I was a paralegal a number of years back and, due to my experience as a coder, I was able to automate a bunch of my responsibilities. Much of the job of a paralegal (and some of the responsibilities of a lawyer) are things like data entry and records keeping that are trivially automated. One of my most popular tasks was to take data from Doc X in format A and move it to Doc Y in format B. Some string parsing (with human oversight) massively accelerated my productivity.

I wrote a short blurb about my experience a little while ago: http://www.cachestocaches.com/2016/2/how-we-teach-programmin...

My first day at my last job as an attorney, I was told to submit 3000 files to a team of paralegals to have them manually convert them to PDF and rename them using a standard exhibit convention (eg EX-2019-001). This activity consumed three FTEs annually. I wrote a script to automate it in ten minutes.

If anyone there had even the slightest sense of how easy that would be to automate, they'd have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by paying some random kid $200 to write them a bash script.

That's just a simple example, but I ran into issues like that on a daily basis. Databases full of evidence that were discarded because no one knew how to access them or run queries on them. Whole inboxes of emails in ost files thrown away because no one knew how to open them. Hundreds of hours spent manually reviewing documents when OCR and a decent text search tool could have gotten the same result in minutes. It was just never ending.

An example I was once involved in.

You have a $VeryExpensive accident.

There are $LargeNumber companies which have some partial liability.

That they are liable is extremely easy to prove, but the extent of the liability is extremely difficult and can be extremely costly on a per company bases.

You also have a database which holds most of the contributions of each of these companies, allowing you to build up a case for why each company has a certain percent of liability. While there is a team of lawyers and a team of programmers working on this case, the ability of lawyers to pull up simple enough data reduces the dependency of involving the programmers, and the lawyers having a basic understanding of SQL helps them both communicating with the programming team and when they have to explain things in front of the judge. Being able to query the data allows for the lawyers to better grasp which cases are the most worthwhile to pursue.

And for macros, sometimes you don't have a simple database, but you do have very standardized forms that are easy to scrape data off of.

Higher echelon (DOJ, State AG's office, etc.) wants to make a case for a change in the law and needs statistics about how many cases over the past x years where certain factors are met. You can query your case management database... or you can send an RFI to every subordinate office and make them do it by hand when they already have crazy workloads.

You have a set of documents you prepare regularly. Could be a Power of Attorney, a diversion agreement, whatever. You can highlight the frequently changed part and substitute information by hand... or you can set up a macro with a form to enter the information and have it automatically generate.

Attorneys are knowledge workers burdened with a lot of administrative nonsense. There is a lot of low hanging fruit for automation.

One simple example would be where an attorney receives a thumb-drive with 100s of documents and files as a "production" in a case. An attorney without basic skills would (or would have staff) manually enter all of those files into a spreadsheet or a word document. An attorney with basic programming skills would write/run a short shell script that instantly pumps all of the metadata about those files into an Excel spreadsheet.

Another example, though a bit more general, would be an attorney trying to find documents in a case that were created around a certain date. An attorney without basic skills is, again, going to end up in a manual or semi-manual (with a basic tool) process. An attorney with basic programming skills is likely able to directly craft a query that produces the documents.