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Coding for Lawyers

codingforlawyers.com

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21–30 of 47 posts

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#21

Post by josaka »

jorgeleo wrote: post #3

Lets start teaching what code is by ... chapter 1 Regex???? If the author is reading this: WHY? out of all the horrors, why?

Regex is not necessarily the best intro to coding, but for a lawyer, it will animate much of what follows by quickly delivering value. At least in my practice, we'll commonly encounter terabyte-sized productions of data during litigation, and the search tools are just awful. For folks in litigation, the power of regex, once past the learning curve, will quickly provide value and might motivate them to dig deeper.

If anything, this list of topics is not law-specific enough. I'd suggest a tutorial on the format of doc production of load files, tesseract, and pdf-manipulation tools for those dealing with doc productions. And a tutorial on relational databases would be very useful for those lawyers drafting discovery requests trying to extract "documents" from ERP systems.

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#22

Post by hobs »

This guys is a laywer, with a mechanical engineering degree, and does coding on the side.

He was also the guy who wrote the SCOTUS opinion tracking software that was all over HN a few months ago.

Seems like a cool guy, and unlike some posters I think regex are definitely something to start people off on.

Many people who are non-technical but have used a computer understand the concept of a wildcard operator, you just expand that knowledge a bit and they can do very powerful things if their jobs involves a large amount of text.

I had some realtors that I worked with, and after seeing me fly through some of the things they did, they were eager for me to teach a bit about regex (and gave them a simple simulator to give them instant matches, I think it was rubular at the time) and they wrote some simple rules to take like 10 hours of drudgery out of their jobs per week.

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#23

Post by esquivalience »

adamc wrote: post #9
mooreds wrote: post #2

Since law is "code for society", I am all on favor of equipping its practitioners with more insight into software.

That's a pretty loose analogy. Law doesn't execute. I guess you could think of it as source, but the execution engine is a lot more, um, variable.

In fact, only the law can execute.

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#24

Post by stevekl »

I am so glad that this started off with REGEX.

So many coding lessons are so irrelevant to business / law people. No, business people don't need to really learn how to code. They want to learn how to parse / clean messy spreadsheet data.

REGEX + basic loops and conditional in VBA will do wonders to the productivity of business people.

On a separate note, I am surprized that there is still no good graphical way to build regexes

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#25

Post by igurari »

hobs wrote: post #22

This guys is a laywer, with a mechanical engineering degree, and does coding on the side. He was also the guy who wrote the SCOTUS opinion tracking software that was all over HN a few months ago. Seems like a cool guy, and unlike some posters I think regex are definitely something to start people off on. Many people who are non-technical but have used a computer understand the concept of a wildcard operator, you just…

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.

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#27

Post by jroes »

I like the idea of niching down for a use case, but I've never met a lawyer I thought had the time or energy to devote to learning programming. I'm also having trouble understanding how a lawyer might use their programming skill to improve their daily lives. It seems to me that other folks on a lawyer's staff would be more likely to be interested in this subject and use it to the firm's benefit.

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#28

Post by adelevie »

jroes wrote: post #27

I like the idea of niching down for a use case, but I've never met a lawyer I thought had the time or energy to devote to learning programming. I'm also having trouble understanding how a lawyer might use their programming skill to improve their daily lives. It seems to me that other folks on a lawyer's staff would be more likely to be interested in this subject and use it to the firm's benefit.

Check out https://permafrast.herokuapp.com. OP built this as well, and it makes it really easy to read cases without signing into Lexis, Westlaw, or, well ... anything.

Just one of many examples of how lawyers can use tech to make their day jobs easier.

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#29

Post by rayiner »

adamc wrote: post #9
mooreds wrote: post #2

Since law is "code for society", I am all on favor of equipping its practitioners with more insight into software.

That's a pretty loose analogy. Law doesn't execute. I guess you could think of it as source, but the execution engine is a lot more, um, variable.

Code doesn't execute itself either, to be fair.

/compiler geek

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#30

Post by jackweirdy »

adamc wrote: post #9
mooreds wrote: post #2

Since law is "code for society", I am all on favor of equipping its practitioners with more insight into software.

That's a pretty loose analogy. Law doesn't execute. I guess you could think of it as source, but the execution engine is a lot more, um, variable.

Not to mention society changes law, and when society doesn't like law, they can ditch it and make a new one
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