Steve Chalmers
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

There will be a small number of people (relative to the legal profession) who get ahead by providing tools which make practicing law significantly more productive (which also includes delivering UX which lets the users focus on law and not on tech). This has always been the case: I remember in the mid 1980s visiting with one of our VARs, an entrepreneur bootstrapped company in Dallas which was good at software for law firms, and whose founder had done quite well.

In the legal profession, the people who can use the latest tools (at Pragmatist adoption, not Early Adopter) will continue to be the most productive. Those who cannot adapt to the latest tools (can you imagine looking cases up in books in 2017) will be less productive. There are situations like searching an email archive or pile of unstructured data from discovery which will benefit from better tools, but it would be an extraordinary situation where an attorney should spend their time writing code.

That having been said, my son did spend a couple of years in high school doing web page development, back in the stone age, and did actually write html and other code directly. That gave him enough background that when a near retirement attorney who was mentoring him got into a kerfluffle over the way some electronic discovery information was delivered…his literacy in file formats, archives, etc cut through in a half hour what would have been hours of his mentor’s time and a lot of friction spread over a week or more. (He couldn’t share technical detail, of course.) So basic literacy in IT for everyone, yes. But that doesn’t mean more than a rudimentary understanding of writing code.

    Steve Chalmers

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    Student of complex systems; prematurely retired from a career in tech focused on the boundaries between server, storage, and network in the data center.