You may have mastered e-filing and e-discovery—but is your technology helping keep you cool at night? Is it reheating your coffee so you don’t have to run to the microwave every 10 minutes?
Technology isn’t just transforming the legal world. From your morning routine to your evening unwind, the right gadgets can make life smoother, saner and maybe even a little more fun.
The traditional final event of ABA Techshow, “60 Tech Tips in 60 Minutes,” was held at McCormick Place Saturday morning. It featured Julie Bays, ABA Techshow Planning Board Co-chair and practice management advisor at the Oklahoma Bar Association; Brett Burney, principal at Burney Consultants; Barron Henley, a founding partner of Affinity Consulting Group; and Catherine Sanders Reach, director of the Center for Practice Management at the North Carolina Bar Association, highlighting the best tech for anything and everything. The slides for the full presentation are available here.
As with much of Techshow, artificial intelligence dominated the session, with many of the sites, tips and tricks offered utilizing the technology. For instance, Bays highlighted Descrybe.ai, a legal research company using generative AI to simplify complex legal information that also competed in Wednesday’s Startup Alley competition. Sanders Reach, meanwhile, provided several tips, apps and programs, including Gamma.app, a program that takes your notes and outlines and creates eye-catching presentations; Jotform, a site that takes forms and creates AI agents out of them; and unblurimage.ai, which is unblurs images.
As usual, many of the offered tips involved workplace productivity, ranging from keyboard shortcuts, voice commands, finding answers to questions online and mastering PDF documents.
“I don’t know how this works and I feel like it shouldn’t work,” Henley said, describing a technology he stumbled upon to unlock a PDF file on a Windows computer. PDFcandy.com is a site he suggested to help edit, print and actually defeat PDF security.
Of course, not everything was high-tech. For instance, while you’re on that computer, you should probably also make an effort to clean it to avoid the petri dish effect. Bissell Aeroslim, ColorCoral Cleaning Gel and simple Wieman Disinfectant Wipes were offered as not-so-tech-heavy help for your technology.
Tech can even help after you die, Burney said. There are a few sites that will send messages after your death, just in case you have some truly unfinished business: Deadmansswitch.net, Mygodtrust.com, Celebrated.com and Ghostmemo.com offer ways to do this.
“There’s probably some stuff you need to say to someone but not while you’re alive,” Burney says. The sites typically send users a monthly email, which is key to its success. Don’t respond to the email, and they’ll assume you’re dead—and your messages will be sent. This is one email you really don’t want to send to the spam folder.
While you’re alive, you may want to save time via your technology. Text Expander is the ideal way to shave off a few seconds per text you send, Burney said. It sets up shortcuts you can text for everyday use. For example, whenever Burney types ddt into a text, it will input the date. Dddt is the shortcut he uses to add a timestamp.
Perhaps the most relatable technology, judging by the outpouring of laughter from the conference room, was the BedJet, a cooling and warming system for your bed. Especially helpful for women going through menopause, each side of the BedJet can be independently programmed to cool or warm at set times and remove sweat from the bed.
Another relatable piece of advice?
Henley is obsessed with his First Alert Interconnect Hardwire Smoke Alarm, which has a 10-year battery backup so that he won’t have to wake in the middle of the night to battle an expired fire alarm.
“Does this happen to you?” he asked. “You’re walking around and you’re naked and you’re pissed off. Where is the beep coming from?”
No matter how high-powered an attorney you are, you’re probably very familiar with the smoke detector chirping at 2 a.m.
Let the tech work for you—in and out of the office.