Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Ask HN: Was a dev. Became a lawyer. How do I become a dev again?
8 points by ss108 on Dec 26, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments
I attended a top 5 law school and am currently a first-year in biglaw. Previously, I was a self-taught dev at small startups in LA. Nothing sophisticated, just standard MVC apps. I was mostly back-end (my front-end skills do include JavaScript, but not include CSS or ability to make things look pretty, etc) and I was able to maintain and deploy web apps all on my own. The last thing I did before law school was an accounting app I built from scratch and of which I was functionally the CTO. Technologies I used during my career: Python, NodeJS/TypeScript, C#, React, Postgres.

I want to go back into tech. Assuming I want to be a software developer again:

1. What should I focus on learning to get a backend developer job that pays 180k+ in a major market (NY, LA, or SF)? Things I was starting to find interesting towards the end of the main part of my career include scripting to automate build processes, integration tests, and I guess what one could call crude architectural stuff that probably isn't worth the name (Should I build the data layer using a "repository manager" class for each table and inheritance? At what point is it not over-engineering to bring in a cache?).

Trying to enumerate those examples brought home that I did not do anything remotely sophisticated during my career lol :( Maybe if I don't know the answers to basic questions like that, those are the places to start.

Anyways, what are some of the next big things? One thing I think I might like is natural language processing, maybe I should start there.

2. Suppose I want to throw money at this (since I have some now)--is that even possible? For example, any recommendations for coding interview tutoring (which would be something to do near the end of the transition, after several months or more of self-learning)? I was pretty bad at dev interviews the last time I did them several years ago.

Please note:

Why I went into law in the first place and why I want to jump back into tech is not really something I want to hash out in this thread. Suffice to say, my interest in leaving is not because biglaw is awful or high-pressure or the people are toxic or anything like that, as some might think. I basically got very lucky: I am at one of the best firms in biglaw in terms of work-life balance and cordiality. It's certainly the only one I know of that's like this. My reasons for wanting to go back into tech have more to do with things that I miss about tech and business, such as the creative aspect of working on a product, the mission-orientation, etc. I know some of you will say "reflect on why you stopped wanting to be a dev in the first place", but please suspend that argument for purposes of this thread.

Let's assume for now that my timeline for leaving biglaw is probably about a year hence.

Thanks for all advice in advance.



1. Backend-wise it seems to be a Java, .Net, Golang and Node world at the moment, so you might like to prioritize those. If you are crazy or adventurous Rust, Ada, Kotlin, Erlang and Dlang are nice, but you will get few bites. Python is fine for all your scripting needs.

2. While you are earning good money in your biglaw job you should stay there while scoping out a startup you can use your legal quals + programming chops at. Or start your own. If I was starting a legal-falvoured startup and looking for devs I would hire you in a flash and train you to use my stack. Impossible the other way around.

Good luck


Thanks

Luckily I know Node and .Net (though a little out of practice with that one). Learning Go as well.

Definitely keeping a list of legal tech startups to which to apply (hence why I am learning Go, tbh lol).


Recovering litigator here. I was a web dev before law school (self-taught; my degrees are all non-STEM). I'm now in data/ML engineering. It took me ~5 years to complete the transition.

Focus on Python, especially if you're interested in NLP.

If you want to get back up to speed quickly, consider a bootcamp (~2 months F/T, ~6 months P/T). There are programs focused on data science. Bonus if you can convince your firm to pay for it.

Leverage your background to position yourself as a consultant. There's lots of demand for basic data analytics tooling in the enterprise space, for example. Once you have a few projects under your belt, it shouldn't be hard to lateral.

Don't waste your time with "legal tech" unless you'd rather spend more time arguing with tech-averse lawyers than coding. There's a lot more opportunity and a lot less frustration in the general market.


Thanks for this.

Why did you decide to go into data and ML stuff? Just interest? Do you think it would have taken less time to transition to a more conventional web dev role?


Any chance I could reach you by email? I have a similar background (but graduated four years ago from law school), and have been looking for another lawyer from a top school at a top firm to chat with. I have about 10 side projects online that I have coded that all focus on legal technology and some on natural language processing. Would be fun to chat more. I have been looking through my network for someone with similar skills. My email is in my profile.


Yeah, that'd be great.

I sent an email to the email listed in your HN profile.


I work in the back office of law firms and tomcam has made a good suggestion, to look t software for law firms, because I can tell you the “digital transformation” all other industries have been going through for quite a few years has only just begun in law firms.. they are risk averse and therefore move slow.

Lots of technology innovation going on in this space


Yeah I think there's a lot of opportunity in legal tech and that I am well-poised to be a part of it.


Let me know if you have any specific questions I may be able to help.

The incumbent PMS and DMS vendors have the market captured for large law firms and the systems are generally slow and expensive to change, but smaller ones have more saas options and smaller ones move quicker.

There is a lot going on in legal ops, innovation and newlaw- things like eDiscovery tools for forensics of new data types - social media, audio and video etc. there’s ML contract review, there’s workflow apps, docusigning, relativity, nuix ….

In general IT space Le firms are slowly moving to cloud so there’s the whole azure, aws piece, other adjacencies like auth (eg. Okta)

There’s also the blockchain hype.. smart legal contracts, lawyers who can code etc


> There’s also the blockchain hype.. smart legal contracts, lawyers who can code etc

Yeah if you know more about that, I'd like to know. Thanks


I would say all FAANG are in desperate need of lawyers with a technical background - personal experience suggest it's probably the single largest unmet need in the market. You can easily start at 400K talking to eng and maybe swing some coding in between the meetings.


?!

Please explain further lol

My guess is my legal experience isn't yet extensive enough for something like that.


Painfully obvious question, but are there gaps in the legal software world you think you could fill?


Yes, I am actually working on a side-project with a friend, and we hope it can be a viable startup.

I didn't mention it because I didn't want to confuse or overload this thread, but if it ends up not working out, I'll probably be back on here asking how to leverage the experience to get a job lol


Just parlay your law stuff into some cushy lawtech gig.


This is really cool. I don't think you're aware of how valuable your Bayesian combination is. The reason I could claim that is that your first point was this:

>1. What should I focus on learning to get a backend developer job that pays 180k+ in a major market

You could make more as a developer; you could make more as a lawyer, but you're a develawyer (or a lawyeroper) and a non-linearity should apply.

I have some ideas for your profile. First, the obvious ones:

https://www.avodocs.com (YC) does legal documents for startups. You could work one the programing and the legal aspects for the crowd you seem predisposed to serve given your presence in this forum.

https://rebase.co. Description :

>Rebase is a new, safe, and easy-to-use platform by Nomad List for becoming a legal and fiscal resident in countries that want to attract remote workers

It sits between users and lawyers to manage the full process. It started this year and I think you could link up with https://twitter.com/levelsio and see what you could do to scale it.

Again, whether you wear your developer hat and lawyer glasses, or your lawyer hat and developer glasses; the results will be interesting.

Now for the less "obvious" things. I work at a boutique consultancy that builds end to end machine learning products for large organizations. Machine learning means we work with data and working with data means a whole lot of questions that have to be answered. Compliance with a law that was just passed or a legislation project that may become law in the future.

Sometimes, you work with an organization that serves clients, and these clients have data of their clients. The project means you may have to use data of your client A, which is data of their clients B, C, D, which itself is data of the nested "clients" E, F, G.

The conversation becomes: whose data is this ? What can you do ? What can't you do ? What should the client transmit ? Everything ? Out of the question. Is the client very sensitive (health, defense, finance, communication)? Where will the models be trained and what's the data flow (these are the meetings where people talk about territory, sovereignty, and borders). Where will the software be deployed. Which cloud provider, in which country. On-premises ? How to maintain and who will access from where ?

There are many people involved. Many conversations. Many consultations. Mutual availability. Meetings scheduled weeks or months in advance.

How about you productize this for these problems that pretty much every organization that wants to do anything with data has meetings about. No need to re-invent the wheel. You make a cookie-cutter.

One way to do this is to join a large company that does this kind of projects for organizations. Learn what the friction points are, then develop a product (software + legal) to do that.


>You could make more as a developer; you could make more as a lawyer, but you're a develawyer (or a lawyeroper) and a non-linearity should apply.

Haha, thanks.

I'll keep those Avodocs and Rebase in mind to apply to.

Are you suggesting I apply to consultancies in general that build sophisticated/specialized software for companies they can't build in-house properly if they tried, and work in whatever capacity, and build some tech to solve some problems re: the legal aspects of the work?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: