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I'm not saying that lawyers shouldn't learn to code, but I don't think it would be wise of them to heavily rely on it in practice. 1. They have a specialized

by kemiller2002 7y ago

I'm not saying that lawyers shouldn't learn to code, but I don't think it would be wise of them to heavily rely on it in practice. 1. They have a specialized skill set, and they can offload a lot of this to other people in the firm. Billing someone several hundred dollars an hour so that you can spend time fiddling with SQL is kinda unethical. This could be considered gray, but it's akin to charging someone the full billing rate to use a copier. Maybe this will ultimately end up billing less and saving the client money, but then maybe not. It all depends on the person. 2. The more important reason in my opinion is that programming is a specialized skill. You have to learn and really understand how it all works. It's easy to say "Well, just learn some Bash, and SQL" and you'll totally be able to get information faster. The question of whether or not it runs is an easy one to answer. Did it return information, yes or no? The real question and where it is tricky, is was it actually correct? Did you search all the files, etc.? Hiring a professional developer to aggregate information and have the knowledge to understand edge cases is why developers make the money they do. Think about the flip side. Should all programmers become lawyers, because after you are one it's easier to understand the legal system. No, that's silly. Should programmers learn something about law? Of course, everyone should, but that doesn't mean that everyone should practice it. Now you could be saying, "Well, but going to law school takes years. That's a ridiculous statement to begin with." How long do you think it takes to be a really competent programmer?

james_in_the_uk 7y ago
I agree with most of this, but as a lawyer who has used SQL and PHP to automate work that I'd have otherwise been billing $600/hour to do manually I do find fault with your point on ethics. Yes I could have delegated that work to do manually by a junior lawyer ($300/hr) or had the dev work done by an IT analyst ($800/day) but in both cases I'd have then had the check the output very carefully (junior lawyer) or gone through the cost and delay of onboarding a dev. Doing it myself was the best overall value for the client. There is an ethical issue if the lawyer is not properly qualified to do dev work. You can get into hot water that way. I avoid it by working closely with my client's IT teams, so they can vouch for what I've done.
- kemiller2002 7y ago
  I misspoke. In your case, I totally understand. You sound like you know what you're doing, but I have met a number of legal people that try and cut corners. I get it, it's a business. Everyone has to make money. You keep expenses down, etc. You do have to admit, that there comes a point where billing at that 600 dollar rate so you don't hire someone that could have done it in 1/5th the time (and at a lower rate). That's pushing the boundaries a little.
  - james_in_the_uk 7y ago
    I don't disagree. It is how the legal profession works, though. If clients demanded something more efficient then there would be incentive to change, but they almost never do.
- geebee 7y ago
  Interesting observation. Coding could be comparable to using the photocopier, or it could be comparable to very advanced electronic legal research. I'm not in law, but I do work with physicians and health care researchers who often need elaborate data analysis. I've found that there are some types of work that benefit immensely from having both coding and medical knowledge in the same brain, so to speak. This is usually when data is complicated and messy, and when the question a researcher asking isn't fully formed yet. The ability do complicated SQL, natural language processing, data formatting and cleanup, and so forth can end up shaping the question that gets asked. The process isn't always straightforward - researcher thinks of the question, asks the programmer to do the coding, programmer gets the answer back to the researcher.Yes, sometimes it works to describe what you want from a dataset to a programmer, but this often isn't the case for very interactive investigation of data sets. For this reason, I actually would highly recommend learning to code for some health professionals and researchers. Now, there's a limit to what one person can learn to do, and there comes a point where it's not reasonable to ask people to be expert in multiple fields. Even when a researcher is pretty skilled at programming for data analysis, the moment will eventually arrive where the medical researcher needs to work closely with a programmer (who has very advanced data analysis coding skills). But even then, I've found that researcher often wouldn't have conceptualized the question that gets asked without possessing at least intermediate level data analysis skills (including SQL, Unix, Python or R like languages). I've also noticed that researchers who possess these intermediate+ level skills are far more effective at working with programming specialists whose main skill set is processing data. I'm not sure if this comes up as often in law, but I wouldn't be surprised if poring through very large data sets for discovery might be one scenario where this happens.
joe_the_user 7y ago
This, definitely. Many of the "X should learn to code" arguments really miss the key point that X is professional, specialized skill and clients pay for that skill. The primary other way that "learn to code!" come up is idea/assertion that programming is like literacy. Now, I like the idea that programming is like literacy but we have to consider that programming has so far not shown itself to be like literacy at all. So far, programming has been much more like law or medicine, a specialized skill set. The amateur client who knows a little bit of law, medicine or programming, from the Internet or elsewhere, just makes things harder for the professional (whereas a literate client is better for a lawyer or any professional and literacy gives many non-professionals are skill to develop throughout their life). Which is to say we should recognize programming as a professional activity but keep working on things that might, in the future, open the door to a programming as literacy.
rhino369 7y ago
Exactly. I'm an incompetent programmer. I took about 4 classes at university on CS and a lot of my EE courseload used some programming. So I've written smaller programs, I've made a simulator of an 8-bit processor. I even made a small app to autodownload train info from an API and tell me which route is faster two years ago. But that took me 40 times longer than it would take someone who does software engineering for a living. So I leave the programming to the professionals in my legal practice. Ironically, I'm one of the few attorneys who actually do look at honest to goodness code since source code review is common in patent litigation. But its a niche field within the law. And I don't even really need to know how to do it, just understand it at a high level.
streetcat1 7y ago
Programmer will probably should not become lawyers. But an AI will (after more advances in machine reading, and NLG). I.e. it will not replace lawyers, but will enable 10x productivity, which means that you will need 1/10 less lawyers.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > I.e. it will not replace lawyers, but will enable 10x productivity, which means that you will need 10x less lawyers. Lawyers are countable, so “fewer”, or, even better “1/10 as many”. But the argument is flawed other than grammatically, as the quantity of legal services demanded isn't fixed, and if they are ten times more productive that means they become viable for tasks where they wouldn't have been worth employing before...and the total quantity of legal services consumed goes up.
  - streetcat1 7y ago
    Sure. My bad. Been coding for 12 hours... So introducing AI is not unlike the innovator dilemma, it will push human lawyers up and up. However, I think that even if the demand is not fixed, most of it is for basic legal services.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > However, I think that even if the demand is not fixed, most of it is for basic legal services. I dunno, public defenders’ work is in a way the most basic of legal services, and from everything I've seen their time is rationed pretty heavily because there simply aren't enough resources. There’s a lot of room to translate more productivity into more getting done rather than fewer people doing the same level of work. (OTOH, I'm not all that optimistic about AI short of AGI helping that much in the aspects needed in that role, because I think the limiting factors there are the harder to automate aspects of lawyering, not the more mechanical ones.)
      - streetcat1 7y ago

james_in_the_uk 7y ago

I agree with most of this, but as a lawyer who has used SQL and PHP to automate work that I'd have otherwise been billing $600/hour to do manually I do find fault with your point on ethics. Yes I could have delegated that work to do manually by a junior lawyer ($300/hr) or had the dev work done by an IT analyst ($800/day) but in both cases I'd have then had the check the output very carefully (junior lawyer) or gone through the cost and delay of onboarding a dev. Doing it myself was the best overall value for the client. There is an ethical issue if the lawyer is not properly qualified to do dev work. You can get into hot water that way. I avoid it by working closely with my client's IT teams, so they can vouch for what I've done.

kemiller2002 7y ago
I misspoke. In your case, I totally understand. You sound like you know what you're doing, but I have met a number of legal people that try and cut corners. I get it, it's a business. Everyone has to make money. You keep expenses down, etc. You do have to admit, that there comes a point where billing at that 600 dollar rate so you don't hire someone that could have done it in 1/5th the time (and at a lower rate). That's pushing the boundaries a little.
- james_in_the_uk 7y ago
  I don't disagree. It is how the legal profession works, though. If clients demanded something more efficient then there would be incentive to change, but they almost never do.
geebee 7y ago
Interesting observation. Coding could be comparable to using the photocopier, or it could be comparable to very advanced electronic legal research. I'm not in law, but I do work with physicians and health care researchers who often need elaborate data analysis. I've found that there are some types of work that benefit immensely from having both coding and medical knowledge in the same brain, so to speak. This is usually when data is complicated and messy, and when the question a researcher asking isn't fully formed yet. The ability do complicated SQL, natural language processing, data formatting and cleanup, and so forth can end up shaping the question that gets asked. The process isn't always straightforward - researcher thinks of the question, asks the programmer to do the coding, programmer gets the answer back to the researcher.Yes, sometimes it works to describe what you want from a dataset to a programmer, but this often isn't the case for very interactive investigation of data sets. For this reason, I actually would highly recommend learning to code for some health professionals and researchers. Now, there's a limit to what one person can learn to do, and there comes a point where it's not reasonable to ask people to be expert in multiple fields. Even when a researcher is pretty skilled at programming for data analysis, the moment will eventually arrive where the medical researcher needs to work closely with a programmer (who has very advanced data analysis coding skills). But even then, I've found that researcher often wouldn't have conceptualized the question that gets asked without possessing at least intermediate level data analysis skills (including SQL, Unix, Python or R like languages). I've also noticed that researchers who possess these intermediate+ level skills are far more effective at working with programming specialists whose main skill set is processing data. I'm not sure if this comes up as often in law, but I wouldn't be surprised if poring through very large data sets for discovery might be one scenario where this happens.

joe_the_user 7y ago

This, definitely. Many of the "X should learn to code" arguments really miss the key point that X is professional, specialized skill and clients pay for that skill. The primary other way that "learn to code!" come up is idea/assertion that programming is like literacy. Now, I like the idea that programming is like literacy but we have to consider that programming has so far not shown itself to be like literacy at all. So far, programming has been much more like law or medicine, a specialized skill set. The amateur client who knows a little bit of law, medicine or programming, from the Internet or elsewhere, just makes things harder for the professional (whereas a literate client is better for a lawyer or any professional and literacy gives many non-professionals are skill to develop throughout their life). Which is to say we should recognize programming as a professional activity but keep working on things that might, in the future, open the door to a programming as literacy.

rhino369 7y ago

Exactly. I'm an incompetent programmer. I took about 4 classes at university on CS and a lot of my EE courseload used some programming. So I've written smaller programs, I've made a simulator of an 8-bit processor. I even made a small app to autodownload train info from an API and tell me which route is faster two years ago. But that took me 40 times longer than it would take someone who does software engineering for a living. So I leave the programming to the professionals in my legal practice. Ironically, I'm one of the few attorneys who actually do look at honest to goodness code since source code review is common in patent litigation. But its a niche field within the law. And I don't even really need to know how to do it, just understand it at a high level.

streetcat1 7y ago

Programmer will probably should not become lawyers. But an AI will (after more advances in machine reading, and NLG). I.e. it will not replace lawyers, but will enable 10x productivity, which means that you will need 1/10 less lawyers.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> I.e. it will not replace lawyers, but will enable 10x productivity, which means that you will need 10x less lawyers. Lawyers are countable, so “fewer”, or, even better “1/10 as many”. But the argument is flawed other than grammatically, as the quantity of legal services demanded isn't fixed, and if they are ten times more productive that means they become viable for tasks where they wouldn't have been worth employing before...and the total quantity of legal services consumed goes up.
- streetcat1 7y ago
  Sure. My bad. Been coding for 12 hours... So introducing AI is not unlike the innovator dilemma, it will push human lawyers up and up. However, I think that even if the demand is not fixed, most of it is for basic legal services.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > However, I think that even if the demand is not fixed, most of it is for basic legal services. I dunno, public defenders’ work is in a way the most basic of legal services, and from everything I've seen their time is rationed pretty heavily because there simply aren't enough resources. There’s a lot of room to translate more productivity into more getting done rather than fewer people doing the same level of work. (OTOH, I'm not all that optimistic about AI short of AGI helping that much in the aspects needed in that role, because I think the limiting factors there are the harder to automate aspects of lawyering, not the more mechanical ones.)
    - streetcat1 7y ago