maxgeist

My wife and I lived in different countries for 2 years, partly because of work. We are not wealthy, nor did we enjoy doing this. You might say that this was a result of bad priorities and maybe it was. We were honestly trying to do what was best for both of us at the time. If we hadn't lived apart, there would have been resentment on 1 or both sides, even though it was quite hard to go through with it. Life is more complicated than your tone acknowledges, unfortunately.

The Free Law Project looks great. I'm going to explore your projects this week. I've been looking for a volunteer opportunity in legal tech. It looks like some of your projects have guidelines for contributors. Do you often work with volunteers?

Yeah, discovery and filing seem to be the biggest emerging applications of software to law. I wonder if going to law school would put me in a better position as a founder of an ediscovery startup.

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.

> It would be just an incredibly valuable asset.

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.

I'm not sure that the lawyers would ever build a case on a quantitative analysis done by the lawyer. Not 100% sure. It's an interesting question. My suspicion is that they would use a credentialed "expert" to do any analysis submitted as evidence.

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.

Well, I can use Postgres but don't know anything about Excel.

Thank you for the reply. I think you're 100% right about the LSAT. I'm prepping for it now.

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.