Ask HN: Opportunities for Programmer/Lawyers?

[maxgeist]

There's a lot of talk about switching careers from law to tech. But are there any opportunities in law where my programming background would be a valuable asset? I don't have a technical degree, so I don't think I'm a candidate for patent law.

[hackthefender]

I left software engineering and became a litigator at one of the big U.S. law firms for the last decade. Here are some thoughts based on my experience.

First, although a technical degree is generally required to become a registered patent attorney, there are a lot of people who do patent and other IP litigation without technical degrees. Software comes up all the time in cases, and being able to read source code is a big advantage.

Second, I firmly believe that programming wires your brain in such a way that makes you good at law school and subsequent practice. The law is really a very detail-oriented endeavor. There is just something about stressing for years about whether there is a missing parenthesis or whatever that exercises your brain in the same way that looking for loopholes in a contract or whatever invokes.

That said, at least in the U.S., the biggest decider of your early success in law will be your LSAT score and undergrad GPA. If you think you might be interested in law, just take the test, estimate what schools you could get into, and then do the cost-benefit analysis with that additional information.

Just my thoughts. Take it or leave it.

[maxgeist]

Thank you for the reply. I think you're 100% right about the LSAT. I'm prepping for it now.

Have you been happy with the switch from software engineering to law? 3 people in my immediate family are lawyers, so I think I have a relatively realistic understanding of the reality of legal practice. But overwhelming online pessimism about law careers is making me uncertain about taking the risk.

[Jugurtha]

Not necessarily patent law, but litigation in general. It would be a completely different matter when there's a legal dispute on in tech, say on a project where a deliverable is a software product, if the lawyer had a programming background.

The conversation would be so different, whether interacting with both parties, the potential experts, the judge. It would be just an incredibly valuable asset.

Not just in litigation, but drafting contracts having a programming background and knowing how projects go, how estimates work, and the common problems would also be helped if the lawyer drafting them has a programming background.

[maxgeist]

> It would be just an incredibly valuable asset.

Do you have any examples of this? I haven't been able to find a ton of examples of lawyer/programmers whose careers combine these areas of expertise explicitly.

[Jugurtha]

A specific example would be that we were went to litigation and I would have loved if our lawyer had a technical background when I tried really hard to draw his attention to subtleties that would make it a fucking slam dunk.

For memo, we lost, and I would not rely on that herbivore lawyer again; not even to deliver food.

[ssss11]

Big firms have a TMT practice - Technology, Media and Telecoms… there would be a subset of matters like they mentioned where tech knowledge (I assume) would be valuable

[ssss11]

Yes. Look up what big firms are doing around eDiscovery or NewLaw or legal ops. look at startup legal tech companies. I believe this space will be big this decade. The line between tech and lawyer who knows tech is blurring so think about how much tech you’d like to be involved in.

Roles in the Relativity space have been lucrative for years but it is complex.

Other terms to read up on:

EDRM process, Relativity, Nuix, Contract automation, Robotic process automation, Some are dabbling in smart contracts but I’m unsure how effective that will be for them, Audio and video, and social media eDiscovery forensic collection

[edit: formatting]

[mlissner]

There's a pretty big legal tech scene these days. I run Free Law Project, where we're looking for experienced python developers and we don't care about having a CS degree if you're good.

There are a lot of other orgs doing similar work. I'd look around at those too, or check out our hiring page. (It says the backend dev position is closed, but we're expanding the position and hiring again.)

[maxgeist]

The Free Law Project looks great. I'm going to explore your projects this week. I've been looking for a volunteer opportunity in legal tech. It looks like some of your projects have guidelines for contributors. Do you often work with volunteers?

[foobarbaz33]

I think writing a parser for English laws and rules could be useful. Similar to how a compiler parses source code into a tree structure. Could allow more rapid analysis of laws once everything is parsed out. If the tree is correct then you could do some wild things.

[Bostonian]

I'm not a lawyer, but aren't there cases, especially civil ones, where data science could be used in a legal argument? For example, whether chemical A produced by company B causes a certain disease is something a biostatistician would study, or maybe a data scientist using R.

[maxgeist]

I'm not sure that the lawyers would ever build a case on a quantitative analysis done by the lawyer. Not 100% sure. It's an interesting question. My suspicion is that they would use a credentialed "expert" to do any analysis submitted as evidence.

A lot of lawyers do "doc review," which is often about analyzing documents for data relevant to the case. I think natural language processing is being used to augment this process. Aside from that, I've haven't gotten the sense that my facility with analysis would be as useful as one might think.

[Raeru]

Idk exactly what opportunities you’re looking for, but maybe look into ediscovery. Lots of opportunities in ediscovery that bridges law and tech.

[maxgeist]

Yeah, discovery and filing seem to be the biggest emerging applications of software to law. I wonder if going to law school would put me in a better position as a founder of an ediscovery startup.

What I had in mind was any kind of law-career opportunity that would be more open to me with software engineering background than without.

[b20000]

you can teach basic computer skills for lawyers most lawyers are not even capable of using google drive

[maxgeist]

Well, I can use Postgres but don't know anything about Excel.