Programmer turned law student here. Some potential areas of exploration you can think about: - Natural Language Processing (nltk and SpaCy) - there are a lot

Programmer turned law student here. Some potential areas of exploration you can think about: - Natural Language Processing (nltk and SpaCy) - there are a lot of people trying to build tools to parse contracts, judgments, legislation and much else besides. You got a big pile of documents and you want to find every single mention of a company name in a stack of thousands of documents: time for named entity recognition. Similarly, in policing and in private sector fraud detection, natural language processing is being used to parse through the hundreds of pages of emails/texts collected from the average person's phone or laptop. - automate work around office files - openpyxl lets you open Excel files, python-docx for Word files - Simple web applications with Django. Django was built initially for making small projects to support journalists to enter data using an admin panel, then display it on a website. If you need a simple data collection tool, a small Django app may just do the job. - If you're doing contract review or transactional work, DocuSign has an API. Automating workflows around that could allow you to be more efficient. - I've ended up writing code to automate some of my email handling. Accessing your email using imaplib means you can write scripts that'll process email in ways that go beyond the simple email filters in Gmail/Outlook. - If you're dealing with governments or regulators in pretty much any capacity, you'll probably end up wanting to do screen scraping eventually to automate the processing of data published on the web. Requests, BeautifulSoup and Scrapy are your friends for this. - Notifications: if something is running in the background and takes more than a few minutes, I don't want to waste my time sitting and waiting for it or remembering to check it. On Mac, Linux and Windows there are tools to let you send yourself notifications... or you can use APIs to send yourself notifications via messaging apps like Telegram/Facebook Messenger, or (for a cent or two per pop) by SMS. There's APIs like Pushbullet and Pushover to plumb together mobile notifications for iOS/Android too. - Time tracking: if I find myself having to account for my activities in, uh, small billable chunks at some point in the near future, you can bet I'm doing what I can to automate the hell out of that. Before "life hack" meant "a silly thing you learned on BuzzFeed that you'll never actually do", it was used to refer to the often rather hacky set of tools and scripts used by software developers to be productive, and to glue together and make sense of their information dense lives. There are non-tech professionals who are using coding skills to automate their professional practice - like accountants building their own homemade document processing systems by cobbling together Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. with little scripts and cron jobs (etc.), and if you can get good at that, you've basically got a superpower that many of your colleagues won't have, and you've also got domain knowledge software developers don't have.