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Podcasting portraitI’m heading to Chicago for what I believe will officially be my “umpteenth” visit to the ABA TECHSHOW. It’s definitely the legal tech conference where I have the most fun.

In big news, after more than 230 podcast episodes of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, Tom Mighell and I will record our first podcast while actually in the same physical space while at TECHSHOW. That should be both fun and a little different for us. I’m so used to sensing Tom roll his eyes at something I’ve said that it will be weird to see him roll his eyes in person. Our topic will be a meta-topic, the future of legal tech conferences, because . . . well, why not?

I’m looking forward to a great TECHSHOW experience and attending some of the related events around the show.

I’ll start with the new Women of Legal Tech Summit and also get to the Chicago Legal Tech Meetup and the Beer for Bloggers event on Friday evening.

I’m not speaking this year, so I’m looking to wander around the show (focusing primarily on the Academic Track this year), see the exhibit hall, and talk with as many people as I can. That’s how I maximize my learning.

As is my tradition, I’ve signed up to staff the Conference Concierge desk on Saturday morning and that’s a great way to meet me.

I’m also looking forward to helping Carla Reyes and a group of Michigan State LegalRnD students navigate TECHSHOW, learn about legal tech and network at the show.I’ll also help the Legal Talk Network with some interview podcasts. Let us know if you have an idea for an interview show.

And, of course, Tom and I will be happy to sign copies of the new edition of our collaborations tools and technologies book.

Hope to see you there. It looks like you can ping me if you want to try to meet, but I try to be approachable, so just walk up and say hello.

I’ll also be tweeting at @denniskennedy and the conference hashtag is #ABATECHSHOW (not yelling – it’s a naming/branding thing).

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[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available:

The second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

From time to time, I’m involved in discussions or see discussions about how to teach technology, practice management, and innovation as part of the law school curriculum. I’m now teaching a class called “Delivering Legal Services” as part of the LegalRnD program at Michigan State University College of Law. Last fall, I taught a class called “Entrepreneurial Lawyering” last fall.

I’ve always wanted to share the syllabi for the classes I teach. I hadn’t been able to come up with a good way to do that.

Fortunately, John Mayer had a great idea and he has executed on it. He is gathering and posting syllabi for these kinds of subjects on a great resource called “The Syllabi Commons.”

The syllabi for both of my classes are now posted on the Syllabi Commons.

Whether you are looking for a good way to learn on your own, or you are teaching a course of this kind, The Syllabi Commons is the best place to start.

I’ve had more people than I ever expected tell me that I should turn my classes (or, realistically, a much shorter version) into online courses. I want to get some feedback on that and have created a survey here. Would online courses of this type interest you and be of enough value that you would consider paying a reasonable price for the course? Here’s the survey.

Thank you for your feedback.

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[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available:

The second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

People regularly ask me what “legal technology” or “legal tech” means when I use the terms and tell them it is something I’ve focused on for many years. In my class in Entrepreneurial Lawyering last fall in Michigan State’s LegalRnD program, I realized that “legal technology” was a term I took for granted and it was, in fact, something I needed to define and explain to my students.

Based on some ideas I picked up from Chrissie Lightfoot, a few ideas of my own, a little creativity, a little commonsense, and an infatuation with quadrant charts, I came up with the following chart for my students:

Image of Quadrant Chart

I’m now ready to unleash it on an unsuspecting and unprepared world for feedback and, I hope, improvement. I think it works as a pedagogical tool. I don’t think it quite works yet as a classic quadrant chart – I’ve never quite figured out what the Y-axis should be and I’m not sure plotting points for tools within the chart would actually work.

To me, that means the chart is ready for feedback and the wisdom of the crowd.

I’ve decided to post the chart here. Please comment or email me if you have thoughts, questions or suggestions. I’ll put it out under a Creative Commons CC BY license to make it super easy for people to use.

Tom Mighell and I have also recorded an episode on The Kennedy-Mighell Report podcast in which we talk about the chart and definitions of “legal technology” or “legal tech” or “law tech”in some detail. That episode should be posted on Friday, January 18, 2019. I’ll add a a link when it’s available. It might be helpful to listen to the show and the explanations there before making suggestions. Or not.

I’m curious to see if people find this helpful or useful. If you think there’s already something better, I’d love to know that and maybe switch to that.

Also, this version is really a first and rough draft. I know that from font choices to other design and spacing, there is work to be done before I would consider it “final.” If you have strong feelings about design and are good at it and want to take a stab at an improved design, let me know and we’ll see how we might work on that.

ALSO:

Until March 31, 2019, I have a special discount code (20% off) for any readers who want to purchase the new edition of The Lawyers Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies. I have it on good authority that it makes a fabulous Valentine’s Day gift. Simply go to the ordering page for the book at
https://www.americanbar.org/products/inv/book/312056356/ and use the code TECHTOOL19 at checkout.

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[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available:

The second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

The American Bar Association, for many years, has surveyed lawyers about their use of technology. The 2018 results are now available. The full results are available for purchase here.

The ABA Legal Technology Resource Center (fondly acronymized as “LTRC”) has been publishing summaries of key findings from the survey as TECHREPORTS, which are available at no charge. The TECHREPORTS for the 2018 survey may be found here.

I wanted to highlight the Cloud Computing TECHREPORT, in part because I wrote it, but in larger part because the security results are very worrisome and troubling to me.

Here’s the money quote:

Confidentiality, security, data control and ownership, ethics, vendor reputation and longevity, and other concerns weigh heavily on the minds of lawyers, yet the employment of precautionary security measures is quite low, with no more than 38.1% of respondents actually taking any one of the specific standard cautionary security measures listed in the 2018 Survey question on the topic. 10.7%, an increase from 9% in 2017, reported taking no security precautions of the types listed. Only 40.7% of respondents report that adoption of cloud computing resulted in changes to internal technology or security policies.

I conclude the Cloud Computing TECHREPOORT with:

Reported growth in cloud use stayed relatively flat in 2018. However, the continuing lack of actual attention to confidentiality, security, and due diligence issues remains a serious concern, especially with the growth in mobile apps running on cloud services. The results on security procedures will continue to fuel client concerns about security efforts by their outside law firms.

There is much that law firm IT departments and technology committees, legal technology vendors and consultants, corporate law departments, clients, and all legal professionals interested in the adoption of technology by lawyers can learn from these results. They give us much to think about and some indications where firms might want to move their technology strategies in the coming year and beyond. Applying basic common sense, diligence, and increased attention to security efforts might be the biggest lesson to learn for the upcoming year. In short, cloud cybersecurity must be on your technology plan for 2019.

The survey findings on cloud computing will be of special interest to cloud vendors, law firm clients, and law firms making strategic technology and innovation plans. Although, as I note in the TECHREPORT, some of the results indicate a probably lack of understanding about the cloud and cloud usage by some respondents, you will find the trends over the last few years quite revealing about the legal industry.

As always, I’m happy to hear your feedback on the Cloud Computing TECHREPORT, highly recommend all of the TECHREPORTS to you, and encourage you let the LTRC know if you have suggestions for improving the survey questions and the TECHREPORTS.

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[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available:

The second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

I’m a big fan of what John Mayer is doing at the Syllabi Commons and the Teaching Technology to Law Students Special Interest Group.

He is collecting syllabi from law school course that provide opportunities for law students to learn about technology and its application and impact in the legal profession and the legal system.

I have given John and John has posted the syllabus for the Entrepreneurial Lawyering class I’m teaching this fall at the Michigan State University College of Law as part of the LegalRnD program. It’s #39 on the list. I offer in the spirit of collaboration and sharing that the Syllabi Commons is promoting.

The Entrepreneurial Lawyering syllabus owes a large debt to Ken Grady who original conceived of and taught this course. I made some small adjustments to the assignments and sequencing of the course and emphasized, not surprisingly, legal technology as a component of the course.

I’m always interested in feedback, so let me know if you have any reactions to the syllabus. And, yes, I’m aware of a couple of typos in there because I saw them on the screen when I went over the syllabus with the class. I’d also be happy to talk with others thinking of offering a class based on this model.

I tip my hat to John for his work on this and encourage others to contribute their syllabi to the effort and others to make use fo the resource for their own learning.

Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels.com

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[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available:

The second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

On September 7 at 12:00 noon Central time, I’ll presenting a webcast called “Looking for Data in New Tech Places.” for CLESeminars.com.

Here’s the description:

Magnifying glass and cityscape

As information flows to and from the old world of PCs and internal servers into and out of mobile devices, the “Cloud” and “Internet of Things,” the potential locations of relevant data area growing at a shocking pace. We can barely get up to speed on one technology before several new ones pop up. Once simple questions, like “what is a document?” have become complicated to answer. In this webcast, you’ll get a highly-practical survey of the new landscape of technologies where people put and keep data, sometimes unknowingly. What you aren’t aware of might hurt you.

The webinar will cover:
• Getting beyond the basics
• From documents to datasets and beyond
• Texting, in many forms
• Data storage services (Dropbox, et al.)
• Wearables
• Social media
• Photos and location
• Collaboration
• Apps that collect and store data
• Devices that collect and store data
• Knowing what those in the target culture use
• Internet of Things

More information about registration and tech requirements may be found here.

I’ve pre-recorded the webcast and will be available during the webcast to answer any and all questions in a simultaneous chat session. Please mention the webcast to anyone you think might find it useful.

Photo by Maurício Mascaro from Pexels

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[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available:

The second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.


The ever-interesting Dave Gray mentioned something called the Sideways Dictionary the other day. The Sideways Dictionary attempts to define/explain technology terms by offering analogies rather than definitions.

For example, if you look up “blockchain” on the Sideways Dictionary, you’ll (currently) start with an analogy that begins, “It’s like the minutes at a Town Hall meeting, written by two very accurate people. . . .” There are currently five blockchain analogies. Some are better than others. The one analogizing a blockchain to to a public money ledger is one that I might use. The notion of “distributed ledger system” is so essential to an understanding of blockchain.

For me, getting a good understanding takes several tries from several different directions. I read many articles on blockchain before Gwynne Monahan and I wrote our “blockchain for lawyers” article called “Lawyers Get Ready There’s a Blockchain Coming” article in January, 2017. We made a valiant attempt in the article to explain blockchain in a simple and accessible way.

When I was asked to write an article on smart contracts (essentially, blockchain applications) for lawyers, “Thinking Smartly About Smart Contracts,” I tried to improve on that explanation. You never know how successful you are.

For me, the explanation of blockchain that worked for me was in the book, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order, by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey.

After recommending the book to others, I realized that an explanation that might be wonderful for me could be entirely opaque to someone else. I’ve sent people to podcast episodes and articles that I thought were crystal clear and had people tell me that they could not make any sense of them.

I do, however, get asked on a regular basis to point people to resources that explain “the blockchain.”

I decided to publish this post in which I have collected a bunch of useful and succinct “blockchain explainers.” My idea is to keep adding to this post as I find useful explainers. there’s no doubt that I’ve missed many good ones, so I encourage you to submit comments to this post with suggestions for additions to the list and I can add them.

My focus here is on “Blockchain 101” information, not in-depth technical discussions.

Here’s my starter list (in no particular order at the moment):

If, after that, you are ready to dig in deeper, I highly recommend that lawyers (and others) get an understanding of business aspects of blockchain. Any one of these four books should get you started:

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World, by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology, by William Mougayar

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order, by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything, by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey

Don’t be discouraged if it takes you several tries to grab hold of the concept.

If you have any other resources for the list, please let me know.

ADDITIONS TO LIST:

Symmetry Blockchain Advisors Beginner Resources (Debbie Hoffman)

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[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available:

The second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

The ABA Legal Technology Resource Center has announced its 2018 class of Women of Legal Technology honorees. It’s a stellar list, with 25 selections made from a record-setting number of nominations.

When you add the names on this list to the names on the lists for previous years, you have around 80 great candidates for speakers at conferences, on panels, and for keynotes on legal technology. It’s a great start. I don’t want to hear the excuses about not being able to find women speakers on legal tech anymore.

They also have quite a range of accomplishments. Check out the list.

A big thank you to Heidi Alexander and the rest of the selection committee (Nicole Bradick, Natalie Kelly, Sofia Lingos, Brooke Moore, Allison Shields, and Kristen Sonday) for their work on this effort and their commitment to its goals. As Heidi put it so well, “LTRC’s Women of Legal Tech initiative is intended to encourage diversity and celebrate women in legal technology.” Let us encourage and celebrate.

As always, I encourage you to check out the resources at the ABA’s Legal Technology Resource Center.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available: The new second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

Adriana Linares and I had the idea years ago to do a live videocast from the ABA TECHSHOW. We made that a reality a few years ago. Steve Best joined the team last year when Adriana was chairing TECHSHOW. The Legal Talk Network has always produced the shows.

The 2018 TECHSHOW Today videos are now available on YouTube at the links below:

We have great fun doing these shows, but the shows have really strong comment and important insights. We had some fabulous guests this year and I recommend all of these episodes. Start watching and let us know what you think.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available: The new second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

Photo of box of books

Ten years ago, Tom Mighell and I wrote the first edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together. We decided that it was time for a second edition. The photo to the right is the box of books that arrived at my house recently. For an author, that’s when it really feels like the book is finally done.

For the reader, however, it’s probably more meaningful that the book is available for purchase more so than that I have received my copies.

The good news is that you can now purchase the book from the ABA Bookstore. Only the paperback version is currently available. I’m told that the eBook version will be available in the near future. Check my blog and the ABA Bookstore page for the book for details on that.

Much has changed in the last ten years, so the book has many revised and new chapters, including an all new chapter on Slack. It is just one on several now important tools that didn’t even exist ten years ago.

While writing the book, Tom and I noted a few big changes:

  1. The movement to smartphones and mobile apps is probably the biggest trend in this area.
  2. Most lawyers and others now understand the potential and the utility of the cloud.
  3. Names have changed, but many collaboration technology concepts have stayed the same.
  4. Culture and process are ultimately more important than specific technologies and tools.

In my opinion, the book is even better than before and I encourage you to look into the book, consider buying it, and definitely recommend it to your friends.

We are in the rollout stage for the book. If you regularly review books for a legal audience and would like a reviewer copy, please let Tom or me know. Both of us expect to be speaking on this topic, so contact us if that is a good topic for your group.

Writing a book is hard work, but it’s great to get to unveil the result to the world.

Ordering information for book can be found here.

 

 

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

DennisKennedy.Blog is now part of the LexBlog network.

View Dennis Kennedy's profile on LinkedIn

Follow my microblog on Twitter – @dkennedyblog. Follow me – @denniskennedy

Now available: The new second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.

Kennedy-Mighell Report Podcast
Noted legal technologists Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell bring listeners an in-depth analysis of the latest advancements in legal technology, in addition to best practices for utilizing existing tools.