If you have practiced law for any length of time, you will find yourself thinking some version of: The practice of law would be great if it were not for other people.

It isn’t just lawyers, its true of every team. There are people who do not advance the ball. They have arguments, they have facts and they may in some respects be right, but at the end of listening to them, the answer is: so what is your plan? How do we move forward? If that is how we move forward, what does that look like and are you prepared to live with that?

The world is full of people who pontificate; that doesn’t help. Have a plan, understand the risks and the benefits. Discuss your plan. How complicated is it? How can it be simplified? If you succeed, are you prepared to live with what success looks like.

If you are the only one with a plan to move forward, then you have the best plan. Challenge those who pick it apart to come up with their own plan.

In the end, as lawyers, we are hired to solve a problem. That is the goal. So you have to actually do that. You can be right all you want, but if you are not solving the problem, you are merely a distraction, an impediment.

From Merriam-Webster

courage

noun

cour·​age ˈkər-ij  ˈkə-rij

Synonyms of courage

: mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty

We continue to see the mob demanding things, generally without cogent argument, and generally based on emotions.

Who stands up to the mob and says: this is not how we do things in America, or frankly, in any group that wants to progress together, be it a family, a committee, a team, anything.

Think of the examples of the mob that we see throughout history: The crowd shouting “Send out Barbaras,” the mobs of the French Revolution, the frenzied in Salem MA. Is that who we want to be?

If you have time, read an a wonderful piece of writing by the erudite, and courageous Dean of Stanford Law School. Unlike Pilate, Dean Martinez stands solidly for free speech, for debate, for thinking. She does not give into the mob.

https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Next-Steps-on-Protests-and-Free-Speech.pdf

Fall seems to be here with its attendant political campaigns, pumpkin spice and cooler temperatures. What I am not seeing is a bunch of pandemic hoopla. Is that because we have reconciled ourselves? Is it because the virus is receding? Is it because we are all just burned out on talking about it. Could be all of the above. I have grown tired to blaring headlines designed to scare me into clicking. I have grown tired of people blaming each other. I am really sick of the idea that knowledge doesn’t evolve.

I am curious about what the US Government is doing experimenting with viruses in Wuhan? What is the rational – its over there and that’s better? Or is it that they are already doing it, so lets use them? The whole thing seems rather like a sci-fi story, but it is apparently reality. I don’t know what to think, but I am interested.

At least it is for me. I have a wonderful VW Campmobile. It does not have CarPlay or any of those equivalents. It has a single DIN space for a head unit. So my phone is my source of music. I have it mounted on the dash on a little magnetic mount. And of course I can’t change the settings to “never” require a password due to some security software that I am running. Do you think that iPhone can recognize my face from 3 feet away? Never. So if I want a song, I have to enter my pass code. Then I have to find the song. Doing both takes longer than my eyes should be off the road.

If Siri were better, I could just ask for the song. But remember, this is a VW Campmobile. It was built in 1985. I have actually put sound deadening mat inside the doors and on the hard surfaces and it is still pretty loud. Siri comes up with some very entertaining offerings when asked for specific songs. Sometimes I am not in the mood to be entertained that way.

You are likely saying to yourself “get a modern, quiet car.” Well, if you have ever met anyone with a Campmobile (often called a Westfalia) you know that is not going to happen. Imagine driving a vehicle where every time you drive it, people talk to you about it, give you a thumbs up, wave, etc… The strange thing is that you’d think this would just be former hippies. But the love of the Campmobile spans races, genders, and probably creeds, though I don’t really ask. And yes, I have a modern car, its a Volvo C 70, a convertible, so any time it is dry and over 55 degrees, I have the same problem.

I know, these are first world problems. But these are technologies that I really want to like. But I don’t. Frankly, if the iPhone 13 came with an option for fingerprint recognition, I would take it.

I read a piece by Dennis Kennedy recently (If you don’t read Dennis’s blog https://www.denniskennedy.com, you should). The piece was about innovation by lawyers to help clients. The piece contrasted what lawyers, usually do – send a client alert about something that might be relevant to someone, somewhere, to everyone.

It got me thinking about what clients want and how we meet that. One answer is in talking to people. However, it is a conversation that takes a while, probably an ongoing conversation. My conversations with clients about what a law firm can do for them are typically not satisfying because they are filled with concepts but not applications. I know, and the client knows that we want to “partner.” But what does that look like. We have to have a lot of conversations until we hit on a thing that we can see and touch. Getting from the theoretical to the practical is difficult. For me, I stumble from moment of enlightenment to moment of enlightenment with miles and miles of plodding in between.

Maybe there is another way.

I am reminded of Steve Jobs comment: “Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!'” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

So what can we think of to give out clients to make “partnering” and “transparency” and other words have distinct meanings?

And here we are, week four, safe at home. I guess I am lucky. I am a lawyer, so my job continues much as it did before. I have a practice that is fairly specialized and results in my being able to work from anywhere and isn’t that affected by court dates and scheduling. I am a geek, so all of my technology works and was built for this a long time ago.

But as the Barry character said in High Fidelity: “can I go back to work now?”

We have had a Synology NAS for years. We use it for back up. I thought we would use it to stream music and movies through Plex, but Plex is not (or was not when I last tried) great with the Apple iTunes ecosphere. So our giant Synology raid striped array was kind of overkill.

At the same time we each have Evernote accounts and Dropbox accounts as well as Bear, Google Drive and large iCloud accounts. We pay for those to sync files and sync notes.

In poking around the latest iteration of the Synology Disk Station OS, I noticed a package called Drive and a revamped Note Station. These promised to emulate the functionality of Dropbox and Bear, maybe Evernote. I decided to give them a try.

I have been impressed with the ease of set up and the syncing. My equipment isn’t new – a Synology DS 713+ with a 5 bay add on. My home internet connection is relatively fast at 3-400 Mbps.

This is better than the old home “cloud” Transporter system that Drobo owned for a while.

I suppose the draw back is that if my house burns down, there is no true “cloud” storage. Also, if something happens, like a power outage, I am the tech who has to restart things.

However, for home use, this appears to be pretty stable and awfully useful. The interfaces are attractive and you can indeed send links to people.

I haven’t cancelled Dropbox, Bear, or Evernote, but I might. (BTW, you can migrate your Evernote files, keeping the structure, to Disk Station. No option with Bear.)

It strikes me that in these days of anyone can apparently publish anything, we have a concurrent amount of “pick me, pick me.” Everyone wants to make a dent and be able to monetize that dent. This is not the marketplace of ideas, this is the mob of ideas.

And that brings us to the Ring Doorbell vulnerability. I have a Ring Doorbell. I think it is a II model. It works; I like it. If something dramatically better came along, I would switch. I have no real loyalty to Ring, other than the investment.

So Ring, it has been found, has a vulnerability. Apparently when I set up my doorbell 5 years ago, and went through that weird dance of joining its network before it could join mine, my wireless network credentials were sent to Ring in the clear.

That sounds scary. But lets think about this. How would someone get my wireless network information? He or she would have to have been focused on my house from some relatively close distance at the time I was transmitting that information to Ring: about a minute.

I live in a nice little neighborhood in Cleveland. It is in the city so that houses are relatively close. I know my neighbors well, and they me. Someone wandering down the street, or even parked in a strange car, attracts notice. I was in and out of the house with the screwdriver and my phone, setting this thing up. What are the odds that 5 years ago, someone with nefarious intent was in that small space precisely at that 60 seconds. I would say nil.

I suppose someone could send me a message to reset my Ring Doorbell and then wait around to see if I did it. That would be a lot of time invested, and like a savvy person, I would verify that message before I acted, but it could happen.

And yet, we got blaring headlines about the vulnerability from the tech press (by the way, the problem has already been fixed). The headlines were not: “ignore random emails telling you to rest your Ring Doorbells” which might have been useful. It was a “See, see, IOT cannot be trusted” type of headline. This sort of thing doesn’t help anyone. When your read further, you need to slog through the hysteria and do more research to assess the risks and understand what the fix it.

Dear tech press (and everyone else for that matter) take a breath. Deal with real problems in ways that can help. Did no one read Chicken Little as a child?