First, although a technical degree is generally required to become a registered patent attorney, there are a lot of people who do patent and other IP litigation without technical degrees. Software comes up all the time in cases, and being able to read source code is a big advantage.
Second, I firmly believe that programming wires your brain in such a way that makes you good at law school and subsequent practice. The law is really a very detail-oriented endeavor. There is just something about stressing for years about whether there is a missing parenthesis or whatever that exercises your brain in the same way that looking for loopholes in a contract or whatever invokes.
That said, at least in the U.S., the biggest decider of your early success in law will be your LSAT score and undergrad GPA. If you think you might be interested in law, just take the test, estimate what schools you could get into, and then do the cost-benefit analysis with that additional information.
Just my thoughts. Take it or leave it.
Have you been happy with the switch from software engineering to law? 3 people in my immediate family are lawyers, so I think I have a relatively realistic understanding of the reality of legal practice. But overwhelming online pessimism about law careers is making me uncertain about taking the risk.
The conversation would be so different, whether interacting with both parties, the potential experts, the judge. It would be just an incredibly valuable asset.
Not just in litigation, but drafting contracts having a programming background and knowing how projects go, how estimates work, and the common problems would also be helped if the lawyer drafting them has a programming background.
Do you have any examples of this? I haven't been able to find a ton of examples of lawyer/programmers whose careers combine these areas of expertise explicitly.
For memo, we lost, and I would not rely on that herbivore lawyer again; not even to deliver food.
Roles in the Relativity space have been lucrative for years but it is complex.
Other terms to read up on:
EDRM process, Relativity, Nuix, Contract automation, Robotic process automation, Some are dabbling in smart contracts but I’m unsure how effective that will be for them, Audio and video, and social media eDiscovery forensic collection
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There are a lot of other orgs doing similar work. I'd look around at those too, or check out our hiring page. (It says the backend dev position is closed, but we're expanding the position and hiring again.)
A lot of lawyers do "doc review," which is often about analyzing documents for data relevant to the case. I think natural language processing is being used to augment this process. Aside from that, I've haven't gotten the sense that my facility with analysis would be as useful as one might think.
What I had in mind was any kind of law-career opportunity that would be more open to me with software engineering background than without.