[lostinpoetics]

somewhat agree that it's a tough topic to start with, but regexes are one of the few things that can be immediately applied. a lot of the practice of law (esp. early in your career) is pretty mundane and repetitive stuff. couple that with attorneys love of OCR, you get a lot of copy/paste/hours of editing workflow that can easily be solved by a quick find and replace with a handful of regular expressions. (you could also argue that the root cause e.g., storage mechanism, should be changed, but often times that is a nonstarter or at least heavily resisted)

edit: also, a lot of services like westlaw/lexis have a very rudimentary type of regex searching capacity (i think just * and some connectors) so it's not 100% foreign to many lawyers

to be honest though, most attorneys need training in basic desktop publishing software to start with. i've seen things done in microsoft word that no man or woman should ever have to see.