Knowing people in both the legal and software world, law is a tough profession with old world business expectations. Almost everything is “last minute” due to either court deadlines or your client dropping everything on you because something happened and it has to be fixed now.

In-house counsel jobs can be a bit more relaxing, as you might be working on longer term projects rather than the latest disaster that fell into your lap.

Lawyering is not really the problem, I have a quite successful career. I am mostly content to just program in my spare time and programming/automating those areas of my practice where there is value. But, and it’s probably more specific to my situation, but I do almost exclusively criminal defense work and it can be tiring, I’ve been at it long enough that I could use a change of focus. Biggest problem for me is that my areas of knowledge/interest for CS/programming is limits solely focused on low level, performance oriented domains, programming language theory And type theory. That is not the most marketable skill set, but I love doing it.

Can't speak for the OPs reasons, but some evidence suggests that law schools have created an oversupply of people with law degrees, which impacts career possibilities.

<filterbubble> one source which supports my worldview: https://www.thecareercookbook.com/hello-world-6/ </filterbubble>