[igurari]

Most lawyers understand the concept of a regex, so I'd agree that its a good place to start. Law students are taught how to search for caselaw using Terms and Connectors, which is a simplified form of regex: http://lscontent.westlaw.com/images/content/WLNT&CSearching....

So they already have a lot of familiarity with the topic, and this just makes it easy for them to understand that coding is not so foreign as they might otherwise believe.

[the_watcher]

Having been to law school in the last 3 years (would have taken the bar 2 months ago had I finished), you are overestimating how many law students actually learn how to perform Westlaw/Lexis searches like that. You only really need to use them in a few select classes, and no one really attends anything more than the mandatory trainings (which cover things like how to log in).

[MWil]

our mandatory legal research class covered wildcard searches and "w/" x number of words/characters

[the_watcher]

I guess mine covered wildcards and some search operators, now that I look back. Nothing that remotely prepared me for learning regex though.