitude about that, but it needs to be reexamined and maybe taken on frontally.

Tom Mighell:

You’ve recently posted on LinkedIn. You asked the question, do you find it’s getting harder to make good legal technology decisions, which frankly I think could be an entire podcast to talk about that. I mean, I think we could have a long discussion about it. I think the short answer to that is yes, but how do you try to answer that question for yourself and how do you advise others to answer it? This is getting into, and this is something Dennis and I have talked about on previous podcasts, your method of choice boxing. Tell us a little bit more about either how you approach it, how you’ve taught students on decision-making, and maybe that’s a good place to start.

Marc Lauritsen:

Sure, yeah. I found myself early on in consulting projects being asked to help an organization choose a word processing system, choose a document management system, choose a case management system, et cetera. And I started noticing that there’s some similarities between those kinds of choices and choices we face elsewhere in our lives. And I had an epiphany 20 some years ago about what if we could build a intangible machine that captured the typical underlying dynamics. So almost any choice where you’ve got options or alternatives to consider, you’ve got reasons to prefer one over the other of various dimensions, and then you got multiple evaluative perspectives and it turns out to map nicely into a three dimensional matrix for those that are spatially organized where you can reflect or represent how good you think choice X is on factor Y compared to the other options or choices you face.

And then I thought, well, wouldn’t it be cool if this thing could be put into an online environment and become something that people can simultaneously manipulate as a visual representation of a choice in progress, the way you collaborate on a Google Doc? And anyway, that was my whole choice boxing thing. I can go on and on about it, but there’s also just a lot of process wisdom. I think people who are good at making choices, we will talk about, one of my favorite short pieces is a thing called 12 Mantras for Legal Technology Decisions. It was on the tech lawyer newsletter and it’s on my website, but it’s a dozen short mantras of things to consider. Wake up, pay attention to this separate the separable, and I refer people to read it. But to me it’s an encapsulation of ways in which we can decide better. And to your point, Tom, I think choices are getting harder, and when I look at law firms and other organizations I see engaged in making decisions, who to hire, what consultant to bring in, what products to use, whether to upgrade all these things, I’m astonished in how poorly people choose, how irresponsibly they are and how much pain and confusion tends to end up. So I think there are opportunities to improve that. Technology is part of it, but it’s also just plain old human learning about how to think better about making choices.

Tom Mighell:

Yes, I think that choice boxing is so interesting, but I have trouble unless I actually see it. I want to visualize how it works. So is there a place where our listeners can go to learn more about it, see how it works?

Marc Lauritsen:

Yeah, we built a couple of prototypes online. One is [email protected]. You can sign up for free and play with it. It’s not a full representation of the idea, but it has all the basic concepts and it does work. I often have my students use that in courses. You mentioned, Tom, that I’ve taught 11 semesters of a course on decision making and choice management, and I have students build apps. Sometimes they use Choice Boxer as an auxiliary tool, but mostly they’re using tools like Gavel and Brighter and other things to build an interactive application that helps somebody, a lawyer or a client make a law related decision. So I think once again, my experiential learning bent, I think having students actually try to build a tool and teach a machine how to help somebody make a choice is a way to improve their own learning about choice making.

Tom Mighell:

Yep. Yep. Totally agree. Alright, we still got more questions for Marc Lauritsen at Capstone Practice Systems, but we need to take another short break to hear from our sponsors. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis Kennedy. And I’m Tom Mighell. And we’re joined by our special guest, Marc Lauritsen at Capstone Practice Systems. We’ve got time for just a few more questions. So

Dennis Kennedy:

Marc, I know you do this on a regular basis, but how do you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in legal tech and non-traditional careers? This is sort of timely for me because right before this recording I had a conversation with A three L at Michigan Law School about this very topic, but there seems to be a lot more interest these days for people going to law school who are saying AI is happening. I’m not sure I want the standard practice of law anymore. How do you have those conversations and what encouragement do you give to students and new lawyers?

Marc Lauritsen:

Well, first of all, I encourage them to take advantage of courses at their own school that have this nature. Suffolk and MSU and other institutions, Stanford, the NYU, are particularly rich these days with such courses. So don’t miss out on your local opportunities. Get involved in hands-on activity if at all possible through those courses or by doing clinics. Get involved with theBar associations. It always amazes me that law students tend not to be even aware of the A, B, A and the state equivalent and how receptive they are, how welcoming they are to law students. It’s a golden opportunity to get exposed. So those are the things I tend to say. I encourage people too. They can afford to do it, to volunteer with a Lincoln Aid or a nonprofit organization and help with the technology. They often think that others know more than they do, but usually it’s the opposite.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, our last question is our selfish question. It’s asking our guests to help us staff more podcasts. So who are the fresh voices? Or maybe I’ll say EverFresh, who are the voices that you think in legal tech that you’d like to single out be part of our series? Somebody who maybe hasn’t been heard from in a while but is still going strong or someone that you’re listening to today who really you think is interesting that we need to pay attention to?

Marc Lauritsen:

There are so many, I haven’t gone back to see who you’ve already had on, but probably some of these people You have one name that just occurred to me who’s a real pioneer is Thorn McCarty. Thorn is a true expert law professor and computer science professor at Rutgers, et cetera. Had one of the seminal articles and he’s still alive and kicking and very much involved, so you might have fun talking to him. Kevin Ashley is another one of those, but some other names Tom Martin and Wal, I’m especially impressed by Tom’s writing. There are other people right now who’s writing I read all the time, Sam Harden you’ll find on social media. Satish Nori used to be at NYU and also in Lincoln Aid in New York. And now I think he’s with just tech Jordan Furlong, who writes great articles. These guys are all deep thinkers. There’s Zoe Dolan, I don’t know if that name means anything to you, but Zoe, I got to meet at the AI and Law conference in Chicago. She’s based in California and she’s writing some really deep experiments with her agents to the point of expecting that she’s achieved machine consciousness in the law space. So check her out. She might be a really fun conversationalist.

Tom Mighell:

That was almost a completely new slate of names for us, so that’s excellent. I love that. Alright, well we want to thankMarc Lauritsenat Capstone Practice Systems for being our guest on the show. Marc, tell us where people can learn more about what you’re doing or get in touch with you if they want to.

Marc Lauritsen:

I’m easily findable just by my name on the web and LinkedIn. My email is Marc MAR [email protected].

Dennis Kennedy:

So thanks so much, Marc. You’re a fantastic guest. Great information advice for our listeners as usual, so many topics to discuss in so little time. Now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website, our observation. You can use this second. This podcast ends. Marc, take it away.

Marc Lauritsen:

I have two quick ones. One is if you’re looking for an alternative voice around the future of AI in general, I recommend Gary Marcus. You can find him, Gary Marcus on both Twitter and Blue Sky. He’s a former NYU cognitive scientist who’s brilliant, and I think for the last quite some time, he’s become a resounding voice on the side of caution and let’s not get too carried away. The other one is just a book I finished reading for the first time. It’s from 2016, but I highly recommend that it’s by Hisham Mattar. It’s called The Return. And besides being beautifully written, it’s about Libya and the experiences Libya went through both under the Italian colonial experience and under Mussolini and the Fascists, and then more recently under Kadafi. But it just reminds us how quickly a leader of a government who may be perceived as a buffoon can turn into a real beast. And not that that’s relevant to anything today, but to me that was very heartrending to read.

Tom Mighell:

I just read a book by him called My Friends. So yeah, I recognize that name. So I’m going to have to go take a look at that. Excellent. My parting shot, it’s interesting, Marc, that you mentioned a tool that had come up with in the past called Party, P-A-R-T-I, because my parting shot is called part of Full. I was recently reading a newsletter about apps and tools that you can take when you go to conferences. And this one was interesting to me because this is, and I’ve not tried it, so I’m just saying go look, take a look at it. But it was recommended. This allows you to set up quick events. Say that you meet somebody at a conference, say, Hey, I’m going to set a happy hour afterwards at the hotel lounge. Join me there. It allows you to set up a quick event in seconds invite people can have any type of event that you want. The person was saying, if we want to set up a meal or a dinner or a party or a happy hour or something, you can do it literally in seconds. And it’s actually free at its base level for users to try. So if you’re heading to a conference anytime soon and you want to network more with people outside of the normal conference activities, ful.com might be an option.

Dennis Kennedy:

This feels like you’re going back to your four square days.

Tom Mighell:

Not quite. I’m not quite there,

Dennis Kennedy:

Dennis. So my parting shot is I’ve been thinking a lot about the workplace environment and how people work with technology, and so I’ve kind of redone my home office, but usually what I see these days in, whether it’s classrooms or it’s offices or whatever, are these fluorescent overhead lights, terrible lighting. It’s really hard for me to imagine that people can even see what they’re doing without it affecting their eyes. So this is not the free sort of thing, I think it’s about $150 or so, but there’s something called the Ben Q Screen Bar Pro LED, monitor Light Bar, and you can get one for a flat monitor or for a curved monitor, and it sits on top of your monitor and it’s a light bar and it gives you a whole bunch of different ways to set the lights from the temperature or color of the lights to do other things.

But it reduces the clear on your screen. More importantly to me is it illuminates your workspace right in front of you. It’s like where your keyboard is or where you’re taking notes. And so even if you have this really bad overhead fluorescent, you dramatically improve your lighting in your workspace. And at most places, people you would say like, oh, to get one of the, I’d like to improve my lights and there’s never going to be any budget for it, and you’d have to buy it on your own. But I think for $150, I’ve gotten more than a great return out of this. So highly recommended by me. And it also is really great too because it’s built so that your video camera will sit right on top of it too.

Tom Mighell:

Oh, that’s another consideration. Yep. Because mine’s right on top of my monitor. Interesting. Very cool. So that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Networks page for our show. You can find all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts on the Legal Talk Network website as well. If you’d like to get in touch with us or suggest a topic for an upcoming episode, you can always find us on LinkedIn or leave us a voicemail. Remember, we always like getting your questions. We’ve answered a few over the past couple of podcasts, so it’s gone. Great. That number is 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy:

And I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy Mighell report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. We wanted to remind you to share the podcast with a friend or two that really helps us out. And as always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. We’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Announcer:

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

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