Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing

Looking back, losing my mother and having already lost my father changed my relationship with work. (Both of my in-laws passed earlier in 2019 as well, so this change was already underway even before this, but this solidified that what I was doing wasn’t what I wanted any longer)

By August, I was in a new role. A remote role. Because after planning and attending the three funerals, the one thing I knew was that I didn’t want to be tied to an office and unable to visit my friends and family more often. Working remotely offered that possibility. It was freedom, in terms of location. I took it, and I never looked back.

The thing is, the firm I left hadn’t done anything wrong. The job was good; the people I worked with were great; it just didn’t fit. I think too often employers and direct managers measure things like retention and employee engagement, and take it personally when someone leaves. Sometimes, they change, and the role doesn’t fit.

Sometimes, you need to be willing to admit that about yourself, too. And give yourself the freedom to try and go do something else, not because you failed or made a poor choice. Just because things changed and it no longer fits.

There’s no such thing as a career ladder anymore; do what fits your life.

Want to Be Known for a Topic? Start Writing About It.

Careers and the Workplace

This is very true, and can be a very effective networking tool:

We don’t just fail to train managers; we put them in very poorly designed positions - Stop Overloading Your Middle Managers and Start Redesigning the Role

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - AI and Liability

In the end, if we shouldn't trust AI answers, why use AI for search? Using this as your legal argument gives the game away: Google is quickly killing its own product and selling us AI. But it doesn't want to be held responsible for the damage it does when the AI gets it wrong.

I have never liked the marketing folks who use the phrase "AI agents are not your coworkers."

This is an ongoing issue, and to be honest, I don’t think existing governance tools are good enough to keep up - Rising ‘bring your own AI’ trend can spell trouble for employers, expert warns.

Mental Health in the Workplace

Have We Considered that it’s not Remote Work that Causes Mental Health Issues, but a Culture That Makes it Harder?

We could create a workplace where people could work from the coffee shop and interact with other humans in person. Where they didn't spend so much time working that they could use that saved commute time to attend community events. We just don't. Instead, we expect remote workers to be available all the time; we tie them up in meetings for 5-6 hours a day because that's how we "keep an eye" on them, and still expect them to hit all their deliverables.

Worth Reading - Hiding who you are can have real effects on your mental health

When businesses tell people to keep their identity out of the workplace, they are causing mental health harm. Period.

The effort to hide, the message that they should be ashamed of who they are because coworkers are uncomfortable, isn’t just about being kind; it’s a real workplace mental health issue. The question isn’t about whether it causes harm; it’s about whether you, as an employer, care that you are causing harm.

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

Sharing - Don’t look away: Have a conversation about online safety today

This resource seems like something worth sharing. We spend so much time talking about online safety, banning phones until a certain age, or banning social media, and not enough time making sure we prepare kids for the dangers of being online at all. It's like banning a child from leaving the house without a parent and then sending them to school with no skills for navigating other people on their own. At some point, kids learning about appropriate and inappropriate behavior and having a safe place to talk about it have to be the priority.

Still true - Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For

Who needs privacy online? Apparently, none of us. - The under-16 social media ban and the rise of “show me your papers” internet

As I’ve said over my years of working with Microsoft and eDiscovery, this is why we test everything. One, because things change, constantly. Second, because sometimes, even Microsoft’s own documentation can lead you down an incorrect path:

Following up on the incorrect documentation

In last week’s newsletter, I discovered Microsoft documentation stating that Puview eDiscovery didn’t support collecting linked files from shared channel conversations. I tested it and didn’t find that at all…

4 days ago · 1 like · Mike McBride

That’s all, folks. If you found something interesting in this week’s newsletter, please share it with your friends. It’s the best way to help support the effort I put into sharing this with you each week.

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #193

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:31:24 GMT

White Sands National Monument - by Mike McBride

This newsletter is usually created and emailed via Substack every other Friday, so you may be surprised to see me on Monday morning. Friday was a holiday for me, Juneteenth, and it came at the end of a 10-day vacation where we road-tripped around New Mexico, so I wasn’t about getting the newsletter out last week.

Instead, you’re getting it on Monday as part of my “catch up with all the work and online-related things I disconnected from for the past ten days.”

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information on careers and workplace culture, workplace mental health, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

Don’t worry, though, this won’t be a typical piece of LinkedIn drivel where I talk about how appreciative I am of my team or the organization I work for, to allow me to take PTO, because that’s a bunch of crap.

Instead, let’s just say this:

Take your PTO. You earned it; you don’t need an excuse to be out or to kill yourself working to make up for being away from work. You need time away from work; it’s the one thing that puts the whole thing in the proper perspective. And that perspective should be that most of us don’t do anything so important that we ruin the rest of our lives over it.

And if you get the opportunity to see part of your country you haven't visited before, spend some time learning about the place's history. A visit to a museum can show you so much you don't know about how history repeats itself.

Worth Reading - The trap of being promoted from within

Careers and the Workplace

When you get the title, people will bring you things and hand off responsibility to things that you didn't know existed. Even though you were sitting right there, in the team that you now lead, you don't know how many things the previous person in that chair never bothered to tell you about, or the relationships across other teams that made their life easier that you need to build. Many of those things didn't just happen; effort went into knowing what to do and who to talk to.

I've talked many times about the importance of training new managers, and how most organizations don't do it well enough, if at all. There should probably also be a module in that training for "What you think you know but don't."

Why Do Team Members Stay?

This relationship might be the biggest indicator of whether your best people stay, yet you give the person in charge of it almost no training on how to manage it effectively.

Work In Progress

How to Build Better Relationships at Work

I’ve spent a lot of time lately helping leaders work through the dynamics of human relationships. Change initiatives that stall because people won’t take action. Leaders who need to influence other leaders they have no direct authority over. And change agents with ideas for new projects or opportunities they’re confident will succeed, but who need buy-i…

20 days ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Al Dea

I don’t know that everything is free, but there’s a lot of free stuff out there for those of you in job-searching mode:

Stop Paying for Job Search Help. Everything You Need Is Free.

Job searching is much harder than it used to be. It’s a challenging market, to say the least, and it seems like almost everyone is trying to sell you something to help you land a role…

19 days ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Alison Doyle and Jen Luckwaldt

Artificial Intelligence

Legal AI Has A Growing Token Price Problem - This is going to only get worse for many firms.

This is also only potentially going to get much worse. - AI-Enhanced Misappropriation: When Departing Employees Leave with More Than Just Client Lists

I agree - CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

Training and Development

Finding experts who are actual experts in using AI can be difficult - How To Build Real AI Fluency In Your Organisation: 13 Lessons From L&D Leaders

Mental Health in the Workplace

This is also a skill managers would do well to acquire - How managers can start mental health conversations.

As it turns out, while there are a number of well-known podcasts telling me to man up and quit complaining about mental health, there might also be a number helping:

Despite a toxic reputation, our research shows podcasts can help men’s mental health

I haven’t been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. Not necessarily because of the reputational hit they’ve taken from all the “dude with a podcast” bros, but because my life has been busy and I haven’t set aside much time for it.

Do you listen to any podcasts that have been helpful for your mental health?

Please share your recommendations

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

This should not shock anyone - Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People

A PR Hoax Created the Year’s Hottest Rock Band. Imagine What It Can Do in Politics

Maybe the best advice is at the end of the article - assume you are being manipulated.

M365 News Roundup for - June 2026

Microsoft Build happened, and Microsoft made more announcements about new Copilot agents and features, and naturally, AI “experts” told us how this changes everything, again, for like the third (fourth?) time in 2026. Mike McBride on M365 is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, cons…

25 days ago · 1 like

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #192

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:03:35 GMT

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

As I was putting together this newsletter last night, I saw an emerging theme, which doesn’t always happen when I’m gathering all of the blog posts and other interesting things I’ve discovered over the last two weeks.

That theme was about our teams at work, and what they need as human beings

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information on careers and workplace culture, workplace mental health, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

You’ll see links about uncertainty, stress, feeling underappreciated, and the difficulty of the job market right now.

The takeaway, for me as a leader, is that the people on our teams and in our lives outside of work are dealing with a lot right now. Things are not good for many people.

We can’t fix everything for everyone ourselves. As a manager, I can only control so much, but I can control what’s in front of me. I can provide clarity, certainty, and appreciation for my team. I can listen and be a reliable source of support and friendship for people in and out of the workplace. I can network with and on behalf of good people who are in the job market, etc.

It won’t fix everything, but sometimes just knowing that you’re not in this struggle alone makes all the difference. It also seems to be increasingly rare for people to feel like they’re not alone in it.

Seems like the least we can do is recognize the humanity in each other and act accordingly.

Create Certainty Where You Can

Careers and the Workplace

Like it or not, your team is dealing with a ridiculous amount of uncertainty in and out of the office. Most of it is beyond our control. When we have the opportunity to create less of it, we should do so. We have the opportunity to make a difference for our team, as human beings, just by communicating and setting clear expectations. Why wouldn't we?

Why It's So Hard to Get a Job Right Now, According to the Data

108 days…

a month ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Alison Doyle and Jen Luckwaldt

Worth Reading - Good Leaders Presume Team Members Feel Undervalued and Underappreciated

It's a difficult thing, in the busy work world we all live in, to make sure your people are looked after and appreciated. It's very easy to take them for granted because you trust them to do their work. I'm not saying you should micromanage them, but showing an interest in them and their work would help them feel like part of the team. Letting other things get in the way creates an issue. One that may lead your best performers to leave for a place where they feel more appreciated.

Facts - How Networking Can Unlock Job Opportunities (especially when your Job Search feels stuck)

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - AI is making journalistic language more repetitive and predictable – and it’s a problem for all of us

Could we enter an era in which AI writes so much of what we read and what people say that we all start to sound exactly the same?

I think we are all starting to realize this - The current AI pricing was always going to go away.

Also, this - Token Costs and the Future of Law Firm AI Spend

There’s a lot to be said for being human in the age of AI Slop - Choosing to Stay Human

I’ve been investigating some of the new Copilot features for the blog and my day job recently, and I came across something I've been wondering about in the eDiscovery space…

Copilot Cowork Artifacts

a month ago · 3 comments · Mike McBride

Training and Development

In Change Management, do you Skip the Unlearning Phase?

Change is hard. It is also never-ending. Things change. The new technology provides new opportunities. Leaders should take responsibility for explaining that to their people and highlighting the opportunities that change can provide. Show them how it will benefit the business.

Then send them to training ready to learn.

Mental Health in the Workplace

It’s all overwhelming - Employee mental health is suffering from rapid AI transformation

Burnout Looks Different Across the Org Chart. Watch for These Signs. - Burnout is not the same for everyone.

Well-being at Work Is More than Just Not Being Depressed

All of these things are interwoven. The people who work for you are human, that's how we are. We aren't just workers for eight hours and then everything else for the rest of our time. We are human 24/7, and our well-being affects us at work. The workplace also impacts our well-being.

Starting conversations with people at the office, in the coffee shop, at lunch - The mental health benefit of striking up conversations with strangers

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

Worth Reading - RIM Is Moving Upstream

Instead of starting your work in a blank Word document or spreadsheet, start in Copilot chat, then move it to a Copilot page, which is a Loop file. From there, you drop part of the page, a component, into chat for live collaboration with your team, or you work together in the Loop app, with Copilot assisting again and drop the new draft into an email, linked to the web version for easier editing by the entire team, until finally, at the very end of this process, you create a PDF of the final product, and add it to your “records” location.

Thus, only the final version ever gets stored as a record. All the prior versions are gone. Work that is still in progress is not a record, but accessible to AI tools. This is the conundrum for RIM.

This is a very real risk - Shadow AI Continues to Expose Company IP

Worth Reading - Copilot Health: Now in Preview

When I saw the headline, I immediately thought about how Business Copilot uses a number of Compliance rules that would make that data available to employers. Employers should not be trusted with that. So, good for Microsoft for remembering that before they pushed out this new agent.

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #191

Fri, 22 May 2026 12:03:32 GMT

Photo by Lucas Law on Unsplash

If you haven’t seen it yet, Tom O’Connor and I spent some time chatting about the Evolve Conference, AI, and Jazzfest last week:

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information on careers and workplace culture, workplace mental health, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

I also spoke to the San Diego Paralegal Association about stress and anxiety, which there’s no recording of, to foster an open conversation, but it was a good one. Trust me, you missed out. 😏

I’m always glad to get an invite to talk about the things that interest me. I’m very thankful to Tom and Sheila Grela for inviting me!

Speaking of which, I’m going to give a short presentation and demo for the International Data Security User Group on June 10, explaining how Copilot and other interactions appear in Purview eDiscovery. You can register for the event and start getting involved in future events here: https://luma.com/international-data-security-user-group

I’ve attended some of the previous sessions, and it’s a great way to learn more about Microsoft Purview. They also like to encourage open dialogue and questions, so don’t expect a recording, come catch us live!

It always feels good to get to share knowledge with folks virtually. If you’re reading this, you obviously know what sharing things I learn means to me. It also pushes me to keep learning, which has been helpful throughout my career.

What kinds of things are you learning?

Tips to Make Sure Your Mentoring Conversation is Actually Helpful

Careers and the Workplace

This might be helpful. - 80 One-On-One Meeting Questions for Managers and Employees

This too:

Work Wise

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Deliberate Manager, which premieres on February 16, 2027. It’s technically available for pre-order now, though as of this writing we’re still finalizing the cover art…

a month ago · 6 likes · Jake Tuber

The easiest way to make a problem seem to go away is to stop measuring it. - EEOC Is Done With Tracking Race And Sex In The Workforce. Right now it’s just a proposal, but I have no doubt about the reasons behind it.

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - Is Microsoft 365 Copilot Tracking Your Prompts? The Real Enterprise Answer

You may read that and think that means your employer can see every prompt you enter in Copilot. To some extent, that is true; in the same way, they can see every email message or Teams chat you type with your work account. It is a work account after all. The key piece missing from that simple statement is that it's not easy to do, and, by design, there are usually very few people who can collect and review that data.

Isn’t this just announcing what we all see every day?

Google Search, as you know it, is over

This is worth spending some time thinking about:

SOCAutomators

Are AI Agents Changing the SOC?

How AI Agents Are Changing the Way SOCs Hunt, Report, and Stay Current…

2 months ago · 3 likes · Mike Palitto

This should be the thing you focus on in terms of AI - AI governance overview: stop panicking and fix the basics.

If you don't put the guardrails in place, you are inviting someone, or some agent, to go rogue. The only difference is that if this were a contractor or an IT person with more access than they should have, you could fall back on their ethics. AI doesn't have ethics and doesn't understand the concept. If it can do it, it will do it.

Mental Health in the Workplace

Obviously - The World Is On Fire (Literally), and Your Employees Are Feeling It

Workplace Mental Health - Why Self-Care at Work Isn’t Optional—It’s Essential - The question isn’t whether it’s essential, it’s whether your workplace makes it possible.

Worth Reading - Most workers told Monster their job harms their mental health

If you look at the contributors to the mental health damage, though, you see things that are avoidable if organizations wanted to avoid them. Fix poor management, address understaffing, pay people what they're worth, and don't lay off workers just to tweak the stock price. Unfortunately, in the current political and economic climate, I don't see enough organizations that want to do any of that.

This has been lost on too many people I know - The Forgotten Art Of Doing Something Just For You (No Productivity Required)

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

More data, fewer resources: What 100+ legal professionals say is holding ediscovery back in 2026

I think you could say the same thing about all areas of the legal tech industry. More data and fewer resources to deal with it.

Worth Reading - More than half of all Polymarket “long shot” bets on military action pay off

Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets on military and defense actions.

That compares with a win rate of 25 percent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 percent for all markets on the platform as a whole.

The research is likely to add to growing concerns among regulators and lawmakers about insiders placing bets on the timing and success of military actions, amid fears that this could reveal classified information in advance.

M365 News Roundup for - May 2026

A frequent point I make about M365 tools is that they might not always be the best of breed, but since you’ve already bought them to use Exchange, they are often good enough given the price point of a different tool…

2 months ago · 1 like

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #190

Fri, 08 May 2026 12:57:32 GMT

Photo by Pieter van de Sande on Unsplash

Last week, I was serving as the volunteer session coordinator at the ILTA Evolve Conference. The conference focuses on AI and Security, and is smaller than the giant ILTACON conference in August. (I’ll be there, as well!)

I’ve seen a couple of posts recapping and offering opinions on the conference that I wanted to share with you:

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information on careers and workplace culture, workplace mental health, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

As for my own opinion, it was a good conference, but I will be the first to admit that I have become jaded by the whole AI conversation. Being a coordinator for sessions in that track was sometimes a struggle. On the other hand, the sessions and speakers I worked with focused on the governance side of AI, which is right in my wheelhouse, and I thought they did a great job! (Obviously, I’m a little biased.)

On the other hand, I’ll agree with Steven’s assessment above; I don’t think, in 2026, you’re doing anyone any favors by trying to teach them how to prompt. I don’t think this was the audience for that. I would have liked more expert opinion on what this all means for the legal profession. The question I have, though, is whether anyone knows and whether we should trust anyone who claims to know?

I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows where we are headed with AI, and people telling us how amazing it’s going to make our lives are selling you something.

That something is not the full truth.

Still, the conference left us with a lot to think about, helped us identify real risks and rewards out there, and, as many have said, was small enough not to feel as overwhelming for those of us on the more introverted side of the legal tech world. I’ll take that.

If you attended, what did you think? Where do you think this is all headed?

What A Modern Resume Needs

Careers and the Workplace

I know many of you are, or know someone who is, searching for work:

Kindness Isn’t Soft. It’s a Career Strategy.

Regular readers of The Job Hopper know that we’re really into kindness around here. We genuinely believe that when people are nicer to each other, work is easier, teams are more creative, and organizations are more effective…

2 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Alison Doyle and Jen Luckwaldt

Students getting ready to graduate or who still have a few years left - start networking!

The Introverted Networker

The Simple Networking Plan Every College Student Should Follow

Welcome to issue #195 of The Introverted Networker. Every Tuesday, I teach you to be a better networker. My favorite part of the week is hearing from my readers, so leave a comment or ask a question, if you are so inclined…

2 months ago · 7 likes · Greg-The Introverted Networker

This is true, mostly because we place too much of our value on what we do for a paycheck:

Snailboat

Why Unemployment Hurts Our Egos

Buckle up — it’s a big one! But if you’re unemployed, or have been lately, it’s worth the read…

2 months ago · 6 likes · 6 comments · Snailboat

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - AI’s Economics Don’t Make Sense

I'm cherry-picking the Microsoft note, but the same is true of every AI company out there. Unlimited Copilot interactions cost much, much more than $30 per month in compute costs. Someday, Microsoft and all the other companies will have to change their entire model to show any profit.

Maybe we can solve both of those issues this way? We’ll bill you fewer attorney hours by leveraging AI, but you need to foot the bill for its use? Right now, with a set price per seat, the cost of using AI on a given matter is nothing, but it won’t remain that way. It can’t.

Will the legal market make this adjustment to billing back the cost of AI compute? If not, how do firms justify the undefined cost for your firm?

This just makes sense, AI user or not, handing off poorly done work makes me trust you less, too:

Presenter Notes

AI Workslop Makes Colleagues Trust You Less

👋 Hi, it’s Rinaldo. Every week or two, I share actionable strategies to help you clarify your message, drive decisions, and grow your influence at work regardless of your role or title…

2 months ago · 7 likes · Rinaldo Ugrina

Mental Health in the Workplace

Worth Reading - Workplace Abuse, PTSD, and Employer Duty of Care

Employees dealing with trauma outside of work often carry that trauma with them into work, and we need resources to help them navigate that. What do we offer people experiencing trauma at work who carry that trauma into the rest of their lives?

Maybe the better question is, what do we owe them?

This is a blind spot, for sure - Check your blind spot: Financial stress, mental health, and suicide risk at work

Live Music is my Therapy

That was a direct quote from me last weekend as we attended JazzFest in New Orleans.

I’m not saying that simply going to concerts is a replacement for therapy. Let’s make that clear up front.

What I was referring to was the healing power not only of music but also of the shared experience with a crowd of similarly minded people.

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

It’s not enough to recognize the voice on the other end of an audio call. It might not even be enough to recognize them on a video call. Start two-factoring your work interactions. ;-)

Deepfake Voice Attacks are Outpacing Defenses: What Security Leaders Should Know

Craig Ball has refreshed his free book - A Refresh of the Annotated ESI Protocol.

Another helpful guide - The Comprehensive Guide to Second Requests

Revisiting M365 eDiscovery Without Premium Features

I was recently working on an outline for an upcoming presentation I’m going to be doing, and realized that I hadn’t created a case in eDiscovery without checking the checkbox for using Premium features in a very long time…

2 months ago · 1 like · Mike McBride

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #189

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:55:52 GMT

Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash

Sometimes, when my blog “this year in history” type of things pop up, I’m caught by surprise. Most of the time, it’s a blog post from a year ago that feels like I wrote it just a couple of months ago, because time flies.

This week, it was the opposite. I was reminded of this post:

Being #OpentoWork and Stigma

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information on careers and workplace culture, workplace mental health, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

That was three years ago. When I was let go by a tech consulting company. My conclusion in the post, of course, was that being laid off by a tech company doesn’t really say anything about your performance. Those days are long gone.

Obviously, that’s more true now. But it also struck me that it was three years ago, and it feels so much longer. That was an entirely different lifetime ago in many ways professionally. This all reminds me of two universal truths in the business world.

Time moves fast. It’s easy to put things off, and before you know it, a year has gone by.
Things change fast. In April 2023, I was unemployed. Three years later, I’m in my second role at my new firm, which didn't exist when I started, and I have gone through a merger, managing a team that didn’t exist then, either.

It’s no wonder that it seems like it's been much more than three years.

Worth Reading - When You’re Stuck on “Help Wanted”

Careers and the Workplace

I feel like we learned this in Econ 101, right? It’s a simple supply-and-demand curve. If you can’t buy the supply at the price you are offering, you need to raise it. Yet, the article goes on to talk about all the reasons why this isn’t happening, and they aren’t what you’d expect. It’s not just small shops that lack the resources to conduct salary research; it’s also very large, growing companies that either don’t want to adjust the salaries of currently underpaid employees or are hesitant to commit to higher salaries long term.

In the end, though, those concerns are your problem, not the candidates.

We have to talk about it:

Surviving a Layoff in 2026: Your First 30 Days

More than 1,600 companies have announced mass layoffs since January 2026. If you’re reading this because it just happened to you, we want you to know: you are not alone, and you are not without options…

2 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Alison Doyle and Jen Luckwaldt

Also from the same place - The New Rules of Applying for Jobs (That No One Told You)

Artificial Intelligence

This is an excellent question:

What kind of business is the AI business?

Also, there’s this - There’s yet another study about how bad AI is for our brains

Worth Reading - Employment data shows the early signs of AI job disruption are already here

While there may be growth opportunities in blue-collar industries, you don’t suddenly become a plumber or electrician. It’s a long learning process that doesn’t scale well for that many unemployed people. This is reskilling at a massive, rapid scale, but we have to admit that whatever reskilling we’ve done in the past hasn’t been that good.

Do we expect what we’ve done before to ever match current and future needs? I don’t think it will, and that’s a problem that should be addressed. We need different, serious ideas, but I don’t see many of them out there.

Training and Development

Worth Reading - Why Your People Managers Are the Weakest Link in Learning and Development

There are many organizations that claim to have a learning culture, but the reality is very different. The real culture is that people are rewarded and promoted based on hourly billable or other targets, leaving no time for learning.

That’s your culture.

Mental Health in the Workplace

It’s still not safe to be honest

In any competitive or demanding career, admitting to a mental health struggle is to be perceived as being less capable, and being seen as less capable is a career-killer.

This week, the world of sports gave us another example:

Jarren Duran’s experience with fan abuse shows there’s still risk in athletes being vulnerable

I wrote about uncertainty in the last issue - read this, too:

Thinking in Bets

Acknowledging and Navigating Uncertainty

In spring of 2025, I chatted with journalist and applied behavioral scientist Elizabeth Weingarten about her new book, all about how to navigate uncertainty in an increasingly volatile world. I was struck by how relevant the book was to the conversations I was having with clients– especially in an environment when economic uncertainty was higher than it…

3 months ago · 56 likes · 1 comment · Annie Duke

Sleep is important. Pay attention to how much disruption your people carry into their lives after work hours, especially tech companies and law firms - Why Employee Sleep Health Must Be on HR’s Radar and What Organizations Can Do

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

A Perfect Storm of Ignored M365 Security Options

How many organizations have a tenant and have simply left a lot of the default settings from when they bought their first licenses? What would that look like now?

M365 News Roundup for April 2026

I kid…

3 months ago

Current events have always impacted the risks for businesses, but things seem to be escalating quickly, for different reasons: - Iran Conflict Adds New Motivations to Cyber Threats

This is going to create a mess, and we know it’s going to create a mess, but no one wants to be seen as not “doing something to protect the children.” - 438 Experts Said Age Verification Is Dangerous. Legislators Are Moving Forward With It Anyway.

Social media doesn’t have to be as bad as your current experience - Stop Begging Big Tech To Fix Your Social Media Experience. You Can Do It Yourself.

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #188

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:41:52 GMT

Photo by Zetta Bytes on Unsplash

Instead of FUD, let’s talk about CUR.

Ok, I am making up that acronym. It’s probably not going to become commonplace. However, this seems like a good time to talk about uncertainty because it’s all around us. Much of it is completely out of our control, unless you work at a high-level of the government, in which case, stop reading and go do something about all of this!

I digress.

Instead, let’s talk about change and uncertainty in the workplace, because that is also at a fever pitch.

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information on careers and workplace culture, workplace mental health, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

Sharing - Intolerance of Uncertainty | How to Thrive in Ambiguity

It’s not just about AI, either. For example, my workplace will be rolling out a bunch of changes this coming weekend. As confident as we are in the plan and the technology we are putting in place, we also know, without a doubt, that something will go wrong. That uncertainty can be debilitating. In your workplace right now, there are also a large number of people feeling that uncertainty. Some are feeling it more than others. I recently shared a resource on my other website about dealing with uncertainty as a survivor of childhood abuse:

In that piece, I talk about how uncertainty can affect survivors in different ways, because not knowing what’s coming feels incredibly dangerous to us. Uncertainty and instability at home taught us some very dangerous lessons. Those lessons don’t get deprogrammed easily. Right now, that description fits any number of your coworkers.

If there’s one thing I have learned, however, about uncertainty as I’ve tried to heal from my past, it is that the confidence that other people appear to have in the face of uncertainty doesn’t come from knowing everything will go perfectly. It comes from surviving even when things go wrong.

I remind myself all the time that I survived my childhood, I’ll survive this too. My message to others rolling out big changes is similar.

Something will go wrong. Something we didn’t see coming, didn’t plan for, and maybe didn’t know about. We’ll figure it out, fix it, and life will go on.

That backlog of surviving is how you build resiliency. But the advice I linked to in that post wouldn’t hurt either.

Worth Reading - Nobody Is Coming to Save Your Career

Careers and the Workplace

I still maintain that this is lesson one for young people coming into the workforce. I have one caveat to that now, and maybe being a manager has given me some additional insight into this, but here’s the flip side of that.

It doesn’t take much to stand out as a manager when no one is taking the time to even ask about the career goals of the people who report to you. The organization probably isn’t going to provide much in the way of talent development budget, but if you can just show you care and provide some mentorship, you’ll be outdoing 90% of the managers out there.

A big part of it is that we don’t train people to be managers; we just promote people who are good at one thing without realizing that managing is different.

Lauren Davidson

Why High Performers Burn Out Faster as Managers - And How to Break the Cycle

There’s a predictable pattern I see in almost every cohort of managers I work with: High-performing individual contributors (ICs) who transition into leadership have a greater tendency to burnout as Managers. This is because the very traits that made them successful before can actually contribute to declining wellbeing and, ironically, limit career prog…

3 months ago · 18 likes · 4 comments · Lauren Davidson

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - Deepfakes: A Problem In Search Of A Problem?

If you ask a group of legal professionals if they've seen deepfakes be an issue in court, and they all say no, is there no issue, or did they fall for the fakes?

This might be true - The Competency Cliff

What that business case did not account for is that the repetitive work was never just production. It was training. It was the mechanism through which junior lawyers developed the pattern recognition, contextual judgment, and professional instincts that made them capable of doing the higher-value work later. The efficiency gain is real. So is the competency gap it is quietly creating.

AI is pushing us back to this - 3 ways to prove you’re human online

Worth Reading - Microsoft backtracks on Copilot Chat access in M365 apps

It never made sense to me that they kept adding more features to the free version of Copilot for M365. Yes, they were also adding some advanced features in the paid version, but at some point, you are competing against yourself for the average AI user. It is definitely a shift, though. Add in the fact that this news also came out in the same week:

Microsoft to strip AI-generated recaps from Loop in surprising move

This is pulling away a feature from the paid version, which is very surprising.

Training and Development

This may be of interest - Live Webinar May 19: Gaslighting at Work: How to Stop the Workplace Bullying That Impacts Neurodivergent Professionals

This was an interesting conversation about how people learn differently, and training for a neurodiverse workforce, and I’m not just saying that because I work with Laura.

Mental Health in the Workplace

Worth Reading - When Asking for Help Feels Unsafe

Obviously, this is true in the world of sports, where any perceived weakness can be the difference between a first-round pick contract and no contract, but it’s also true in many of the industries all of us work in. In tech, do you want to be perceived as someone who might not be able to produce at the same level as everyone else? In law, do you want to be seen as maybe not able to hack the billable-hour requirements?

Whether either of those perceptions is true is not relevant; the risk of being seen that way exists. This risk makes asking for help less safe, which makes it more likely that someone won’t be able to do it.

Maybe it is All About Just Showing up and Being Friendly

Maybe they’ve stumbled onto the simplest life hack there is for loneliness - become a regular somewhere. Exist in a space where people expect you to be and then be friendly while you’re there.

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

This is true of all of your files - How to make sure you never lose your photos again (backup, backup, backup)

It’s hard to feel sorry for the losers in this case- Meta and YouTube ordered to pay $3 million to young woman in social media addiction trial. It’s worth considering the possible ramifications - Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For

This was an interesting case related to cloud resources - When the Platform Disappears: Spoliation Sanctions and the Google Analytics Sunset

Maybe you’re normal, and you don’t see a new feature like chat inside of a Planner task and immediately wonder where that data lives and if it’s discoverable…

Planner Chat

3 months ago · 1 like · Mike McBride

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #187

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:04:06 GMT

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

I came across a post this week about the importance of “wasting time” with people as an important part of building a community.

I wrote a bit more about it here but this week was also an important reminder for me.

Sharing - If You Want to Build Community, You Have to “Waste Time” with People

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information on careers and workplace culture, workplace mental health, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

I work from home, so most of my time with other people is structured toward goals. I try not to make all of the time that way, though, and one of the nice things about this past week, as I made office visits to spend time with my team members, was the opportunity to take them to lunch and have a very unstructured conversation. Did we talk about work during part of that? Of course, but we also talked about our families, hobbies, the local area, etc.
Am I exhausted after visiting three offices in three cities in three days? Absolutely. Not just because of the travel, that’s also a lot of socializing for me. But it was worth taking some steps toward building community with my team.

What I come away from this week with is not that I should go back to working in an office. Afterall, I was also much less productive this week than I normally am at home. I know how I work best. I am thinking a lot about making my one-on-ones less structured, or finding ways to communicate in a way that is less task and goal focused at times. To give myself and my team an opportunity to waste a little time together.

How do you waste time with your team?

Worth Reading - If You Feel Behind in Your Career, Read This

Careers and the Workplace

The idea that you will start your career after college, work hard, and move up the career ladder is a complete fiction. That is not normal by any means. If you find yourself in your 30s or 40s switching jobs and not climbing the ladder the way you thought you would, welcome to the club. What you've been experiencing is normal. There's no ladder, it's the freaking monkey bars out here.

This is a very underrated career skill - How to express yourself clearly

Worth a bookmark - Self-Audit Your Career Edition

Artificial Intelligence

As always, the answer is it depends.

AI For Lawyers

Is It Safe to Put Confidential Information in AI Tools?

The question I get asked more than any other by attorneys—at every conference, in every CLE, over a casual lunch and even in the restroom—is this: “Is it safe to put privileged or confidential information into AI tools?” Not surprisingly the answer is that it depends—on which tool, how it’s configured, what your engagement agreement says, and the vendor…

3 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · Amy Swaner

Training and Development

This is a risk that many people might be taking -

Presenter Notes

The High Cost of Outsourcing Your Thinking to AI

👋 Hi, it’s Rinaldo. Every week or two, I share actionable strategies to help you clarify your message, drive decisions, and grow your influence at work regardless of your role or title…

4 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Rinaldo

Obviously, I would share this in the newsletter - Ditch Doomscrolling: How Newsletters Beat Social Media for Your Brain

Mental Health in the Workplace

How is the mental health of workers in 2026?

Do you see the trend? Many of us have gotten more comfortable talking about mental health with people we trust. We do not trust corporate leaders. And, why should we? How many people do you know who’ve been laid off in recent years, not because they weren’t meeting the requirements of the job, or the company was losing money, but because the stock price needed a nudge? It’s impossible for employees to trust that you care about their mental health when you’ve watched them cut staff and make it more difficult on those left behind over and over again.

Supporting your workers’ mental health requires them to feel a sense of safety. That no longer exists in most workplaces.

If this is a precursor for what’s to come, this is going to be very bad for big tech, and it’s very difficult to feel sorry for them. - Meta and YouTube ordered to pay $3 million to young woman in social media addiction trial.

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

This isn’t just a K-12 problem. Third-party breaches are not uncommon, and as tight as your security may be, you’ve also got to constantly be onguard against risks targeted at the companies you partner with who also have your confidential data. Yes, I’m looking at us, law firms.

EdTech IRL

The Vendor Problem

When a school district suffers a data breach, the first question from the public tends to be direct: “How did the district get hacked?” Increasingly, though, the most accurate answer is that the district itself wasn’t actually hacked at all. A growing share of K12 cyber incidents now trace back to the companies providing the digital tools schools rely o…

3 months ago · 2 likes · Andy Lombardo

This is frightening, and also correct - Targeted advertising is also targeting malware

New features and new eDiscovery questions:

Have you seen this feature in your tenant yet…

Teams Draft Messages

3 months ago · Mike McBride

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #186

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:41:35 GMT

Photo by Semyon Borisov on Unsplash

I wrote a blog post two years ago about a simple example of a data hack that caused chaos in a system without ever breaching it. Rather, it was a simple matter of creating false data points that threw it into disarray.

People in the UK gained access to the license plate database and started making copies of other car owners' license plates, who then received all the tickets for infractions caught by license-plate readers.

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information on careers and workplace culture, workplace mental health, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

In that post, I wrote:

This is only small potatoes. It takes very little skill to make a fake license plate. Imagine what highly skilled hackers with AI tools could do with access to surveillance systems if they decide to target you individually.

I was focused on the risks faced by anyone who is impersonated and has false accusations made against them. When I read that post this week, though, I had another thought.

Imagine how far the chaos could go if you were able to alter information that your organization uses to ground its AI tools. How much damage could be done if your AI tools were analyzing false information and feeding that back out to your employees?

Who’s protecting that data? Who’s verifying that data? Who is making sure that data stays up to date as things change?

These questions keep me up at night, but they also pale in comparison to this one:

Who would benefit from creating fake data points, and how easily could it happen?

We build many tools to detect data theft. We monitor for inappropriate data sharing by internal users and for data exfiltration by external actors. Are we also monitoring who changes data without moving it?

Organizations have treasure troves of data sitting around that AI could surface and make even more valuable, but that entire process assumes the data is accurate and hasn’t been altered to influence AI responses.

If it has been, you’ve got unreliable AI, which is worse than having no AI.

Fake job recruiters hide malware in developer coding challenges

Careers and the Workplace

Last issue, it was ghost jobs, which I’m guessing is only slightly better than this outcome:

I endorse this idea - Random Acts Of Workplace Kindness Are Awesome

Artificial Intelligence

As someone replied on Mastodon - “Yes. Yes is the answer.” - Are you leaking company data to non-sanctioned AI Apps?

Grammarly Doing Some Creepy AI Stuff - By the time this goes out, the story changed again, with Grammarly disabling the new feature that used famous authors’ names without permission.

Let’s make it more difficult to keep up with changing technology

As if the struggle to keep up with technological change wasn't hard enough for those of us in the industry, now we've got to deal with reports that are made up by GenAI?

The Geek in Review

Niki Black on AI Adoption, Billing Pressure, and the Governance Gap in Legal

This week we welcome back Niki Black to unpack the findings from the newly released 2026 Legal Industry Report from 8am The conversation centers on a legal profession moving into a new phase of AI adoption, where individual lawyers are embracing general purpose AI tools at a striking pace, while many firms still lack even basic policies or training. Nik…

4 months ago · 1 like · The Geek in Review

Sharing - The AI child exploitation crisis is here

It’s not like we didn’t know this would happen. We knew. The industry just didn’t care:

Training and Development

This is an important part of developing your team - How to Improve Team Collaboration and Inspire Creativity: A Leader’s Guide.

Maybe this can help you be a better mentor, or find a better one. What Makes A Good Mentor?

Mental Health in the Workplace

The Psychology of Fair Labor

Fair labor isn’t just about wages, it’s a mental health issue: Decent work conditions shape psychological well-being.

Managing Multiple Priorities at Work Without Burnout - the question for managers is whether your team is free to manage them in a way that works for them. If not, it might be the express train to burnout.

Nothing stokes our attention like outrage and fear—Digital media is using negativity to steal our attention—here’s how to reclaim it.

I have been on record talking about how little training we provide people moving into management, so while this is a good idea, I’m not holding my breath - Why training managers to prevent burnout should be a HR priority in 2026.

”

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

Struggling to respond to an eDiscovery request? Just ignoring it for a few months is one strategy, I guess - Don’t Go Quiet If There Are Complex eDiscovery Problems.

Vulnerable information and under-resourced security teams - Why Attackers Target School Districts

This is a great question - Cybersecurity Still Struggles to Retain and Elevate Women…Why?

Hate To Say I Told You So Again: Your Chats Ain’t Private - Do you know your rights when using public AI tools? Ask yourself if you should be doing that.

They are problematic everywhere, courtrooms just happen to have stricter rules than the rest of us deal with every day - Mark Zuckerberg’s Court Appearance Proves Smart Glasses are Problematic

M365 News Roundup for March 2026

Copilot News…

4 months ago · 1 like

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #185

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:38:17 GMT

Photo by Erik Müller on Unsplash

As if things aren’t tough enough for anyone looking for work right now:

Are You Applying to Ghost Jobs?

A recent survey from Clarify Capital showed that while 3 in 5 employers say that they have open positions, 1 in 4 don’t plan to fill an open role for three months or more. When asked why they post non-urgent job openings, employers most commonly said they were “always open to hiring new people (37%), they “wanted an active pool of applicants in case of turnover” (22%), and “no reason in particular” (21%).
If you’re coughing a cussword into your sleeve at those answers, consider this: 1 in 5 employers surveyed said that they “feel pressured by stakeholders or investors to maintain an image of growth through job postings.”

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

I feel like I’ve been screaming into the void about layoffs recently. I’ve been saying that layoffs aren’t good for business, they’re horrible for morale and culture, and they don’t help the bottom line. The one thing they do is raise the stock price. It’s performative, but that is the business world we live in.

Now this? Companies are posting jobs to appear to be hiring to satisfy the “growth” expectations of investors, or to have a pool of applicants with no intention of interviewing or hiring anyone right now.

It’s really difficult not to view capitalism as one scam after another when companies act like this. Maybe in 2026 it’s time to wonder if that’s all it is.

Careers and the Workplace

Related to the above, things are grim, and we should all be prepared for job loss.

The (Pretty Grim) Job Search Advice We Need to Give You Right Now

If you have a job right now, hold on to it at (almost any) cost. That’s the bottom line for workers right now, and it’s extremely unpleasant advice to give and to hear…

4 months ago · 16 likes · Alison Doyle and Jen Luckwaldt

I feel like this is important for many of us - How to network when you’re socially anxious.

Also, this is worth bookmarking:

The Introverted Networker

The Ultimate Guide to Using LinkedIn for Networking

This issue is about using LinkedIn to network…

4 months ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Greg-The Introverted Networker

Artificial Intelligence

I’m sold on this idea - There’s a Grim New Expression: “AI;DR”

some netizens are proposing a new term to call out AI slop so other people can avoid wasting their time — or to just make fun of the person peddling it: “AI;DR,” or “ai;dr,” short for “AI, didn’t read.”

How do we make this expression a thing, and how can it be used?

Governance Can’t Keep Up With AI

So I ask again: why are we listening to the people who have the most to gain by getting everyone to buy AI tools, instead of making our own decisions about how quickly we should move forward with AI? Governance exists to slow things down - forcing people to think before they run off and do something disastrous.

Should we design better governance to address rapidly changing technology? Absolutely. Should we let Big Tech determine how we redesign it? I don’t think so.

An interesting idea - Why Companies Should Consider Requiring Internal Disclosure of AI Use

AI For Lawyers

Agentic AI in Law

Of all professionals, lawyers should be the least surprised when delegation creates liability. We spend careers analyzing principal-agent relationships, parsing scope of authority, and litigating whether someone acted within their delegated powers. We know that when you appoint an agent, you’re responsible for what they do within the authority you’ve gi…

4 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Amy Swaner

Speaking of AI and legal, sometimes, your AI doesn’t know you’re a lawyer - Copilot Isn’t Broken… It’s Being Literal: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Microsoft Copilot in Legal

Mental Health in the Workplace

Worth Reading - The main reason your company’s healthcare costs are skyrocketing

Here’s the interesting thing. When workplaces have made people ill, we’ve done little to hold them accountable. We have done some things, though. (Asbestos lawsuits, for example.) It hasn’t amounted to much in the broader context, but we do acknowledge that working in an environment that causes health issues is generally frowned upon. We have not reached that point with mental health. We’ve not started thinking about the poor health outcomes for people pushed to the brink and beyond by their managers.

We should, and businesses should be leading the charge, because this is costing them a ton in health insurance premiums.

Reaction to Death of Rondale Moore and Workplace Mental Health

This is not just an issue for the NFL or other sports leagues. This is the reality in EVERY workplace. People ask all the time why no one talks about mental health at work, even when you have programs designed to support your employees. This is why. It's the way everyone else in the workplace looks at them, talks to them, avoids them, and treats them differently than they did before they said anything.

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

You’ll want to grab this update from Craig Ball if you are in the eDiscovery space - Electronic Evidence Workbook 2026.

Also, Craig quickly followed with more writing - Detecting Deep Fakes

Worth Reading - If your external drive is always plugged in, it isn’t a backup

Having a good backup strategy involves being slightly paranoid. What are the risks? What happens if...? You need to look at the worst-case scenarios and consider if there's a copy of your important data that would still exist if it happened. It's not a fun exercise, and if you suffer from anxiety, it can be a bit exhausting to invite that in, but in this case, it could save you from a data disaster.

What is the Future of eDiscovery in M365?

Before we get lost in the deep recesses of my mind, I wanted to share a small update to my last article about Outlook reactions…

4 months ago · 1 like · Mike McBride

There may be a very fine line between protecting kids and isolating them. - Australia’s Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned.

Also:

Where are Kids Supposed to Connect?

If we consider what has changed for kids over the last couple of decades, the issues are similar. Kids don’t wander around our communities on their own anymore. We’ve decided that was too dangerous. Outside organized sports, there aren’t many places where teens can socialize offline.

Naturally, in a world where they no longer had access to peers outside of school, they turned to the internet. Phones and social media were the fallback for connecting. Now, however, many find that the option has been taken away as well.

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #184

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:39:28 GMT

Cajun Mardi Gras - Eunice, Louisiana 2024

When you work remotely, you may find yourself living in a place where Tuesday is a state holiday, but your workplace is not in the same state, and so it’s not a work holiday.

It’s very important that you take the day off and enjoy it with the rest of your community.

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

And so, as I wrap up this week, I’m looking forward to the four-day weekend I’m going to have to take in all of the Mardi Gras activities (LSU gymnastics Mardi Gras meet, Baton Rouge Spanishtown parade, and Traditional Cajun Mardi Gras run included!) and get a break from the recent insanity of my professional life.

There is one thing about that insanity I wanted to share with y’all. Part of it has been volunteering as a session coordinator for the upcoming ILTA Evolve Conference, April 30 - May 2. I’ve been conducting short interviews with potential speakers for my sessions, and I have met some very smart people in the process.

This gives me hope about the LegalTech space. I’m looking forward to working with them and putting together some great educational sessions!

Worth Reading - Top 10 Biglaw Firm To Conduct ‘Massive’ Layoff, Leaving Hundreds Jobless Thanks To AI

Careers and the Workplace

Or is it AI-Washing?

I can see why publicly proclaiming that you’re being innovative with new technology to reduce your headcount is a better alternative to admitting your firm isn’t doing well or to publicly blaming US policy. It might not be the whole truth, though. Usually, when there are large layoffs, the truth is a questionable idea anyway. AI just created another way to stretch it. In this case, Baker McKenzie may see a path in which new technology reduces the need for 10% of its staff. They may also be using that excuse to cover up failure, too.

Either way, 700 people are out of a job, and it’s become so routine that I fear it no longer raises an eyebrow. That’s the truly scary part.

Speaking of layoffs, the IT industry shed jobs again in January.

This seems excessive, so why are so many companies treating employees poorly? - Turnover costs exceed $45K per worker, report finds

Artificial Intelligence

This should set off some alarm bells:

Why a lack of governance will hurt companies using agentic AI

Only 27% of organizations say their governance frameworks are mature enough to monitor and manage AI systems effectively.

Speaking of a lack of governance - The viral AI agent Moltbot is a security mess - 5 red flags you shouldn’t ignore (before it’s too late)

Zoom Changing how AI Note-takers Can Be Used - Will Microsoft Follow?

The first paragraph makes it obvious that you can’t be an unnamed guest in a Zoom meeting and invite your AI to take notes. That makes sense.

The second adds a requirement: you must also attend the meeting. No more sending your AI to take notes for you while you spend your time elsewhere.

It’s not the AI:

Ryan McKeen

Law Firms: Your AI Problem Isn’t the Tools. It’s Leadership.

Law firms are asking the wrong question about AI. They obsess over which platform to buy, which vendor to trust, which features matter most. They compare Harvey to CoCounsel, debate Claude versus ChatGPT, and schedule demos with every legal tech company that promises to revolutionize their practice…

5 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Ryan McKeen

AI For Lawyers

Why Legal Fees Aren’t Going Down Despite AI Adoption

In the beginning of GenAI in law, there was a hope among some—including me--that widespread access to artificial intelligence would reduce legal costs, expand access to justice, and level a playing field that is noticeably tilted toward those who can afford $800-an-hour legal counsel. Technology could deliver what…

5 months ago · 6 likes · 5 comments · Amy Swaner

Training and Development

This is a good question, and the article contains some good commentary from experts in the field:

How should we design and deliver learning in 2026?

Worth Reading - The new Women in the Workplace report is pretty dire

Let me get this straight:

You’re actively disinterested in the career development of people who work for you because they are female.
You are limiting advancement to only part of your workforce.
Your actions are causing some of your best employees to disengage, not seek to improve themselves, and eventually leave.
You’ll take that disengagement as a sign that women “just aren’t ambitious.”

I can’t even.

Mental Health in the Workplace

Is there room for calm in your meetings?

Mora’s advice is to slow down, pause after someone finishes speaking, take a breath before coming off mute, and slow your speech.

I think those are great ideas that I plan to spend a little more time on and bring to the meetings I host in order to bring calm to the whole team. But then I started thinking about the many meetings I attend each week, and how few of them feel anything like that. They ooze anxiety, tension, and focus on “getting through” the agenda at lightning speed before the next meeting comes at us with even more of the same.

They make us feel more distracted and uneasy, not less.

A few more notes on mental health at work:

That last one hit home for me. I once had a manager who fancied himself an amateur therapist who could help me. This was 18 months or so after I had returned to work after a mental health issue caused me to take leave. I didn’t last a year on that team. My previous manager had been there during my leave and told me she was available if I needed her, but left it up to my therapist and me to figure out how I could continue working safely. I should have stayed with her team.

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

What are we doing? - An AI plush toy exposed thousands of private chats with children

Also - Notepad++ Hijacked by State-Sponsored Hackers - I know many of my eDiscovery friends have been Notebook++ fans when it came to editing load files. You may want to go read that.

They thought it would be cute and heartwarming, assuming we wouldn’t pay attention to how creepy the technology actually is when applied to everything else. Why so many people hate Ring’s ‘Search Party’ Super Bowl ad?

M365 News Roundup for Feb. 2026

Case in point…

5 months ago

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #183

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:35:55 GMT

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

According to Gallup, employee engagement has declined since 2020, but it remained at the same low level between 2024 and 2025. Maybe we’ve reached peak disengagement?

It’s still pretty bleak, though:

Between 2020 and 2025, younger U.S. workers experienced the largest drops in engagement. The percentage of Generation Z and younger millennials who are engaged at work dropped by eight points, while older millennials (born 1980 to 1988) dropped by nine points. Generation X declined in engagement by six points, and baby boomers saw no change in engagement since 2020.

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

Using 2020 as the starting point is interesting. Remember in the early days of the pandemic, when employers and politicians talked about how we were in this together, and they were finding unique ways to work remotely, fund solutions for people who couldn’t work, and applauded the folks who still showed up in essential jobs to make sure we were as safe as we could be, but still taken care of?

What happened to those leaders? Where did they go?

I think these two charts say it all when it comes to how younger workers feel about the workplace now:

We just quit giving a crap about people, and it shows. I guess these young folks should just be glad to have a job, but that mindset isn’t leadership. I don’t know what it is, but it won't convince anyone to give you their best work.

How do we get leaders to see these charts and understand that this is a problem?

Show Your Work, and You Might Get Lucky

Careers and the Workplace

How much burnout is this popular workplace advice causing? - The Hidden Cost of “Doing More with Less” in IT

I’d also argue that it’s not hidden.

The post is written by a developer, and he’s got good advice for anyone looking for that kind of work. I’m not a developer, but I can say with some confidence that this advice applies to everyone. In this job market, who you know is everything.

Scratch that. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you and your work. The more people who see your work, the more likely you are to land a job. It’s not always that simple, but it sure increases the odds. Maybe for the rest of us, it’s not about having a GitHub repository for our projects, but about writing a blog, being involved in user groups, or volunteering with your industry’s educational resource.

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - General Purpose AI Will Never Be Safe

I think we can agree that granting someone full access to the open internet without education or tools to protect themselves would be dangerous, no?

OK, but what is a general-purpose LLM but a collection of everything that the model could ingest, without rules about what was safe and what wasn’t?

Yet we expect people to use them, and aren’t making any effort to make them safer.

This seems bad - AI Use + Data Security: A Growing Gap

survey of 921 IT and cybersecurity professionals finds that although 83% of enterprises “already use AI in daily operations…only 13% report strong visibility into how it is being used.”

Worth Reading - How Malinformation Tricks Your Brain

The article above, however, makes it clear that our brains take shortcuts to make quick decisions. In doing so, the number of times we see something that isn’t true can impact whether we treat it as false or true. They say familiarity breeds contempt when it comes to other people, but maybe familiarity with shared information breeds acceptance, regardless of the truth.

That is frightening in a world where tens of thousands of posts can be created in minutes.

Training and Development

Teaching employees to use AI could add up to $6.6T to US economy

This is a problem, however:

Meanwhile, an October report from Express Employment Professionals and Harris Poll found that although 72% of hiring managers said their companies are using AI, more than half also said their organizations don’t have the resources to train their employees how to use it effectively.

I agree, but I also don’t see it happening - Why Mental Health Training for Managers Is a Non-Negotiable Today

Mental Health in the Workplace

Worth Reading - “Pizza Parties Don’t Fix Burnout”: The State of Librarian Mental Health

It’s exhausting to go to work every day for people who refuse to stand behind you as a human being and treat you like an expense they would do anything to be rid of.

Sadly, that is the state of the workplace for many people. It’s not just at the library, and it won’t be fixed by pizza, yoga, or any other lunchtime activity.

Worth Reading - Fake news and trust

This is the instruction manual. Make everything seem dangerous and chaotic, then offer simplistic fixes and explanations that aren’t true at all, but fit a narrative you wish to manipulate people with. As Seth describes, the easy thing to do is to accept those explanations and stop thinking about it much further. We are hard-wired to do that. We’ve been educated to do that. We’ve been told simplistic lies like the world is fair, and good things happen to good people, and we believe it because the truth is much less comfortable.

We’ve all done this math - The mental math of taking time off

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

Worth Reading – Carvana and the New Hyperlink Fight: “Contemporaneous” Isn’t Automatic—It’s Earned

As someone responding to an eDiscovery request, the flip side of that statement is, of course, true. Kelly goes into some detail, but for my M365 folks: if you're going to argue that the version of the document when shared is too difficult to collect, you will need to show your work. That will need to include a whole lot more than saying you don't know how to do it, or that it's difficult.

This seems relevant to lawyers this year - Effective Advocacy 101 in the Age of eDiscovery and AI: A Guide for Lawyers and Their Clients.

Agents automate lots of things, including the actions that we would consider an insider threat:

The New Insider Threat: Employees Using AI Agents to Bypass IT Policies

Artificial intelligence has become a double-edged sword. On one hand, AI agents—autonomous tools powered by large language models and machine learning—boost productivity, automate mundane tasks, and foster innovation. On the other, they empower employees to skirt around established IT policies in ways that were once unimaginable. This isn’t just about r…

5 months ago · Rod Trent

Blogs are Back

You know I’m a huge RSS fan, so much so that I pay for a Feedly Pro account. (I pay for the larger number of feeds and the ability to turn an email address (one I subscribe to newsletters with) into a feed I can read in Feedly.

If you aren’t yet that dedicated to RSS feeds, this may be a super-easy way to get started. It’s free, you don’t even need an account, the data is stored in your browser, or you can create a free account and sync the data across your devices.

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #182

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:59:19 GMT

MLK Memorial - "True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

In the links below, you’ll see some negativity about AI, which might make you think that I’m being hypocritical about AI since I do work with it.

I’m not. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to see the benefits of AI while also decrying the unbelievable amount of crap posted online by AI.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

Worth Reading - Is 2026 The Year We All Decide to Quit the Internet?

As we enter 2026, though, this is a legitimate question, and I think the author of the original piece (linked in the blog post) makes a valid point about whether all the AI slop and algorithmic outrage is worth being online for.

They also make a good point that we can be better than that.

I’ve always written under the assumption that people were reading what I put out here and, hopefully, learning something. In the age of AI-slop, I want more of that, and only that. I’m seeking it out and connecting with it. I am not connecting with people who are creating crap content in a chase for attention. Bring your authentic self, or I’m ready to assume your account is AI slop.

I hope you’re looking for that, too, and that I can continue to provide it here. Just a human sharing human knowledge and ideas.

Your Bonus Won’t Buy Loyalty and Your Above and Beyond Won’t Buy a Raise

Before we get into the rest of the newsletter, a quick promo for my M365 newsletter and a new community I’m trying to build for subscribers and others interested in M365 and eDiscovery, IG, Security, etc.

Would you be interested in getting together over a Teams channel to discuss M365, eDiscovery, and other related topics with other subscribers? Perhaps even schedule some chats on occasion? (Paid subscribers, I’ve got some ideas just for you as well.) If you are interested, sign up here. If there’s enough interest, we will definitely get this going in the next few weeks.)

Careers and the Workplace

This is about law firms, but it’s applicable everywhere:

Ryan McKeen

January is brutal…

6 months ago · 3 likes · Ryan McKeen

This is interesting - Why Mandatory Cameras Can Harm Neurodivergent Employees

As is this - The Problem With Sending Your AI Agent to Meetings, According to Neuroscience

Every conversation I have at work right now feels dumb amid what we are seeing on the news every day. I can’t imagine what this is like:

How to Job Search When the World Is on Fire

If you’re on social media, you’ve seen lots of posts like this recently: “I wasn’t really expecting to work through the apocalypse.” And while sitting in meetings or serving customers during Unprecedented Times is hard enough, we’d argue that it’s even harder to be looking for work right now…

6 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Alison Doyle and Jen Luckwaldt

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - The Achilles’ Heel of AI: The Data That Feeds It

This challenge, in part, is why my job title is now related to Information Governance and Compliance. It's recognizing that data is a valuable asset and a significant risk. Grounding your AI in low-quality data is a massive risk.

Dear lawyers, what are we doing? - AI Hallucinations Cases Are Not Slowing Down, They’re Speeding Up…A Lot

Worth Reading - Microsoft’s Satya Nadella wants you to stop calling AI “slop” in 2026

The slop problem is the kind of PR problem that kills industries. It’s the Ford Pinto’s exploding gas tank, New Coke, and the iTunes U2 album fiasco all rolled into one. People see all the hype about AI, then experience entire websites and tens of thousands of social media accounts spewing content no one wants, generated by AI.

That’s a perception problem that won’t go away because you want customers to stop talking about it. You have to build a tool that doesn’t create this problem.

On the other hand, Turning AI Concerns into Opportunities.

At least until advertising makes AI utterly useless, right? - Advertising is Coming to AI. It’s Going to Be a Disaster. (Also - OpenAI Reportedly Planning to Make ChatGPT “Prioritize” Advertisers in Conversation)

Gmail Users Losing POP and Getting AI Whether We Like It or Not

Never fear, though. In 2026, Google wouldn't dare let you have a product that doesn't feature AI. So, we're all getting the AI Inbox, and you will have to opt out if you do not want an AI-generated list of to-dos and summaries instead of just reading your email.

Training and Development

This is a cool resource to grab - an ebook of the entire year’s newsletters. Here’s what we wrote about in the Offbeat newsletter in 2025.

When you don’t teach people how to lead, this is what happens - When Good Frontline Workers Make Bad Supervisors.

Mental Health in the Workplace

Worth Reading - We Asked 9 Burnout Experts Their Secrets to Protecting Mental Health at Work—and They All Said the Same Thing

This article gathers input from multiple experts and continues for 28 paragraphs without once mentioning the employers’ expectation that we do all the things they tell us not to do.

It’s all well and good to point out that setting boundaries, saying no, ending our work day on time, etc., are good ways to avoid burnout. It’s another thing entirely for many of us to have that option in the first place.

Have you admired any art lately?

Simply Viewing Art Can Improve Mental Well-Being, Major Psychological Review Finds

Photography included - Want better mental health in 2026? Look at more photos...

Here’s a head start from my own photo blog - Best of 2025

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

Have you gotten random emails about resetting your Instagram password? - A huge Instagram data leak allegedly exposed 17.5 million accounts, and you might have already been targeted.

The details of online age verification are scary - 10 (Not So) Hidden Dangers of Age Verification.

This is something I think about when it comes to lawyers taking client data out of the country on their devices. - Border agents can search your devices. Is a burner phone worth it?

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #181

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 14:03:34 GMT

Welcome to the final edition for 2025. With the regular biweekly schedule, the next issue would be coming on Jan. 2, but I’m taking a few weeks away from newsletters over the holidays, so you may not hear from me again until a couple of weeks after that.

As much as I would like to claim I’m using the holidays to rest, the reality is that the new year is bringing a new role and a merger at work, so between that level of work and trying to do some holiday things, something’s gotta give for a few weeks.

All of this chaos seems an appropriate way for 2025 to end, frankly.

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

Let’s face it, this has been a year. I won’t recount all the ways this year has been, let’s call it, “challenging” in our best office-speak, because we know what has happened this year and what will follow in 2026.

Things aren’t pretty out there.

In the meantime, of course, I’ll still likely be posting to the blog and sharing things on Bluesky and Mastodon. I won’t be totally offline, but I'll let the newsletter rest for a few weeks so I can come back with some fresh ideas and build the kind of community we all need, where we can share knowledge and learn from each other.

Until then, I hope you enjoy your holidays, however that might look for you this year.

How much do interruptions hurt productivity?

Careers and the Workplace

I think this is true, and I believe it has serious ramifications for every workplace: Job Search Might Become an Ongoing Activity.

Not the least of which is how to deal with a workforce that stays for only a few years. That’s a different landscape than the one we’ve designed work to be. It’s also precisely what employers have brought upon themselves.

Think about it: if you’re getting interrupted by email, calls, instant messages, etc., every three minutes, and it takes longer than three minutes to get back to focused work, there is none.

Want more help with the job search? - The Job Search and Career Newsletters Worth Your Inbox in 2026.

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - AI can change political opinions by flooding voters with real and fabricated facts.

So what you’re telling me is that AI chatbots can spout so much bullshit, so fast, and so confidently that they are incredibly effective at changing people’s political beliefs?

Thinking Freely with Nita Farahany

When AI Stops Advising and Starts Acting (Inside my AI Law and Policy Class #26)

7 months ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · Nita Farahany

AI Eats Everything - Micron Kills off Consumer Sales of RAM

With the demand for chips, processors, and memory from AI data centers, there’s a ton of money to be made, and selling small amounts of these same parts to computer enthusiasts is a distraction that isn’t worth the effort.

I trust Bruce on this issue - Against the Federal Moratorium on State-Level Regulation of AI.

Anthropic is now a Microsoft Subprocessor.

This is a pretty significant change for many of us who had been concerned about vetting data protection agreements with Anthropic before allowing user access to the Claude option in Coiplot Chat, and who’ve also watched new agents for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint rollout, but not to our tenants with Anthropic model access disabled.

This is happening in real time:

Bring Your Own AI: The Next BYOD Nightmare

In the early 2010s, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) revolutionized workplaces by allowing employees to use personal smartphones and laptops for work, boosting productivity but also introducing a slew of security headaches like data breaches and unmanaged endpoints. Fast forward to 2025, and we’re facing a similar paradigm shift: Bring Your Own AI (BYOAI). …

7 months ago · Rod Trent

Training and Development

We know this, even if we don’t want it to be true - Everyone Should Upskill and Reskill Their Career.

If you’re trying to help someone learn new tech or other skills, remember - Telling Is Not the Same as Training.

From Ticket Taker to Strategic Technologist: The Reinvention of IT Pro Careers in 2026

The role of the IT professional is undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Gone are the days when IT pros were primarily seen as the unsung heroes behind the help desk, resolving endless tickets for password resets, software glitches, and hardware failures. As artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies mature, these operational tasks are incr…

7 months ago · Rod Trent

Mental Health in the Workplace

Worth Reading - The Legal Profession Cannot Yoga Its Way Out of a Mental Health Crisis

Yoga or mindfulness seminars are nice, but they won’t eliminate the mental health impacts of working 60-80 hours every week. If that’s your expectation, you are harming your employees. If your business model depends on causing this harm, don’t be surprised that people opt to do something other than continuing to work for you. It’s in their best interests.

An end-of-year bonus link if you’re interested in the mental health space and hearing from me on the off weeks here:

Child Abuse Survivor

Heading into the Holidays and the end of 2025

For many of us, 2025 has been a struggle. If you’re a regular reader here, you already know some of the reasons it has been frustrating to advocate for mental health and underrepresented people in the current climate…

7 months ago · 3 likes

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

Yeah, so this definitely happened:

2025: The year tech embraced fakeness.

This is a question I keep seeing in the eDiscovery world online: Are GenAI Prompts Discoverable?

Did we get the answer to that question? - The Ruling Is In: GenAI Prompts Are Core Discoverable ESI

What's Coming for M365 eDiscovery in 2026?

Before we dig into the roadmap, this will be the last newsletter for 2025. I’m taking some time away from the newsletters over the holidays, mainly to deal with a merger becoming effective after the 1st at the day job and to avoid losing my mind. Also, I’d like to get a little time to enjoy the holidays. I hope you do a…

7 months ago · 1 like · Mike McBride

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #180

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:20:40 GMT

Photo by Petter Lagson on Unsplash

The EFF put it succinctly:

Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They’re Doing

This is focused on a recent bill in Wisconsin that fixes the “gap” in its age-based website restrictions, where anyone could use a VPN to appear to be coming from a state without the limitation, by banning the use of any VPN in the state.

They aren’t the first ones to push the idea.

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

The EFF is right to point out that many businesses rely on VPN for data security. What I don’t see enough of is those businesses coming out and telling politicians to stop it.

I have worked in the legal field for years, and I’ve worked remotely for years. Banning the use of VPN would seriously harm my employer and me. In my opinion, the only appropriate response to this proposed law is for businesses to threaten to leave the state and never hire anyone there again, because using a VPN is a fundamental requirement of the job.

If your organizational security is designed around VPN technology, where are you? Why aren’t you screaming about the security risks of bills like these?

Worth Reading - Purposeful Work Boosts Engagement, but Few Experience It

Careers and the Workplace

I would suggest that another partial explanation is that many jobs and businesses don’t involve work that feels purposeful because the work has no purpose. Too many jobs exist solely to make more money for CEOs and investors. They don’t sell anything that helps society. Employees don’t benefit directly from business improvements, and those same CEOs justify all of the efforts by talking about how much the stock price went up. That seems to be the entire point of the organization. That’s the purpose.

It’s not easy to feel like your work has a purpose when the real purpose is to make some number go up. It’s hard to be engaged with that.

Sharing for the many folks in this situation now:

Free Tools for Job Seekers and Career Changers

You don’t necessarily need to pay for help when you’re looking for a job. Some of the best job search tools are 100% free. You can get no-cost help finding job listings, writing your resume and cover letters, interviewing for jobs, and more. There are even free career quizzes and online classes — just in case you’ve decided to piv…

7 months ago · 8 likes · Alison Doyle and Jen Luckwaldt

Worth Reading - Why Starting Networking Conversations Feels Hard (and How to Fix It)

As Greg points out, it’s pretty standard for us to appreciate it when old contacts reach out. I’d add that it’s pretty standard for people at events to enjoy the stranger who tries to welcome them into a conversation rather than ignore them.

Yet most of us go about life depriving people of that enjoyment because we somehow believe they won’t enjoy it.

There’s no evidence of it.

The holidays are a great time for reaching out, by the way. A quick, happy holiday wish can go a long way.

Someone needs to share these:

Work Wise

Six Tips for Remote Meetings

Anyone else feel as though an hour-long meeting on Zoom/Teams can be far more exhausting than the same meeting in-person…

7 months ago · 2 likes · Jake Tuber

Artificial Intelligence

I would agree, and add that I don’t think we’ve even begun to make those choices. - Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices

Is this the future for tech workers?

The New IT Pro Survival Skill: Becoming a Prompt Architect for Your Entire Organization

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, IT professionals are finding themselves at the forefront of a transformative shift. No longer confined to managing servers, troubleshooting networks, or deploying software updates, today’s IT pros are stepping into a role that’s as creative as it is technical: the Prompt Architect. This emerg…

7 months ago · Rod Trent

I took a deep dive into Copilot inside Teams chats and channels:

Agents and Bots in Teams, Oh My!

Happy December, folks…

7 months ago · Mike McBride

Training and Development

Worth Reading - Communication Isn’t Part of Your Job. It’s THE Job.

If you’ve felt this way, I encourage you to consider that communication is a skill you can learn. Writing, speaking, presenting, training, etc., are all variations of the basic skill of communication. If you can learn how to articulate your ideas, you will likely find more success in your career. If you’re willing to teach your employees this skill, you’ll get more involvement and better ideas, rather than just hearing from the loudest voices on your team. It’s worth the effort.

Mental Health in the Workplace

Just dropping some knowledge for your consideration: Large-scale trial finds four-day workweek improves employee well-being and physical health.

Worth Reading - The mental toll of continuous transformation

This feels like a small hand being raised in the corner of a deafening room, trying to point out the obvious. We’re only human. We need a break. That unsettled feeling you get every day at work might not be imposter syndrome or everyday stress, but the sheer exhaustion of knowing that you can never pause and focus on getting work done. The skills and knowledge you have now will be worthless tomorrow.

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

I’m living in this world, especially with my new position. It’s a lot.

The Intersection of eDiscovery, Privacy, and Information Governance and Why You Need to Focus on It — Masters Conference Seattle Recap

Chatting about Purview, eDiscovery, Copilot, and more with Tom O’Connor

There’s no such thing as a private online meeting, which makes me wonder how much trust we place in employees not to record meetings, whether online or in person. (It only takes one phone in a pocket or a wearable device to record any conversation.)

Is Your Teams Meeting Being Recorded? I’d Assume It Is

We’re still failing at basic security things like passwords - Compromised Credentials Responsible for 50% of Ransomware Attacks.

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #179

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 13:35:44 GMT

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Change is a common theme in my professional life right now. You’ll see it come up numerous times in this newsletter. Whether it’s the challenge of learning and managing AI, keeping up with changing technology, or the news, things move faster than ever. The job market, especially in tech, requires staying up to date and being prepared for anything.

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

So much news from Ignite 2025.

This week, I began by watching an absolute firehose of Microsoft announcements come out of the Ignite 2025 Conference in San Francisco. As the person tasked with tracking M365 changes and testing new features, that was overwhelming.

That’s easily enough research to keep me busy through the end of the year and into the first quarter of 2026. The list of things in that post is also incomplete. I already know that.

But the week wasn’t over yet. There was also this little merger announced yesterday.

That is no small amount of work to combine two firms, but also a big ol’ ball of change coming at us! (Buckle up and keep your head and arms inside the ride at all times, folks!)

I’m sure that won’t be all. Change won’t stop just because we can’t keep up personally. That’s not the world we live in. I was chatting with someone yesterday about all of this and found myself saying something that sounded familiar. I referred to “focusing on the thing in front of me right now.” When' that’s done, then focus on the next thing in front of me, and so on.

Last night, I remembered where I had heard a similar sentiment and written about it:

Clean Up the Spot in Front of You

I enjoyed this clip of Henry Rollins discussing the pain and injustice he has witnessed on his travels.

He recognizes that he is “one guy.” He can’t possibly fix all of it, and trying to would be pointless. So he sees opportunities to make a difference and hopes that more of us will try to “clean the spots” we can, too.

So as I look at the landscape of my professional world, I’m channeling a little Henry Rollins and cleaning the spot in front of me. It’s a good reminder to do good in the world where we can, and I think it makes for good career advice right now as well.

I will not determine the success of our IT projects and business growth alone. None of us is that talented. But I can do the things in front of me that make a difference.

That’s my contribution. The more people doing the same, the more likely we are to be successful.

How do you handle all the change coming your way?

How to Network at a Conference (Even If You Hate Small Talk)

Careers and the Workplace

Uncertainty is everywhere. How do you lead through it? - Our Favorite Management Tips on Leading Through Uncertainty.

It might not be conference season for many of us, but industry group holiday gatherings are right around the corner:

Your employees are begging - Leaders: Learn How to Conduct Good Meetings

Timely for many -

What to Do If You Lose Your Job

Losing your job is a traumatic experience, whether you’re laid off, fired, or forced to quit for reasons beyond your control. This is true regardless of the state of the economy; in the current job-hugging era, it’s especially scary to be without work…

8 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Alison Doyle and Jen Luckwaldt

Before that happens -

Level Up Careers

Build Your Lifeboat Before It's Too Late

In this issue…

8 months ago · 7 likes · The Random Recruiter

We should probably make sure people know how to manage first - every employee will become a manager (of AI)

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - AI agents are only as good as the data they’re given, and that’s a big issue for businesses.

In the age of AI, though, this might be the high-priority risk. That old, untrustworthy, and outdated information that no one ever bothered to clean up is actively messing up your AI implementation. Your attempt to be a data-driven business depends on having accurate data. That becomes difficult to do when you’re not actively cleaning up after yourself.

Worth Reading - AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge

I think we might need a variation of the Dunning-Kruger effect to describe the people who weren’t smart enough to realize the AI was wrong when it told them their ideas were brilliant.

Training and Development

Work3 - The Future of Work

Learning In the age of AI: Networks, Not Notebooks

I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from the last article – the idea that “AI feels like a second job” seems to have hit a real nerve. In summary, we saw that the culprit isn’t just the technology itself: it’s the cognitive overload, emotional pressures from media, and unrealistic pace of modern work. Today, we are focusing on the solution to this probl…

7 months ago · 7 likes · Matteo Cellini

Related to this, we learn from people we trust. - In the age of AI, trust has never been more important - here’s why.

With all this change, maybe take a look at this:

So, you want to learn a new skill? (A guide to getting smarter.)

Mental Health in the Workplace

Worth Reading - Learning AI Feels Like a Second Job

It’s no wonder that people are burning out professionally. Every week, there are new things to learn, changes to deal with, strategies to reconsider, projects on deadlines, etc. We don’t often get a chance to simply do the work, let alone rest.

Always celebrate wins. - Celebrate Your Successes - Big and Small

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

Worth Reading - Best Microsoft Teams Governance Strategies: Complete Guide

Regardless of the details of your Teams governance strategy, you want to have one. Leaving it up to users to provision and manage their own Teams is madness.

Once again into the hyperlinks breach we go - Ten Takeaways from the Georgetown Webinar on Hyperlinked Documents.

It’s a little mind-boggling to see the details and how little they seem to understand basic concepts like freedom of speech, let alone technology. - Bipartisan Senators Want To Honor Charlie Kirk By Making It Easier To Censor The Internet.

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #178

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 12:45:40 GMT

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

It’s an annual tradition - eDiscovery Day.

I’m sure many of you have seen the announcement and didn’t need me to tell you that. What I was interesting in talking about is the stated focus for this year:

AI, Risk, and the Future of eDiscovery

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

The intertwining of AI and eDiscovery may be familiar to you from the AI-assisted document review tools.

What’s more interesting to me is the “risk” of AI with eDiscovery from the other side, all that eDiscovery prompting and generated content.

I was recently part of an ILTA webinar talking about Copilot, for example. We pointed out that all those prompts and responses of your users are nothing more than chatting with Copilot behind the scenes, which means that they are stored just like Teams chat messages are, complete with all of the eDiscovery issues that arise from that.

Did you know that? Do you have a plan for dealing with that?

How about how you’re going to handle drafts, notes, meeting summaries, etc. that were created by AI and not one of your custodians? Are you prepared to deal with the risks of whatever it is you decide to do with that data?

Are there policies in place regarding AI data and information governance?

I’ll be interested to see how these topics are addressed on Dec. 4

If you’re part of the agenda that day, I will be watching.

Worth Reading - Productivity and Flexibility Do Not Have to Be Mutually Exclusive

Careers and the Workplace

Why would we trust the same leaders who never overcame proximity bias when it came to people who spent more time in the office versus those who got work done to figure out how much flexibility employees should have? They’re not good at any of this.

The Introverted Networker

The Lesson I Learned the Hard Way: Build Your Network Before You Need It

Welcome to issue #169 of The Introverted Networker. Every Tuesday, I teach you to be a better networker. My favorite part of the week is hearing from my readers, so leave a comment or ask a question, if you are so inclined…

8 months ago · 1 like · Greg-The Introverted Networker

Something from the archives:

Quick Thought – The Scourge of Back-to-Back Meetings

It was better to set aside meeting time and meeting+ time to focus on the topic before moving on to the next meeting. Unfortunately, too many of us don’t get that opportunity. We’re spending our days leaving one Teams or Zoom meeting so we can join the next one. We never get to debrief ourselves while those synapses are still firing on the discussed topic. We all know that human brains are not built to multitask and that there’s a cost to the constant task switching that jumping from meeting to meeting represents, yet we all do it anyway.

Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading - Don’t Let AI Transcription Sink Your Ship

We should always be thoughtful about what we say in meetings and how we say it. It’s just being professional, and now that we can also assume there will be a record of it, we have yet another reason!

This might be a handy resource for some of you - The 5 generative AI security threats you need to know e-book.

I agree with this, and I agree that we shouldn’t.

We Will Not Trust Autonomous AI Agents Anytime Soon

Uh-oh: Major security flaws discovered in new AI browser

An interesting presentation - Shadow AI is the New Shadow IT

Training and Development

This is the world we work in:

Never Stop Learning: A Survival Guide for IT Pros and Security Engineers in a Relentless Tech Landscape

In the world of IT and cybersecurity, standing still isn’t just risky—it’s a one-way ticket to obsolescence. Remember Y2K? That was a blip compared to today’s whirlwind of AI-driven threats, zero-trust architectures, and quantum-resistant encryption. As an IT professional or security engineer, you’ve likely felt the pressure: another vulnerability drops…

8 months ago · 1 like · Rod Trent

Mental Health in the Workplace

A Small Way Social Media Can Be a Mental Health Positive

I know opening social media right now can feel like an open invitation to a never-ending scroll of rage. I’ve been avoiding much of it myself for the last few weeks, busying myself with travel and projects instead for the benefit of my mental health. I know, however, that the internet can be a source of inspiration, fun, community, and happiness. I need to commit to finding that rather than lazily scrolling through algorithmic feeds.

Investing in community is investing in our emotional health

You can’t build community when people are forced to work 60-80 hours per week or two or three jobs to afford rent. We need a commitment to connecting people and building community with everyone. Our current path will only harm all of us.

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

When a new feature sounds scary, but isn’t anything worth worrying about

If you don’t realize that your employer’s IT folks already have a dozen different ways to tell whether you’re logged in to the office wifi or not, you’re kidding yourselves. We didn’t need Teams to start ratting out employees.

Could we eliminate hallucinated case citations if there was one source of all decisions? - A Master Table of Truth

In my humble opinion, eDiscovery without Information governance is just walking blind into a death trap. - Taming Modern Data Challenges: The Importance of Information Governance

M365 News Roundup for November 2025

There is an infamous story I tell about the time I was training a client on the M365 eDiscovery tool. While looking at data in a review set, I navigated out to discuss the advanced settings, only to return to the review set with a completely different interface…

8 months ago

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #177

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 11:44:21 GMT

Photo by Ed Hardie on Unsplash

This week, I gave a presentation at the Oxygen Forensics Legacy and Logic User Conference. Their head of training and I go back to our days training at AccessData, and he thought it would be interesting to have someone from outside the digital forensics world come in and talk about collecting data from M365 using eDiscovery tools.

He was not wrong; it was interesting. Traveling also meant a chance to meet up with family and hit a concert, while still working in between everything, so the newsletter is a little lighter than normal. Don’t worry, I’ll be back with more in two weeks!

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

If you’ve followed me online over the last few years, nothing I showed them would shock you. If you’re not living in the M365 universe, it can be pretty shocking to see charts that illustrate how confusing Microsoft licensing can be, where Teams and Copilot data can be located, and concrete examples of the complications that come from collecting in a collaborative, ever-changing environment.

More than one person told me afterward that it made them nauseous. I don’t really blame them. It can be overwhelming. That is also the opportunity.

M365 isn’t going away. Organizations are not going to leave Exchange en masse any time soon. It’s too difficult to switch. The forensic and eDiscovery industries will be living with this for a long time to come. The investigators and eDiscovery vendors who can master it, teach their clients about it, and communicate with clients about changes and how to adapt their workflows will start to stand out.

It is a massive opportunity to partner with clients truly. To be their expert when they can’t afford one on staff.

I suggested at the end of my talk that the solution lay in community. None of us will ever be able to keep up, but finding a community of knowledge is the way forward.

Who are your experts? Who do you suggest others follow and learn from? Who’s sharing the best stuff on M365 Purview, data sources, eDiscovery, etc.?

I have mine, and you see many of them in the M365 news roundups in that newsletter. But I know there are more.

Let hear ‘em!

Worth Reading - Managing a remote team of engineers

Careers and the Workplace

You may notice how frequently the words “intentional” or “on purpose” appear. With remote teams, nothing is left to chance encounters, because there aren’t chance encounters. You communicate effectively, even when it feels like over-communication, and you set clear expectations that are well-documented. Additionally, you create transparent processes to track progress and create transparency. You do all of this on purpose, which I would argue is how you should be leading, regardless of where your team is located.

Worth Reading - Americans Are Overworked. Could AI Change That?

Juliet has written an entire book on the subject, so you should at least read the full article above. As mentioned in the paragraph I quoted above, though, what you’ll find are the things that would allow the American workplace to allow for translating the increased productivity in to fewer hours worked; universal healthcare, overtime pay, loss of unions, and income ineqaulity, are the same things that powerful corporate interests will convince politicians, and voters, are bad for society.

Yeah, I know it, too —You Know, In-Person Networking Can Help Advance Your Career. But You’re Still Not Doing It.

Oh no.

Artificial Intelligence

How many people are sharing confidential data with shadow AI tools?

Do your users understand the risks and how to use AI safely?

Struggling with knowing how to use AI? Maybe there’s an idea here:

1,001 real-world gen AI use cases from the world’s leading organizations

I’ve noticed this, too - AI’s Sameness Problem

I’m going to go with “no.” - Do you want Windows Copilot to send emails for you?

Training and Development

More of this - Training Your Workforce Against AI-Driven Social Engineering Attack

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

This is an excellent question for eDiscovery. How do we handle data generated by AI? How should we treat it as evidence? - Taming Modern Data Challenges: Generative AI Created Content.

They’ve got to make that money somehow, privacy be damned! - Companies at Risk of an Earnings Miss Allow More Third-Party Trackers on Their Websites

Ouch. - Google pitches Workspace tools for “when, not if” Microsoft 365 fails

Have you tried the Facilitator agent in a meeting yet?

If you haven’t tried adding the Facilitator to a Teams meeting, I recommend giving it a test run…

8 months ago · 1 like · Mike McBride

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #176

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 12:58:18 GMT

Photo by Saradasish Pradhan on Unsplash

The question above comes as a result of reading this article by Ed Bott:

Microsoft has lost its way

In the post, Ed makes several points about areas where Microsoft is no longer the company it once was. He also notes that even employee communication seems to be the vapid word salad one would expect if someone used AI to write it.

Welcome to this week’s collection of thought-provoking things. For each issue, I will share information about careers and workplace culture, mental health in the workplace, talent development, and key insights into privacy, security, and legal technology.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

Back in July, shortly after the close of the fiscal year, Nadella wrote an email to the 228,000 or so employees at Microsoft. (Despite this year’s layoffs, Microsoft’s reported headcount has been flat for the past fiscal year.)

The email was also published to Microsoft’s corporate blog, which might be your first hint that this was really a PR move and not a sincere communication to the employees whose future is in Nadella’s hands.

It’s a remarkable missive, and after reading it, I’m pretty certain that Nadella had help writing it. I am not speaking about the competent PR professionals and legal minds in Microsoft’s corporate HQ, who probably had some limited input.

No, this reads like something that was drafted and reshaped by the Copilot LLM chatbot that has become Microsoft’s obsession these days. It has that cloying, inauthentic tone that most humans can’t match, filled with sweeping language that breaks down when you ask, “What does that mean, actually?”

I don’t think there is any proof that Satya used Copilot to write this email. On the other hand, he often “brags” about using Copilot for everything, including replying to his email, so would we be surprised that he did? This raises an interesting question for employees. Does communication from your leader mean less if you know they used AI to write it? Can we consider interpersonal communication to be interpersonal when no one takes the time to write anything themselves?

Personally, when I see an email with all the signs that AI wrote it, I take it a little less seriously. That’s fine if it’s an announcement sent to a large group at work. It’s another story if it is meant to be a direct communication from the CEO personally. The same applies to a manager or peer when writing specifically to me to provide feedback, for example. If I can tell it’s AI, how do I trust it’s what you actually think?

Some things are worth writing ourselves. Maybe with some assistance from AI, but they should sound like us if we want people to view it as coming from us.

They should also be crystal clear. No one should be left to ask “What does that mean, actually?”

Worth Reading - Layoffs Cast a Long Shadow

Careers and the Workplace

Layoffs aren’t good for business. They are detrimental to employees, even those not directly affected, and I would add that they also don’t benefit customers.

The only benefit large corporations seem to get from layoffs is an increase in stock price, and that might be everything you need to know about the priorities of the C Suite.

Worth Reading - The Remote Reality Check

Many leaders demand that everyone return to the office because they don’t know how to collaborate when people aren’t in the same room with them, and they see no improvement because there still isn’t a single location where the team interacts, such as around the water cooler. The water cooler is online, regardless of whether your team is in 2-3 office locations or 17 different states.

Artificial Intelligence

AI Tech “Discovers” Personalized Ads

OpenAI isn’t calling the “feedback” advertising yet, because they haven’t started selling ads to businesses, but does anyone think that isn’t coming next?

Do you know what your agents are doing? How about the agents you got from external sources? - Worth Reading - First Malicious MCP in the Wild: The Postmark Backdoor That’s Stealing Your Emails.

This was not unexpected - ScamGPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud.

Wait, what? - People are more likely to act dishonestly when delegating tasks to AI

“Using AI creates a convenient moral distance between people and their actions—it can induce them to request behaviors they wouldn’t necessarily engage in themselves, nor potentially request from other humans,”

Training and Development

We need something to help people adjust to change. - What is the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and how could it help you?

This is a good question:

The Great Leadership Drought: Can We Still Grow Good Leaders?

Mental Health in the Workplace

The simple things that improve employee mental health

Employees want to know they are being treated fairly and are trusted to find the best way to accomplish the required work. That doesn’t seem so difficult. Both of these things reduce the risk of burnout, a phenomenon that is becoming a workplace hazard everywhere. You would think they were asking for the impossible from the way some companies act, though.

Meanwhile, we seem to be investing in tools that make the mental health of employees worse. - Workplace AI Is Crushing Employee Mental Health.

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

It’s not like anyone could have seen this coming. Who would have thought that having a collection of identification documents to prove your age would be a target for hackers?

Proof-of-age ID leaked in Discord data breach.

I’ve had a few search terms with wildcards prove to be more wild than expected - It’s easy to be searching for references to an app, or apps, or applications, and forget how many other words start with “app” - Some Wildcards Are Even Wilder Than I Thought. I didn't realize there were websites where you can check that kind of information.

After I did a session at ILTACON this year on how to use Loop, my wife started referring to me as “The Loop Guy.” It’s humorous, but it is more useful than people realize - Microsoft Loop is underrated, and these features prove it.

M365 News Roundup for October 2025

On the blog this week, I asked a question about some of the new features Microsoft is introducing with Copilot. Namely, allowing users to bring their personal Copilot licenses to their work documents, and enabling agents to access Office as a way to “vibe work…

9 months ago · 1 like

Do you mean it’s not just me getting multiple calls and texts from scammers every day? - America Is Drowning In Scam Calls And Texts, And Donald Trump Is Making It Worse.

Thought-provoking Things Worth Sharing - Issue #175

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 12:51:25 GMT

Photo by Fardin Amar on Unsplash

This seems to be an ongoing issue in the workplace:

‘Workslop’: AI-Generated Work Content Is Slowing Everything Down

The Harvard Business Review defines workslop as, “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”
This can look like polished presentation slides, eloquent report summaries, and even decent code, but on closer inspection, the work can be missing key context and is ultimately unhelpful.

You can learn more about me here: Mike McBride Online.

We’ve all gotten the email response that didn’t address any of the questions raised, or the occasional report that didn’t provide any actionable information. Now it seems that this has become endemic, as workers are letting AI tools do the work and not bothering to do much more.

I’ve talked before about how demos of AI tools are often incomplete because they write a prompt, receive a written response, and mark their task as complete. That’s incomplete, because you still need to review the content before calling it “done.” That effort may not be small.

Of course, if you don’t do that, I guess that effort gets passed on to the next person in the chain.

If I were that person, I might grow to hate you.

Just saying.

Have you seen workslop?

Worth Reading - The Real Cost of Poor Leadership in Workplaces

Careers and the Workplace

When good talent does leave, as the article mentions, they often cite the need to get away from their manager. However, bad managers don't exist in a vacuum. They are created in a poor culture, which comes straight from the top.

There’s so much that is changing in the tech industry - The IT job market keeps shrinking, but not for everyone, or everywhere.

Some helpful advice, though:

Job Search Advice from Recruiters and Hiring Managers

Also consider how much of the job market is never “on the market" -

Worth Reading - The Hidden Job Market: Why 70% of Roles Are Never Posted Online – and How to Access Them

Which, of course, brings us back to the original point about these kinds of jobs. You need to know people. Employers need to have employees who know people, as well as know people themselves, and job seekers need to have connections. The only way this works is if you get referrals, and you only get referrals through connections.

Artificial Intelligence

This is an interesting question to examine: Three Years In, Has Generative AI Made a Meaningful Contribution to E-Discovery?

Worth Reading – Skilling snack: Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

If you’re rolling out Copilot at work and looking for ways to teach people about using it, this might also be a good place to start.

Want Trustworthy AI? Can You Trust Your Data?

We’ve seen a lot of discussion about AI projects not showing significant ROI, and this may be because the results are not trustworthy, which raises the question of whether the data being modeled is reliable. If AI is surfacing incorrect information because the model was built on outdated and inaccurate data, the problem lies with the source of the data.

Training and Development

Worth Reading - Unlearning Is an Important Part of Learning

I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. Change is our reality. The most challenging students I worked with as a trainer weren’t the ones who struggled with a concept or had to overcome a barrier related to language or cultural understanding. It was the ones who didn’t think they needed to change anything they had been doing for years. They didn’t understand why they were being asked to change the way they worked.

Mental Health in the Workplace

We all need rest:

Why Resting Is Resilience, Not Giving Up.

This isn’t good - Even with Insurance, Workers Struggle to Get Mental Health Care, New Survey Finds.

Some ideas on at least making the workplace better, especially in legal:

Privacy, Security, and Legal Tech

Worth Reading - Beyond Chat: The Hidden Dominoes When You Create a Microsoft Team

Everything about Teams—security, retention, eDiscovery, privacy, and so on— starts with understanding the data involved. To understand the data involved, you need to be familiar with all the details of this chain reaction. You're not protecting and investigating data in a Teams channel; you're dealing with data in Exchange, SharePoint, and potentially in various other locations, depending on the apps used in the channel.

What is your strategy when it comes to AI interactions?

AI Logs and Legal Holds: How to Build a Defensible Retention Strategy

Ouch. - How One Bad Password Ended a 158-Year-Old Business.