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Coding for Lawyers

codingforlawyers.com

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Re: Coding for Lawyers

#4
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?

That question is answered in foot note one of chapter 1: http://codingforlawyers.com/chapters/ch1/

Maybe try reading a thing before breaking out the multi-punctuation and caps? ;)

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#5
Seeing DRY at the end there was amusing. I recently worked with a client who convinced me he was really interested in our web project's back-end. Normally I keep things really light, but this guy had a convincing air of tech-savvy about him.

Toward the end of the project, he wanted to do a lot of copy/paste-style "reuse" within the content management portion of the project, so I showed him how he could take advantage of the de-duplication features, and explained what DRY meant--just in terms of content management.

The next day I got an email about a bug he found, where a sidebar wasn't showing up properly or something like that.

His conclusion at the end of the email read:

"So this DRY thing doesn't seem to be working, can we please remove DRY?"

(I know, it's my fault for exposing the innocent client to such heavy terminology, blah blah blah...but I had a very pleasurable laugh about the whole thing)

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#6
post #4
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?

That question is answered in foot note one of chapter 1: http://codingforlawyers.com/chapters/ch1/ Maybe try reading a thing before breaking out the multi-punctuation and caps? ;)

That footnote does not answer the question. Why start with regex?

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#7
post #4
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?

That question is answered in foot note one of chapter 1: http://codingforlawyers.com/chapters/ch1/ Maybe try reading a thing before breaking out the multi-punctuation and caps? ;)

I would actually vote version control as chapter 1 of Coding for Lawyers. Also not "coding" per se, but immensely important - anything to get past "importantdocument.version.13.3.barkingcat.doc" hell.

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#8
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That question is answered in foot note one of chapter 1: http://codingforlawyers.com/chapters/ch1/ Maybe try reading a thing before breaking out the multi-punctuation and caps? ;)

That footnote does not answer the question. Why start with regex?

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.

Re: Coding for Lawyers

#9
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.
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