4 ms·

>> attorneys could benefit from basic programming knowledge (e.g., simple scripts, macros, and SQL). Can you give a few examples of practical uses of those to

by petra 7y ago

>> attorneys could benefit from basic programming knowledge (e.g., simple scripts, macros, and SQL). Can you give a few examples of practical uses of those tools ?

gjstein 7y ago
I was a paralegal a number of years back and, due to my experience as a coder, I was able to automate a bunch of my responsibilities. Much of the job of a paralegal (and some of the responsibilities of a lawyer) are things like data entry and records keeping that are trivially automated. One of my most popular tasks was to take data from Doc X in format A and move it to Doc Y in format B. Some string parsing (with human oversight) massively accelerated my productivity. I wrote a short blurb about my experience a little while ago: http://www.cachestocaches.com/2016/2/how-we-teach-programming/#an-anecdote http://www.cachestocaches.com/2016/2/how-we-teach-programmin...
torstenvl 7y ago
Higher echelon (DOJ, State AG's office, etc.) wants to make a case for a change in the law and needs statistics about how many cases over the past x years where certain factors are met. You can query your case management database... or you can send an RFI to every subordinate office and make them do it by hand when they already have crazy workloads. You have a set of documents you prepare regularly. Could be a Power of Attorney, a diversion agreement, whatever. You can highlight the frequently changed part and substitute information by hand... or you can set up a macro with a form to enter the information and have it automatically generate. Attorneys are knowledge workers burdened with a lot of administrative nonsense. There is a lot of low hanging fruit for automation.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  You have a set of documents you prepare regularly. Could be a Power of Attorney, a diversion agreement, whatever. You can highlight the frequently changed part and substitute information by hand... or you can set up a macro with a form to enter the information and have it automatically generate. Law firms have been using software to do this for 2 decades. Rather than using macros, they have dedicated document-management systems that can generate templates/documents based on the type of filing, client, etc. that get further customized by lawyers as needed.
  - torstenvl 7y ago
    Some of them do this. Some of them don't. We used to have LexisNexis HotDocs. Now we don't. However, even if we still had a third-party macro and templating system that was better-suited to the task, it would still be useful for the lawyers to know how to program those macros.
SkyBelow 7y ago
An example I was once involved in. You have a $VeryExpensive accident. There are $LargeNumber companies which have some partial liability. That they are liable is extremely easy to prove, but the extent of the liability is extremely difficult and can be extremely costly on a per company bases. You also have a database which holds most of the contributions of each of these companies, allowing you to build up a case for why each company has a certain percent of liability. While there is a team of lawyers and a team of programmers working on this case, the ability of lawyers to pull up simple enough data reduces the dependency of involving the programmers, and the lawyers having a basic understanding of SQL helps them both communicating with the programming team and when they have to explain things in front of the judge. Being able to query the data allows for the lawyers to better grasp which cases are the most worthwhile to pursue. And for macros, sometimes you don't have a simple database, but you do have very standardized forms that are easy to scrape data off of.
rudyfink 7y ago
One simple example would be where an attorney receives a thumb-drive with 100s of documents and files as a "production" in a case. An attorney without basic skills would (or would have staff) manually enter all of those files into a spreadsheet or a word document. An attorney with basic programming skills would write/run a short shell script that instantly pumps all of the metadata about those files into an Excel spreadsheet. Another example, though a bit more general, would be an attorney trying to find documents in a case that were created around a certain date. An attorney without basic skills is, again, going to end up in a manual or semi-manual (with a basic tool) process. An attorney with basic programming skills is likely able to directly craft a query that produces the documents.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Or you send it to a vendor who has written the code to do that.
  - pnw_hazor 7y ago
    This. It doesn't make much sense for a $400/hr attorney to play around with scripts and such or otherwise do much of anything with document production (that is what staff is for). If an attorney knows coding from a previous career, it can be helpful in a few cases, but for a non-technical attorney to try to pick up enough coding to do anything useful is a stretch.
    - RichEO 7y ago
      It may be the case that some vendor somewhere can provide a tool to do this, but they will charge quite a bit more than $400 and it will take more than an hour to find them. A shell script to achieve your ends could be endlessly helpful here.
      - pnw_hazor 7y ago
        Having the depth of knowledge to recognize when a simple shell script would be helpful is the harder part. It is one thing to teach a non-techie lawyer how to "hello world" But getting them to understand file system attributes, permission schemes, file I/O, regular expressions, and so on, is where "learn to code" falls apart in this context. Just getting a non-technical person to learn how to navigate in Powershell is a near impossibility.
stult 7y ago
My first day at my last job as an attorney, I was told to submit 3000 files to a team of paralegals to have them manually convert them to PDF and rename them using a standard exhibit convention (eg EX-2019-001). This activity consumed three FTEs annually. I wrote a script to automate it in ten minutes. If anyone there had even the slightest sense of how easy that would be to automate, they'd have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by paying some random kid $200 to write them a bash script. That's just a simple example, but I ran into issues like that on a daily basis. Databases full of evidence that were discarded because no one knew how to access them or run queries on them. Whole inboxes of emails in ost files thrown away because no one knew how to open them. Hundreds of hours spent manually reviewing documents when OCR and a decent text search tool could have gotten the same result in minutes. It was just never ending.
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  There are cheap PDF tools that do all that -- many designed specifically for making and marking exhibits. Also, there are discovery production management tools that incorporate indexing, OCR, searches, and what not. For more complicated stuff you can use vendors. It sounds like your old firm liked to bill clients for all of that extra staff time -- keep the revenue up.
  - stult 7y ago
    This was years ago, and the commercial offerings weren't as well developed.

by petra 7y ago

>> attorneys could benefit from basic programming knowledge (e.g., simple scripts, macros, and SQL). Can you give a few examples of practical uses of those tools ?

gjstein 7y ago

I was a paralegal a number of years back and, due to my experience as a coder, I was able to automate a bunch of my responsibilities. Much of the job of a paralegal (and some of the responsibilities of a lawyer) are things like data entry and records keeping that are trivially automated. One of my most popular tasks was to take data from Doc X in format A and move it to Doc Y in format B. Some string parsing (with human oversight) massively accelerated my productivity. I wrote a short blurb about my experience a little while ago: http://www.cachestocaches.com/2016/2/how-we-teach-programming/#an-anecdote http://www.cachestocaches.com/2016/2/how-we-teach-programmin...

torstenvl 7y ago

Higher echelon (DOJ, State AG's office, etc.) wants to make a case for a change in the law and needs statistics about how many cases over the past x years where certain factors are met. You can query your case management database... or you can send an RFI to every subordinate office and make them do it by hand when they already have crazy workloads. You have a set of documents you prepare regularly. Could be a Power of Attorney, a diversion agreement, whatever. You can highlight the frequently changed part and substitute information by hand... or you can set up a macro with a form to enter the information and have it automatically generate. Attorneys are knowledge workers burdened with a lot of administrative nonsense. There is a lot of low hanging fruit for automation.

gamblor956 7y ago
You have a set of documents you prepare regularly. Could be a Power of Attorney, a diversion agreement, whatever. You can highlight the frequently changed part and substitute information by hand... or you can set up a macro with a form to enter the information and have it automatically generate. Law firms have been using software to do this for 2 decades. Rather than using macros, they have dedicated document-management systems that can generate templates/documents based on the type of filing, client, etc. that get further customized by lawyers as needed.
- torstenvl 7y ago
  Some of them do this. Some of them don't. We used to have LexisNexis HotDocs. Now we don't. However, even if we still had a third-party macro and templating system that was better-suited to the task, it would still be useful for the lawyers to know how to program those macros.

SkyBelow 7y ago

An example I was once involved in. You have a $VeryExpensive accident. There are $LargeNumber companies which have some partial liability. That they are liable is extremely easy to prove, but the extent of the liability is extremely difficult and can be extremely costly on a per company bases. You also have a database which holds most of the contributions of each of these companies, allowing you to build up a case for why each company has a certain percent of liability. While there is a team of lawyers and a team of programmers working on this case, the ability of lawyers to pull up simple enough data reduces the dependency of involving the programmers, and the lawyers having a basic understanding of SQL helps them both communicating with the programming team and when they have to explain things in front of the judge. Being able to query the data allows for the lawyers to better grasp which cases are the most worthwhile to pursue. And for macros, sometimes you don't have a simple database, but you do have very standardized forms that are easy to scrape data off of.

rudyfink 7y ago

One simple example would be where an attorney receives a thumb-drive with 100s of documents and files as a "production" in a case. An attorney without basic skills would (or would have staff) manually enter all of those files into a spreadsheet or a word document. An attorney with basic programming skills would write/run a short shell script that instantly pumps all of the metadata about those files into an Excel spreadsheet. Another example, though a bit more general, would be an attorney trying to find documents in a case that were created around a certain date. An attorney without basic skills is, again, going to end up in a manual or semi-manual (with a basic tool) process. An attorney with basic programming skills is likely able to directly craft a query that produces the documents.

rayiner 7y ago
Or you send it to a vendor who has written the code to do that.
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  This. It doesn't make much sense for a $400/hr attorney to play around with scripts and such or otherwise do much of anything with document production (that is what staff is for). If an attorney knows coding from a previous career, it can be helpful in a few cases, but for a non-technical attorney to try to pick up enough coding to do anything useful is a stretch.
  - RichEO 7y ago
    It may be the case that some vendor somewhere can provide a tool to do this, but they will charge quite a bit more than $400 and it will take more than an hour to find them. A shell script to achieve your ends could be endlessly helpful here.
    - pnw_hazor 7y ago
      Having the depth of knowledge to recognize when a simple shell script would be helpful is the harder part. It is one thing to teach a non-techie lawyer how to "hello world" But getting them to understand file system attributes, permission schemes, file I/O, regular expressions, and so on, is where "learn to code" falls apart in this context. Just getting a non-technical person to learn how to navigate in Powershell is a near impossibility.

stult 7y ago

My first day at my last job as an attorney, I was told to submit 3000 files to a team of paralegals to have them manually convert them to PDF and rename them using a standard exhibit convention (eg EX-2019-001). This activity consumed three FTEs annually. I wrote a script to automate it in ten minutes. If anyone there had even the slightest sense of how easy that would be to automate, they'd have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by paying some random kid $200 to write them a bash script. That's just a simple example, but I ran into issues like that on a daily basis. Databases full of evidence that were discarded because no one knew how to access them or run queries on them. Whole inboxes of emails in ost files thrown away because no one knew how to open them. Hundreds of hours spent manually reviewing documents when OCR and a decent text search tool could have gotten the same result in minutes. It was just never ending.

pnw_hazor 7y ago
There are cheap PDF tools that do all that -- many designed specifically for making and marking exhibits. Also, there are discovery production management tools that incorporate indexing, OCR, searches, and what not. For more complicated stuff you can use vendors. It sounds like your old firm liked to bill clients for all of that extra staff time -- keep the revenue up.
- stult 7y ago
  This was years ago, and the commercial offerings weren't as well developed.