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Absolutely, he probably would not be the right hire to squeeze an extra 0.1% of performance out of Google search, but on any team which has to understand the needs of the legal industry (plenty of these at FAANG and non-FAANG companies) he could find himself in a senior role very quickly.

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Yeah no shortage of Legal Discovery startups. Plus plenty of use for a lawyer-with-tech-skills when it comes to things like intellectual property laws, or just having someone who knows how to use Legal Hold software effectively.

Isn't the 'senior role' aligned with what he said though? He'd have the industry insight to design product roadmaps and UX wire frames in a PM type role, but wouldn't touch the codebase because he's a lawyer who wrote some code a long time ago, not a lawyer who codes, and the non-lawyers his team can hire have much more experience in actual software engineering.

The silos that individual contributors perceive tend to disintegrate as you move up the chain. If you're the GM of some product at a FAANG that has exposure to the legal industry, what you often find is there are tons of great developers you can hire internally, but not many people who have expertise in that vertical and can also be dangerous around the code. If a lawyer with a CS degree and a bit of coding background wanted to cross over and join your dev org you'd probably be happy to open whatever doors they need.

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