Should Lawyers Learn to Code? Through the lens of the Hype Cycle.
In general, lawyers do know how to code, because almost everything we know is neatly coded in law. Katharina Pistor, the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law, has the notion of “legal coding” well covered in her book “The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality”.
I have deliberately started with this pun because the term “legal coding” is often exploited as a buzzword by many providers of programming courses for lawyers, although legal coding has a bit different meaning. But this story is about the necessity of acquiring hard programming skills for practicing lawyers.
The quick answer to the raised question is — It depends on one's career stage and goals, legal field, and organizational framework. Sorry, but no “one-handed economists” this time as well.
For top-ranked lawyers, it`s pretty unlikely that knowing a programming language may lead to an increase in earnings and/or performance. First, clients will insist on paying for proper legal coding and nothing extra. Second, prominent lawyers often have enough support from junior lawyers and paralegals to “mine data for answers”, thus any time spent on cleaning datasets themselves can be considered downtime for the most experienced and skilled legal coders.
From the perspective of a junior lawyer, it correlates with organizational capacity. Several legal department benchmarking surveys, conducted by ACC, CLOC, and many others, point to the increased reliance on Legal Operations staff. Given that the best practice is to combine Legal Ops with Data Analytics or even Data Science capacity, I do not see why lawyers should spend a lot of time, again, on cleaning datasets and building NLP models. I mean they can, but should these hours be ‘billable’, given the availability of Legal Ops & Analytics staff?
Another point to consider is the amount of spending on Legal Tech solutions. According to KPMG 2021 Report, in-house legal teams spend on average 13% of their overall budget on Legal Tech. I think it`s not enough but the crowded Trough of Disillusionment demonstrates the lack of effective legal technology strategies among legal teams, as well as the issue of over-optimistic promises from vendors and overall hype in the marketplace. Thus, legal teams are often “trying to run before they can walk, or flat out investing in the wrong solution for their needs”, said Zack Hutto, Gartner.
This disillusionment adds to the popularity of DIY approaches. But I am not sure that starting to learn to code now may provide a significant competitive edge to lawyers in the mid-term perspective, given that many important technologies such as Natural Language Query, E-discovery, and Prescriptive Analytics, are expected to reach the Plateau of Productivity within the next 2–5 years. Of course, we should not forget about the radical uncertainty, which can impact this guesstimate in both directions.
Under such conditions, focusing on legal coding and soft skills may be a better strategy. After all, “the future of law is human”, summarized Paula Davis in her article for Forbes. In terms of organizational development, I would underline the importance of an effective legal technology strategy, sufficient Legal Tech budgets, Legal Ops & Analytics function, and overall improvement of digital dexterity.
Of course, practicing law outside of Anglo-Saxon legal systems may limit the choice of applicable Legal Tech solutions, although there are gradual improvements in this regard as well. If this is the case and/or there are no paralegals or Legal Ops & Analytics staff, knowing Python and being able to do Data Analytics/Science will help a lawyer to stand out.
I know cases when legal teams even develop and implement their own IT solutions. While insourcing may be a good strategy, we should always remember that there are only 24 hours in a day. Thus, doing legal coding or programming may turn into a career choice.
Last but not least, regardless of programming skills lawyers should with no doubt be “informed contributors to technology-driven conversations”, as mentioned in the description of the CS50 course for Lawyers, although this can be applied to any profession nowadays. Of course, lawyers should know how to use ChatGPT, Bard, or similar AI tools.
It should be disclosed that I have been doing Legal Ops & Analytics for a large in-house legal team for 5 years already, thus it may influence my views on the matter.
