Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Kimberly Bennett

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Web 2.0 innovation collaboration software, metadata got the world turning as fast as it can hear how technology can help legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to the Kennedy Mighell report here on the Legal Talk Network

Dennis Kennedy:

And welcome to episode 396 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, Mathew Kerbis the subscription attorney, was our guest on Fresh voices on Legal Tech. Lots of great insights on legal, tech, ai, and the impact of both on legal business models from someone working in the trenches. Be sure to give it a listen. 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 on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report, we are thrilled to continue our fresh voices on legal Tech interview series with Kimberly Bennett, co-founder of theu attorney, and a knowledgeable and insightful contributor in new legal business models, legal, tech 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 you ought to 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 Kimberly Bennett to our Fresh Voices series. Kimberly, welcome to the Kennedy Mon Report.

Kimberly Bennett:

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here and chat with y’all today.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell our audience a little bit more about you, what’s happening at FIU and your role, what our audience needs to know about you to get started?

Kimberly Bennett:

Sure. So Kim Bennett, CEO, and co-founder of fidu. I’ve also have been a practicing attorney for over 18 years and well, am I in my 18th year? I dunno, whatever that timeline is at this point. And for many years I ran a subscription in flat fee law practice. So since about early 2010s, I have been running a subscription in flat fee practice. I started in traditional labor and then market crashed and then I needed to still grow in my career. And so then when I went out on my own, I just started doing what I was told Bill by the hour collect retainers. It didn’t work for me at all. And that ended up with me being able to start on this journey, which is we all now call subscriptions, but I’d say it’s probably one of the first, if not probably the leading voice in this space because I do think it’s a better model for us, a better way for us to build healthy practices. But I didn’t have a straight line, but I went from practicing to coaching and teaching to now having a tech startup that focuses on helping legal teams and deliver in scale subscription and flat fee legal services.

Dennis Kennedy:

Great. Kimberly, first of all, it’s so awesome to have you with us as a guest on the podcast. I like to say it’s not always easy to talk with lawyers about tech, and sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technologies both old and new, let alone AI and their benefits to those in the legal profession. You do a great job of it, especially by framing it in a business context. Would you talk about your approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology? What you found works well for you and how the explanations that you give and how you talk about it might’ve changed as you entered the legal tech startup space with fdu?

Kimberly Bennett:

Yeah, so I think for me, I like to be practical. What are we actually doing? How does it impact our day-to-day? And I try to give real life examples of what I’ve done or I’ve seen others do when they’re looking to grow and scale. But I think when I first started my practice, I was very much tech forward. So I’ve always used tech and I’ve always looked to other industries outside of legal to kind of influence how I built my practice. Essentially I came to subscriptions because I saw I was paying for software that was doing it, and then I was like, well, I worked at a company and I got paid on time all the time. So I just try to relate it to things that were my real life experience, real life circumstances, things that I’ve done, I’ve seen, I’ve tried, I’ve seen other people try.

That’s really worked well for me and then for when I coach and train it. So I’ve had a lot of years teaching and training it in CLEs or in workshops or in events that I ran. So I think with du, the goal is to continue to both provide the technology and the training and that’s something that we try to really step into being more like 360 full support that tells you what the tech does, but then tries to take you through it step by step and remind everyone that there’s no magic bullet. As much as I want tech to be a magic bullet, it’s not right. As much as I would love to snap my fingers and my firm went from hourly to subscription overnight, that wasn’t the case. Of course it’s much easier. But that’s how I try to talk about it real life, what’s actually happening, sharing examples and then breaking it down into what it actually was like for me and others in the past when they have grown and tried to scale something different or implement a new process or system or technology into their business.

Tom Mighell:

So Kimberly, one of the things we love to talk about here and we love to see what our guests are seeing out in the trenches are kind of the state of technology competence among lawyers. So we kind of wanted to get an idea of what are you seeing in the people who either are your customers or the people who are trying to be your customers in terms of their technology competence. And maybe then beyond that, what do you view, what do you think a technologically competent lawyer needs to know about tech today in order to be successful? I guess?

Kimberly Bennett:

So I guess from my vantage point with working with attorneys now as a tech co-founder, but I did before when I was coaching and training of course, and I have many colleagues in the field, but I think what do I see? I think getting comfortable with tech is still a thing. Getting comfortable with processes that support the underlying framework of the tech, getting out of their own way with mindset issues are some of the things. But I think I find the thing that pushed lawyers forward the most recently was COVID. So that forced people to question how they thought about tech before and how you can operate and leverage it. But I don’t think enough of us have taken enough leaps. We did the one thing and didn’t really take a step back and say particularly with where AI is today, and say, well, what would it look like if I just started afresh?

How can I reimagine how I practice? And I don’t think that enough of those conversations are happening because we’re still just trying to replace the same things we did before. And some of that is right. I don’t think that is wrong, but the bigger thinking, which leads to better I think tech adoption and better understanding of the tech so that you feel comfortable using it. But I think more people are generally better at using tech because we were forced to over the last five years. But I think there’s still hesitancy to understand tech as a partner to your business and to then leverage tech in a way that makes various functions in your business more effective and more efficient. Yeah, I think that’s what I would say. So what do I think they need to do? What do they need to learn to become more technologically competent?

I don’t think you need to try every tech tool, but I think you should be thoughtful of how can first ask the question of what’s the issue, what am I trying to solve, what am I trying to help my clients with? And then ask yourself, how are you doing it? See what your roadblocks are and then go search to see if there’s a tool out there to support it. I think we just don’t do enough of that ideation and to move the needle and then try the tech, but you have to try it. You have to put some time in, you have to test it for some time, at least to me, 90 days. 30 to 90 days to actually put your systems in, see if it works, and then have a small subset of your client base or you’re a team, leverage it to see if it’s something that you can work and then go from there. But there’s not enough testing tweaking, there’s not enough big picture thinking before you go to the tech and expect it to be the final solution to get truly competent. I think we have to work on both sides, understanding the why and then implementing properly that’s based off the function, the needs of the individual firms.

Dennis Kennedy:

Kimberly is the big question, so many possibilities here. So I’ll let you pick what you want to focus on. You have a number of really interesting perspectives on this, but what are the areas in the legal profession that need the most attention these days and how can we actually get people to pay that attention?

Kimberly Bennett:

This is probably the same answer a lot of people do, but the 80% gap or this 70 to 80% legal market we don’t serve. I think as a profession, all of us, myself included, who serve clients, typically, I’m going to give maybe not all, I’m going to say 90 plus percent, 95% serve the done for you market, the high bespoke, high revenue generating business or income generating individual. And that leaves, that is why we have this big untapped market. And for me, the biggest place that we need to spend more time is actually designing pricing models, pricing structures, service offerings to meet people where they’re at and to get out of simply bespoke. And I think that’s what leads to, well, I can’t process out my business. Oh, what I do is too special. It’s too nuanced. Well, you’re dealing with the small percentage. There’s so many more people, including many of us that are listening to us right now that hire lawyers or want to but don’t because we are not in that bespoke market.

We are in the bigger market. So I think a lot more time and energy needs to be spent on designing better services and being okay with and not pushing back on the technology as a, it’s not a replacement, it’s solving the DIY market. Now let’s solve the done for you market’s, done with you, excuse me, market and let’s focus on building services and processes and systems and offers and products and outcomes for those people. That to me is the biggest thing. And that’s as an industry, we are failing to do that. And that comes from law school education, really educating too much on big law as the main opportunity for growth when most are not doing that, I think it comes from bar associations having outdated CLEs that aren’t really practical and focused on helping us implement real time, what’s actually happening on the ground. It comes from practitioners being stuck on how it used to be done and not embracing what the future could look like and being okay with, so what we did it one way, there’s so much, much better way to do that, to do it in the future. And then I think when you think about court systems, I love to see the innovation courts were forced to go to Zoom, but let’s do better. Zoom to me was like baseline, there’s so much more. So those are some of my initial thoughts at least

Tom Mighell:

That was the kitty pool that was dipping your toes in and table stakes and getting ready for everything else. Yep, agree. Alright, let’s talk about collaboration. We love to talk about collaboration on this podcast and the thing that I like the most about having guests is getting everybody’s different perspective on collaboration. So tell us some of your favorite ways to collaborate, whether that’s a favorite tool or a favorite process. And it could be collaborating with anybody. Yeah, your clients, your colleagues, however you choose to work.

Kimberly Bennett:

Yeah, I mean I love collaboration. Every part of everything I do from ideating, from having my group of people that I call my C-suite, even though we don’t have a C-suite where we mastermind together about things and help each other around our businesses, I love tech, so I’m always here to try a new tech tool to see how it can help grow and scale. But I think my favorite, favorite, favorite way to collaborate when I would say as a practicing lawyer, it was being embedded in a team and being able to show up in ways that they didn’t realize a lawyer could show up, opening up their mind to the value add of having a lawyer that isn’t just simply telling you no, but is helping you make strategic business decisions, leveraging mine and my team’s legal expertise. That was a great way. It felt like it was different every day.

It felt like we can talk through different issues. It felt like we could be a part of decision making and helping them unlock an opportunity or push through a roadblock. So I love that on the client side. On the Fido side, I like collaborating when it’s either some of our partners that we work with and we do collaborative talks, whatnot. It just gives the ability for two different sets of audiences to hear what we’re talking about and hear the perspectives. So I love that. And then I think, I guess my true, true favorite way of collaborating, I like people, I like to talk to people. If you ever see me in a conference, come up to me, say hello, just the random conversation when we can sit down and workshop something together and each of us have an unlock or at least one of us have an unlock, that to me, those are opportunities that just happen that are just serendipitous. Those are the things that are exciting for me and when it comes to collaboration.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we’ve got more questions for Kimberly Bennett at fiu, but we need to take a quick break for a message from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Kimberly Bennet at fiu. We founded a Fresh Voices, this series that we love to hear about our guest career paths and our audience does as well. You’ve talked about some of that path, but will you talk more about your career path and what kinds of things you’ve done to get you to your current role and focus and especially how you made your decision to sort of pivot to a legal tech startup?

Kimberly Bennett:

Yeah, so I started, I came out of law school oh seven. I was fun fact, I was in a JD PhD program, so I was in law school forever. Technically it was six years of law school. We petitioned to get out of five because we were like, we want to pass theBar. We are tired of being in law school. And so my cohort of four people got out in five years, we graduated and then I decided not to complete my PhD, but I will say it’s been probably a secret. I don’t know some of the secret sauce I think of how I do what I do. But that was in clinical psychology and so I went through everything. But the dissertation is basically, so a lot of grad school in that and then started practicing in traditional labor, which was really exciting and interesting and different, particularly as a woman, particularly as a black woman in a space that I didn’t see a lot of people that looked like me.

And then the market crashed and I needed to grow and that looked like going out on my own because the opportunity that I was about to get promoted to everything paused and it just stayed like that for a while. And I just thought, well, this can’t be how I continue on. So that meant, let me see what else, what other opportunities were out there. So I was able to kind of partner, well partner with, but join and with another person and work behind the scenes in their firm and kind of grow and grow and learn. But it was like I became a solo overnight and just learned what didn’t work and what worked. And I think I hinted it earlier, but my story is probably a lot of other people’s story. I got retainer then I built against retainer. I billed more than the retainer, sent out a bill, maybe they paid the first or second time, I don’t know.

Basically they stopped paying. That was my story. And it wasn’t once, it was twice back to back with two clients in cases that I could not get out of for years. And it made me say there is no way and whatever that I’m going to continue to not get paid for the work I’m doing. And I just thought I would rather get paid something than have nothing and then have that as the thing hanging over me and causing friction. And so that happened twice back to back. I stopped hourly billing from then and never have looked back and it’s one of the best decisions that I’ve made. And then I just started, I pitched flat fees. It was good, but ebbs and flows I really hated. And so I just basically pitched one client one time, Hey, pay me $500 a month and I will do all the things for the business.

And they said yes immediately. And as I mentioned, I was a traditional labor attorney, which meant I negotiated labor agreements, I did negotiation training as a part of my growth and they said yes with my first offer and I was like, dang, I should have asked for more. But I mean it was true, I should have, but I didn’t. But it didn’t matter because how I got basically here today. So then we went from there and then I just continued to iterate and tweak. And I’ll tell you, I talked to lawyers about it in the beginning and one of the biggest things that I really was disappointed in was a lot of people telling me no based off information. They didn’t know, they didn’t read the rules, they didn’t read the ethics, they didn’t see how it was done. And so I stopped talking about it, I just kind of put my head down and went, and then people started realizing I was doing it.

And so that led to me coaching and training for some years. And then during one of the virtual Clio cons in 2020, I was running a round table on subscriptions and flat fees. I think I had just been one of the judges for launch code and my co-founder wasn’t co-founder at the time was at the table. And essentially we were talking, we were all having this conversation about subscriptions and flat fees. I was sharing my thoughts and perspectives, helping people think through it for themselves. Then he sent me an email and he was like, this is not a sales pitch, but what if we built out a subscription platform together based off of your framework? And honestly at that time, I used a lot of technology, talked a lot of tech co-founders, gave a lot of my opinions to TechCo founders to help them improve technology for solo and smalls.

My position in life was always, what if I, I’m in the no position now. I’m not a TechCo founder, so let me try it. We worked together for a couple of months from 2020 to top of 2021, and we built out features that would be very good with ai. Right now we have not launched it, but it would be dope. I see people basically put out new platforms all in the future we built, but we worked well together. We were able to push back. It was like, okay, I think I can do this. And that’s kind of how it happened. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t something that I decided I’m going to be a tech co-founder. Now, did I find it interesting? Was it like, could I imagine it because I had to piecemeal my entire firm to make subscriptions work. I built a system, piecemealed it together, but that’s how it happened. So I got to FDU by just continuing to put my head down and do the work that felt aligned with me and try to show up authentically every day and then not be told no by people who are naysayers, but see what, and that’s how I kept on going. And then Lane pitched me to become a co-founder. And now here we are today.

Tom Mighell:

Awesome. Let’s talk a little bit more about FIU and more specifically about ai. We have to spend time talking about AI on the podcast and we are seeing that there’s a lot of interest these days in new approaches to legal services delivery using ai. You and FIU are on the front lines of that. Tell us about how you see this area evolving.

Kimberly Bennett:

None of us know where the heck it’s going to go. Let’s just be honest. It is so transformative. I think the biggest thing that, and this is maybe how I’ve always been like the what if I mindset is like I’m just curious. I’m just super curious. I’m interested paying attention. How can I unlock more creativity with these platforms and what their use cases? I firmly believe it does not replace us. I firmly believe it probably will remove the need to be so focused on the process because the tech will help improve a process. So the process isn’t going to be your selling point, which it probably never was. Truly, it’s the value add your secret sauce, the way you can see and put things together, your various experiences coming together, the human side that tech can never replace. But I think AI is and will continue to transform the industry and we just have no idea actually what that looks like.

I’m interested to see how agents really take on a bigger role. Even things that none of us are talking about. I’m not the technical co-founder, my co-founder Blaine is, but when we talk about what it looks like and how we want AI to work in our platform, we take the perspective that when it came on the scene for legal, my general thought was these are great platforms. I love them all, but they are very much like a siloed approach. And I think it’s going to be just search. And so if you just make this one thing, it’s great. Sure, get acquired, move on. But our goal at DU is to end the hourly model for good and billable hour for good. And I think AI is the best piece of tech to move that needle forward for people. Even if their mindset is shift, they can’t shift it, their operations will make it because it just won’t make any more sense. I’m excited. I’m excited to see what’s, what’s going to come. I’m excited to see how that looks. We’ve just released some new features inside of FIU and we keep on iterating and integrating it into the platform. So it’s not just like AI here, AI there, it’s just a foundational piece of the platform and think that’s how all platforms will move and we’ll see how data takes over because I think that’s the other side, how data gets transformed as we continue CJ and Gen AI and all the iterations of that come to fruition.

Dennis Kennedy:

So to round out on AI and you are involved in legal AI live webcast that I’m also involved in, which is a lot of fun. And the focus there is just practical ai, what people are actually doing, which is my interest as well. So yeah, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity for the legal profession. So what are the new developments, you’ve alluded to some and the new perspectives do you find the most interesting today? And then what do you see your clients moving towards? So I guess maybe the simplest way of say is what do you see this actually working in AI beyond the hype?

Kimberly Bennett:

I think it’s still a lot of hype because we’re still just so new. But I think what the best part, I think it’s shifting people’s perspective on how they show up. I think it’s forcing people to say, well, if this tech could do this, what does that mean for me? And I think that has been an important conversation we need it to have so we can solve more problems so we can serve more people. So we can be an industry that has 70% utilization rate versus 20 to 30%. So the biggest thing I think it’s having is making even the biggest naysayers say I need to rethink how I’m showing up to start questioning the status quo, even if it’s slow. But the fact that more people are questioning the status quo means that we have an opportunity to see change, to see transformation, and to see how these tools take over and allow for us to take a step back and get out of the mundane and get to the more interesting and more nuanced or the more stereotypical things that we just aren’t touching that really impact people every day.

So on that hand, it’s I think breeding more creativity and curiosity. And then on the other hand, I think for the clients, clients that are using it, everyone’s using it. And so I see a lot of people that use it in ways that they didn’t intend to share information or whatnot. And so there’s so much opportunity for us to learn and serve our clients client. I’m talking as a lawyer now, not as a DU founder, but the clients that you serve are using, we all know they’re using AI in a lot of ways that we don’t even understand and it’s on us to be good stewards of the risks and opportunities of that and sharing that. And so I think that’s something that I’m seeing, but for me it seems to be it’s going to be transformative. It is transformative, but it’s pushing everyone to think better and do better.

But the question is, are the people in power and those places, are they going to be so stuck that even when it’s pushing that they’re not going to let the changes happen? And that’s my only fear, are the leaders and organizations that have the power to change are the leaders that create across all theBar exams, leaders on the institutions and big firm, which they shouldn’t be, but they still lead too much of the industry and a B, A and all these organizations. Are you all taking the position that let’s not fear it, let’s not fear what that means for our industry. Let’s not fear what it means for who can help serve, help us serve more people and let this tool be a way to improve where we failed in the past.

Tom Mighell:

So let’s talk more about the subscription model for legal services. In our last episode we talked with Matthew Bu, who is using that model in his practice. You have taken what you’ve learned from being a subscription attorney and now you’re showing others how to be successful at it. What’s the biggest challenge that you find in getting lawyers to change the way they practice to get away from the billable hour and maybe what makes you most satisfied about helping lawyers to ditch that billable hour?

Kimberly Bennett:

Yeah, Matthew’s great. I’ve been on his podcast too and remembered when he first launched it. Him and I chatted before they did. And yeah, I think, I mean the biggest thing, and it is mindset, it’s you think that you can’t do it. And I alluded to it earlier, but I think that’s the biggest thing. People just say it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t work. You’re still very much valuing what you do based off of time when really that is the place that AI is going to change you. It doesn’t work anymore. It will work for a while still because people will be slow to change, but at some point that will break. And then you’ll either be stuck in the old model or the new model. And then I think people are get stuck on perfectionism where a lot of type A people in this industry.

And so you want the perfect subscription for every single client. And a lot of times people are creating subscriptions that are not dialed in. It’s not for a particular client. You’re only still focusing on trading time and repackaging hourly instead of what a subscription is. It’s a set of services or products for a particular client or customer for a defined interval, for a set recurring flat fee. So if you do flat fees today, you could do subscriptions, but you have to go beyond the transaction and think about what the client’s big outcome, big goal is, and you’re helping get them towards that. And a lot of times people are still too transactional or too much focused on, I do a document review and not that you’re helping a client close a deal, I help clients get divorced. No, you’re helping a client have a happy life post-divorce, a happy co-parent parenting life, like re-imagining our purpose and our role in this system called society.

And then allowing for us to actually step into the better role that we I think used to do probably as a profession. And then somewhere in that gap when hourly took over made us just focus on the task and now we need to go back to goals and outcomes. And so the biggest issue is too many people are goals and outcomes. Then when they’re designing it, they’re designing it for everyone, not anyone specific. And you need to design for a specific client across a journey and then they just don’t get it launched. You stay in ideation, you got to get it out, you got to tell people and it’s not going to be perfect the time, but once you get it out, you can learn with real users and real people who are paying you money to support them.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we’ve got a few more questions for Kimberly Bennett at du, but we need to take another quick break for a message from our sponsors and let’s get back to the Kennedy bio report. I’m Dennis Kennedy. And I’m Tom Mighell. And we’re joined by our special guest, Kimberly Bennett, co-founder of fiu. We’ve got time for just a few more questions, Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I love working with today’s law students, but so how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in legal tech and other non-traditional careers in law? And I sort of agree with what you’ve been saying throughout this. There is this kind of showing up and being authentic, but I’ll let you answer that too. What advice do you give law students these days?

Kimberly Bennett:

Yeah, I’ve been lucky and privileged to have had interns in my practice that were in law school. And so some of the stuff that I told them, I guess I’ll share here, but I think be open and curious while you’re in law school to get varied experiences. The best piece of advice when I was in law school was not to take classes for theBar exam and I really didn’t. There was a few in there that I did, maybe I needed to pick up a class or whatever, but I really focus on being curious and if you are curious about what it looks like to be on the more operation side or to see a problem solved via tech and maybe not only by people, go out and see what’s out there because there’s so much more opportunity to see things virtually. I think spend the time and not all of your time you’re in law school, do focus on law school, but go see what’s happening.

Go to these webinars, introduce yourself. I might get reach out from law students, I might be interested in legal tech. That’s smart. Develop relationships, right? Start early, start often find things that are interesting in you and don’t be afraid to reach out. I mean the perspective that I’ve always taken is what if you are in the no position now you’re interested in legal tech but you have no experience. Go sort out, go seek out some experience. You’re interested in a tech tool, but you’d like to meet the co-founder, try to meet them. Who knows? You never know. I didn’t know half the people in legal until I opened my mouth to try to meet them. And so I think if you’re interested in legal tech and you have interest in a non-traditional career path, use your time in law school to explore that and to see what opportunities exist. There is so much more out there and that doesn’t mean any of your law school training goes away. It actually becomes super useful. Plus probably some of that undergrad training and your life experiences. So ask, go after it. Don’t be afraid. The worst that can happen is you don’t get a response. They tell you no. So what? Talk to the next person.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we have our last question and it’s a selfish question. We love to recruit guests for our show from our current guests. So who are the fresh voices in legal tech that you’re listening to and that you’d like single out and maybe see as a future guest on our Fresh Voices series?

Kimberly Bennett:

Yeah, I’d love to see Melissa from fourth party. She has a legal tech platform for mediators and I think as we think about how you serve more people and go outside of the spaces, I think it would be great for people to learn more about what her platform does and for each of us to consider is there an opportunity for us to develop something for the community for the greater good that maybe doesn’t have to look like a lawyer performing it, but maybe supports other aspects of legal because I didn’t say it earlier, but I want to say it now. My other part of collaborating is collaborating with across the entire spectrum of legal service providers, not just lawyers. I think that’s where we get a lot of wins. And so Melissa, bring her on. I’d love to hear more about what she’s doing and sharing and her sharing it to your audience.

Tom Mighell:

Excellent. Thank you so much for that. We want to thank Kimberly Bennett, co-founder at FIU for being our guest on the podcast. Kimberly, tell us where people can learn more about you and get in touch with you if they want to.

Kimberly Bennett:

Sure. So you can find us. We are fiu, FIDU legal LEGA l.com. That’s our website, but you can find me across social at k Bennett Law. That’s my personal handle or at Fido app for our platform where everywhere we do our own little flat fee series where we’re talking about flat fees and we do subscription, live free content for people to just ask us stuff. So come find us, come to one of our free sessions, push back, ask me all the questions, find me on social, let’s continue the conversation.

Dennis Kennedy:

Great. Thank you so much, Kimberly. You’re fantastic guests, great information, great advice for our listeners and as usual, so many topics to discuss in so little time. But now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Kimberly, take it away.

Kimberly Bennett:

Okay, my one is I’m going to give a book recommendation because we were talking a lot about people shifting and moving and changes that are happening, and I think the way you move through change is through commitment and through intention. And so I want to give a book recommendation that will help you do that and that will help you think about how are you showing up today and how you need to show up and elevate your intention so that you can really get the thing that you want gland that client start that tech platform that you’ve been thinking about. Okay, so the name of the book is being is the New Doing, it’s by Dy Rhodes. And yeah, go grab it. It’s a quick read, an easy read, but it’s one of those things you can read over and over again that can help you take the next action, move through a roadblock, and really it seizes the opportunities that are in front of you.

Tom Mighell:

Love it. I just put it on my good reads want to read list. So excellent. Mine is actually okay, I’m breaking the rule a little bit here because it may not be something that you can start to use the minute this podcast is over. It depends on where you live. There’s a new service out there and it is maybe not really new, maybe some you’re familiar with it. It’s called Smart 9 1 1. It is actually a service that is coming to more and more 9 1 1 services around the country. And what you do is you give them more information about you, any health information, any other demographic information that would be useful for 9 1 1 to know in case you ever need to call them. The information never gets used until you use it and it travels with you if you move around the country. If that group, here’s the downside, if your city or town has subscribed to the SMART 9 1 1 service, that’s the only downside. And I don’t have a complete idea of who’s using it or not, but as someone who recently had to spend some time unfortunately calling 9 1 1 and spending time on there talking to people and answering questions, I would love it if they would be able to pull it up and say, all right, here’s what we’ve got about you. It would save so much time and anguish. Frankly, I think it’s a great idea. I hope it succeeds. Go see, check it in your area. It’s smart nine one one.com.

Dennis Kennedy:

I have two things, so just a little plug for the legal AI live webcast. You can find information about it on LinkedIn once a month, second or second Friday of the month that we talk about what lawyers are doing practically with ai, with a group of lawyers who are doing very cool things. And then the advice I have, which is kind of relates to what Kimberly was talking about, how AI can have this big impact on process. And so my tip is to use AI for checklists. And so a lot of times you’re saying like, oh, it’d be great if I had this checklist. I tend to forget one thing or another. And the fact is that AI can be really good at creating checklists and you can also prime the AI and prompt it to say you’re an expert on checklists. I mean there’s books out there on checklists, there’s all sorts of techniques and stuff.

You prompt the AI to be an expert in checklist. You tell it what you want to do, you have it generate the checklist for you, and then you’re not trying to figure out what the checklist is and what you might’ve forgot or whatever. It’s giving you this checklist and you just edit it and put into things you need and maybe you have it even do more work for you and you end up in just a couple minutes with just that checklist that you wanted. And so Tom, you and I probably need to do that when we prime our guests before the show, but I think it’s a really great use and one of those simple things AI can really, really excel at that will benefit you.

Tom Mighell:

Well, I’m not sure how good it would be with a three step checklist, but I’m willing to do that if I mean any size checklist, I guess.

Kimberly Bennett:

Well, at least you don’t have to write even the three steps. So that’s positive.

Tom Mighell:

That’s also true. That’s true. Alright, so that wraps it up to this edition of the Kennedy Mall 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 if you want to subscribe to our show. Again, you can do that on the Legal Talk Network website or within your favorite podcast app. 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, you can believe it or not, still reach us at a voicemail. You can send us that voicemail at 7 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. We love to get your questions for our B segments. 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 want 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, the 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.

Continue Reading