Lawyers have the reputation for being tech-ignorant because for a long time they were. Long after everyone else was using word-processors, lawyers relied on typists and shorthand secretaries.
That got shaken up with the arrival of knowledge management systems; law firms led that charge.
Most politicians are lawyers; and most politicians are tech-ignorant. That sustains the myth.
Incorrect. During the mid to late 80s law firms were some of the favorite customers of integrators. Firms moved from a 1:1 lawyer to secretary ratio to 2 or 3:1. IT also transformed the accounting department. Who do you think was buying all those WordPerfect licenses?
I worked as an integrator for city law firms in the late 80s. Yes, they were using WordPerfect and Netware. No - lawyers didn't have computers on their desks. They regarded using computers as clerical work, and beneath them.
And these were City firms, working for big corporations. High Street lawyers were way behind.
I was never involved with the accounting departments of law firms; but obviously, that's clerical work, from the point of view of a lawyer.
The best place to get surplus huge computer monitors was the local law school they always needed to be showing off the latest and greatest shiny tech amongst themselves.
I think it's more accurate to say that lawyers only know about lawyer stuff. They live in their own constructed reality that is quite different from normal logic, intuition, and processes.
In this case, that's because he's got rid of his Linkedin account since that article footer was written (I follow Neil via Mastodon, he discussed it there).
If the blog footer is intended to contain links to identity, I'd make that whole footer dynamic and then I'd just keep a single source for that.
Alternatively, arguably better: Keep a master domain for each identity and update social media accounts for that identity on a page in the master domain.
Of course not all lawyers are the same. There are some that really do get tech. Or more like the niche they specialize in, because the days of being a polymath are over, the tech world is way too large and complex these days to know it all.
That said, I thought exactly the same reading the article. If he thinks he's already one of the more tech savvy ones, that only proves the point of the article he's criticizing.
As somebody deploying some very advanced technologies in the litigation space I think this is a reflection of his own docket, not the broader space. There is definitely a need and a market for highly specialized tools in certain segments of the law.
The selling point for tech is often that it makes you more efficient. But law firms don't want to be more efficient because their income is tied to the billable hour. Partners, who run the firm, know that if you make their associates more efficient, they will literally make less money doing the same amount of work.
There are some firms that understand the value of efficiency (especially those that do fixed-fee or value-based billing), but most of the largest firms aren't especially interested in increasing efficiency.
From what I understand a lawyer can't advertise his or her services as better or worse than anyone other lawyers. It's part of the deal of having your law license. You agree that everyone else is up to the same standard, or you bring up a complaint and suggest their license be revoked / suspended / etc.
The partners won't make more money because their associates will be billing the same number of hours. They'll just be doing so for more clients, which doesn't really do the partners any good (aside from making them feel more powerful because they have lots of clients).
But you are still billing by the hour. 8 hours in a day. Do work for 4 clients or work for 8 clients and get the same amount of money?
There are a few law firms that are heavily automated. But they are mostly larger, class action, pay per result, type law firms vs your standard law firm.
Yeah, I worked with one of those "we get paid if you get paid" firms. Professional, courteous, & every conversation we had was completely to the point. First call was with a receptionist. Spent maybe ~30 minutes talking to the lawyer total. They already optimize not to waste time.
If I charge a fixed rate per hour then the number of clients is irrelevant no? 8 hours of work a day pays the same amount, regardless of how many people it serves.
Not all work is equal. Some will require partner time - others lead to longer more lucrative relationships. Being capable of handling more load means you will earn more money in the long run - usually a goal for most business owners.
Not to mention, you might not require a small army of paralegals and secretaries anymore... fewer staff can get the same load accomplished.
It even opens the door to charging flat-rates for certain services, instead of by the 1/10th hour or whatever.
The point is, doing more in less time is always better... even if you decide to kick back and relax with your newfound time.
As someone who works closely with legal billing, I'm also calling BS. I can attest firsthand that lawyers regularly get deducted on bills for spending too much time on their tasks. There's an entire market (well over 50 companies) for reading legal bills and sending them back with reasons they won't be paid. Spending too much time on a task means it will take longer to get paid for it.
This isn't how law firms see things. Can they do more in less time? Yes. But can they double their rates so that they're making more money? No.
And while they could hypothetically get more clients, this aspect of the business is based on relationships (and is a burden for senior partners). Partners know that if associates are more efficient, there's a chance they would lose money, and a chance they could win more new clients and add those in too. But at the end of the day, that just puts them roughly where they were before — with fully-occupied associates, and a book of business that is the same size. For partners, it's all risk and no reward.
Fire half of your staff and get the same amount of work done as before.
I repeat - there is zero downside to modernizing and using tech for any business.
You have to adapt and figure it out... before your competition does. Perhaps that means changing your billing model or something - whatever, figure it out.
All of this "no automation - no technology" chanting is wild to see.
Majority of what a law firm does is low skill or no skill. Copying documents, looking up case law and citations, filling in documents from templates, etc. None of this requires highly skilled labor, and a lot of it can be automated or made easier for fewer people to accomplish the same output.
When a law firm sends out a bill to a client, it lists the following info:
• description of task
• time spent on task (in 6 min increments)
• name of person who did the task
• billing rate of said person
• total cost for the task
Unless a firm that "fires half its staff" also doubles its billing rate, it will not make more money. And good luck to the firm that tries to double its billing rate. It is very difficult to convince clients that you're worth that much (or that you should be getting all the benefit from advances in technology).
I'm not saying firms shouldn't make changes, I'm saying they really don't want to. Eventually they will, just like they eventually got rid of typing pools. But it took much longer than it would have if the incentive structure in firms were different. They are married to the billable hour.
There is no requirement (as far as I am aware), only convention for charging in 1/10th hour increments.
Filling out standard documents and such can (and often is) charged by the job. Some common case types even are billed by the job, instead of hourly.
Majority of firms do not handle complex cases that require deep knowledge and skill. We can compare this to accounting automation, such as Intuit/Quickbooks. Are they for every business? No - but for a ton of standard businesses they are a perfect fit, and Intuit makes a ton of money in the process.
This resistance to modernizing will kill some firms in the process.
The requirement comes from the clients, not the lawyers. No sane person would ever opt in to having to account for every six-minute increment of their work day.
> The requirement comes from the clients, not the lawyers.
So many standard things are handled with flat rates these days. You're not the first one needing to incorporate, or respond to an ADA complaint, etc. These are cookie-cutter things, and can be handled very quickly by the firm.
So - accordingly - they charge a flat rate. You don't get a choice usually.
Very few firms handle complex, specialized issues that require unknown amounts of time. Rate billing is for those situations.
No client is demanding to be billed every 6 minutes, having no idea what the ordeal's cost will amount to. That is compelled by the firm, because of the unknowns involved.
You're right that most lawyers don't work in biglaw and handle complex matters. But if you're trying to sell tech to lawyers, you're going to think about whether you would be able to sell to biglaw lawyers, who would be the most lucrative customers. If you cannot, you might build the product anyway and try to sell downmarket. But many would be discouraged from trying to build the business at all, since so much of the profit would have come from the whales at the top of the market.
Car mechanics figured this out years ago with standard “book rates” for hours. Swap the starter in 1 instead of 2 hours? Pocket the diff. This even covers things like “already had the engine pulled out but still billed 2hrs for starter”.
At that point they are effectively pricing based on the work accomplished rather than the time taken to accomplish it. That sounds justified so long as it's transparent. Certainly as a customer if my car is in the shop for a week I don't really care how long any individual step actually took, I just care how long it takes to get my car back.
Law firms call this value billing, but it's still pretty rare. The equivalent would be "write memo on topic X, which is mostly copied from a memo we already wrote for a similar client."
> But law firms don't want to be more efficient because their income is tied to the billable hour.
Law firms with better reputation can and do charge more per billable hour. Presumably, results factor in to that, so anything that produces better results for the same effort should, over time, increase the $/hour rate. (Or, if only relative and not absolute performance matters, missing out on an improvement adopted by other firms will drop the sustainable $/hr rate.)
Also, not all lawyers are employed in law firms, and many are employed in places where their time is cost not revenue.
IANAL, but I’m married to a partner in biglaw. Clients routinely refuse to pay for work they perceive (rightly or wrongly) to have been done inefficiently or unnecessarily. For instance, this past week, my wife had an associate who took an absurdly long time to research and write a draft of a brief, and almost all that time will be getting written off by the firm because the client won’t pay for it. Every large client is sifting those bills with a fine-tooth comb to determine what they won’t pay, and the firm isn’t going to risk future business for the sake of dickering over an associate’s hours. So even if it was true in the past that the billable hour incentivized inefficient work, it seems that clients have figured out how to even up the scales for the most part.
I think a lot of tech companies that spout this nonsense don't understand how law works. Routinely I see products based entirely around reducing lawyer's billable hours. They'll only implement that kicking and screaming if clients force them to bill less. If clients aren't putting pressure on them to be more efficient they will happily bill more hours than are truly needed in discovery rather than using state of the art tools to reduce billable hours. If you don't understand your market is billing hourly and come up with ways to work within that framework you aren't going to be successful.
I've worked with software engineers who didn't see the value in DCVSes like git but now that they use it they wouldn't dare go back to non-distributed systems. I would bet most lawyers fall into this camp. They have a process they know works and learning something new is a hassle... but if they used and got used to having history and diffing they wouldn't want to go back. I doubt it involves billable hour calculations for most of them.
Remember that software like WordPerfect which was very much not WYSIWYG had a long life with certain audiences like attorneys because they were used to it.
If it really is a billable hour problem the auto mechanic industry has already solved it: standard hours. Various services are documented at a given number of hours which is what you get billed by most shops even if it takes the mechanic half the time.
Sure but if your bet is that you're going to drag all of law to a new billing model that's similar to what mechanics have done the fact that you might not be successful is a significant risk point in the profile of your product and substantially affects whether or not someone invests. It's not a trivial solution that's easy to implement as an external vendor.
For instance, discovery is a lot more complex than doing a standard operation on a car and the variance in hours worked depends heavily on specific details of the case which lends itself very poorly to charging a standardized price for discovery.
> If you work with me and think "I wish Neil used [x]" or "this would be so much easier if Neil had a system to do [y]", please let me know. I'm always happy to get feedback, and I certainly don't know everything.
This is a rare but wonderful point of view, particularly among non-technical-field professionals.
This blog post was written by a lawyer that writes shell-scripts to automate presumably job related tasks, but it reads like he didn't even read the article he's critiquing (https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/practice/profession-sitting-on-...) because he hates that he’s lumped in with lawyers that don’t embrace technology. Despite being a lawyer that lurks on Hacker News, I can admit that I’ve found the article's point mostly true.
The clear thrust of the article Neil is critiquing, right at the top:
- "A study of attitudes to lawtech carried out by The University of Manchester, University College London and the Law Society finds that a lack of understanding by, and encouragement from, senior managers is proving a barrier to the uptake of technologies such as artificial intelligence."
Neil's framing:
- "Pretty much every day, I read something to the effect of 'lawyers are clueless when it comes to tech lol' ... sigh"
From the article:
- "less than a third (32%) use even basic lawtech, such as legal databases and contract review software."
From Neil:
- What on earth is "lawtech"?
From the article:
- "'The legal profession is at a crossroads, with new technologies that promise to transform virtually every aspect of the legal services sector starting to gather pace,' she said. 'However, our report suggests that this transformation might not be as rapid as some would think. It is clear that there is a business case for adopting lawtech, but people are not necessarily equating this to how it will benefit them personallySenior managers and leaders within law firms need to think about creating a clear connection between the benefits to the organisation and the benefits to the individual, if they want to get the buy-in they need from their professional colleagues.'"
There are some lawyers that get tech, but many more have only a very surface level understanding, if that. Especially the “senior managers” the article is directed towards. I understand this article is directed at the UK, but my favorite example of this is SCOTUS justices learning that text messages are routed through, and stored on, intermediary servers. Chief Justice John Roberts, during oral argument in Ontario v. Quon (https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...): “I thought, you know, you push a button; it goes right to the other thing” followed by Justice Scalia: “You mean it doesn't go right to the other thing?”
The concept of less than a third of lawyers using legal databases kind of beggars belief. Lexis and West, to say nothing of newer upstarts, were pretty much totally widespread in my view. How much the situation is different in the UK though, I don't have any idea.
Is it really surprising? Solos can't always afford what more established firms can. Also, this: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/27/business/chat-gpt-avianca-mat.... The lawyer asked ChatGPT if the case was real, but did NOT check any legal databases. Also consider, many lawyers are not litigators. They handle the same types of matters all the time, and likely lean heavily on one or a few treatises, in addition to their own experience.
Every real estate transaction I've done has involved two sets of lawyers mailing Word docs to each other with me cc'ed with names like "Purchase and Sale (2) - Copy - Latest".
I actually mentioned to my last lawyer that there is established and well used technology that can show changes between documents. She seemed uninterested and a couple of days later I had to email her about a clause that got dropped in one of the Word doc email tornados the day before.
I see no mention of any kind of version control in this article. It seems crazy to me but I guess that would drive down billable hours.
I don’t think lawyers want version control of contracts. They want what is outlined in the contract to be the final agreement. An agreement with a bunch of history attached seems like it would be worse.
But you could still use version control for drafting. You don't include version control history in your shipped binary but it's still very useful for coding.
I'm not sure what that would change legally, the contract signed is still the contract agreed to. Most of the time you either sign on paper or e-Sign a pdf neither of which will communicate the history so it would just help keep track of changes.
You want it for the process of drafting. In fact, it is quite common in the SF startup world (and probably elsewhere) while redlining to send back and forth a Word document with Track Changes turned on. One time, someone turned it off and then pasted over a different document, and then turned it back on and made some edits so only a few changes were made. It's really quite shady but you have to deal with all sorts so we just fixed it up.
Ultimately, a tool like Juro would be pretty cool, but if you're the guy trying to get the contract done you're not going to introduce a new thing to the workflow. Everyone will object.
While negotiating over a contract, seeing the changes is very useful. It's very common. Talk to someone who is in procurement or who is in sales.
Proper version control would ruin all the fun - it would make it easier for unwanted parties (such as e.g. the partner you have office rivalry with, or legal discovery process you're at the receiving end of) to step through the history of your documents, while making it harder for the opposition or other third parties to ship all the juicy history to you by pure accident (i.e. sending the OG Word document with "Track Changes" still on).
(Disclaimer: IANAL, most of my "knowledge" about the legal profession comes from the TV show Suits.)
Lots of firms (usually bigger ones) use version control internally. But it can be a mess to try to get two or more firms, their clients, etc., all to use version control, let alone the same system.
Pretty much everyone uses track changes in Word, though. And if not they should.
Well, software firms have already been using some variant of VCS for a while. The legal world needs to first get sold on the concept (at least on all the bits beyond Word's "Track Changes" functionality), and then... well, nobody but techies looks at VCS based on richness of CLI commands, or depth of mathematical foundation, or provenance / industry cred of its authors -- lawyers will want something with reasonable GUI UX; whether it's powered by Git or Mercurial or whatever, doesn't really matter.
(FWIW, I think embedding Git support in MS Office would do a lot towards VCS adoption outside of tech.)
This is actually a problem in the games industry, where git is generally impractical for assets and things like Perforce or even SVN are used instead. It’s often preferable to put the code in the same place too, which interacts poorly with disciplines that have good reason to use git instead.
If you want version control you need a format, that is amendable to version control. So, some uncompressed text markup.
Interesting observation over the last few weeks of playing with OpenDocument is that the revision control feature works by creating new local style for every change, which creates total havoc when you try to diff the .fodt or content.xml by external tools.
If I were in charge of digital literacy for the next generation, I would make "understanding version control" one of those basic things. I lost so many hours of papers, programming assignments, etc over time because the non-VCS version of iterating on a "draft" of a document for the non-educated is "Copy of copy of copy of paper-final draft (4).docx".
We used the Compare Documents feature in Word when I was in practice a decade ago. I don't know why it wasn't mentioned; perhaps because its in such wide usage?
Aside: the quip "when people go to a DIY store, they might buy a drill, but what they really want is a hole in their wall." is such a bad take. No, what they want is a drill. If they wanted a hole they would borrow their friend's drill. But they just moved into an apartment or house, or they're starting their life of collecting DIY items, and one of the things they're going to need to own is a drill. The person that follows this adage and tries to figure out a way to trick them into buying a hole is an asshole. The person who directs them to a good, durable, versatile, high-quality drill is in the right. If both sides of the transaction could clearly see who is doing that and who isn't, everyone would be better off --- but in tech they usually can't.
There are for sure lawyers who know nothing about tech, but there are definitely some who are very strong on tech. Two examples from my personal experience:
1. I know a lawyer who did comp sci at Stanford before doing his law degree at either Yale or Harvard I forget which. He was very knowledgeable about all the licensing, IP protection issues etc relevant to software.
2. I work regularly with an ex-dev who is now a lawyer who specializing in infosec and data privacy issues. He runs packet captures on sites and checks for unintentional data leakage/gdpr violations when sites somewhere call out to google tag manager or put 3rd-party trackers somewhere. In an enterprise context there are a bajillion places this can happen so it's great to have a lawyer who understands what's ok and not but also is technical enough to use curl against a rest api or can run (and understand) packet captures when different web actions occur.
I created software to expedite discovery analysis of labor disputes, and when pitching it to lawyers I was literally told “you’re saying you created something that will take milliseconds to do what would take me weeks? Why would I want that? I get paid by the hour.”
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadThat got shaken up with the arrival of knowledge management systems; law firms led that charge.
Most politicians are lawyers; and most politicians are tech-ignorant. That sustains the myth.
And these were City firms, working for big corporations. High Street lawyers were way behind.
I was never involved with the accounting departments of law firms; but obviously, that's clerical work, from the point of view of a lawyer.
Lawyers only drag their customers up into a constructed reality. They're paid to solve problems in lawspace, not in the real world.
Crime, family law, wills, industrial espionage, bankruptcy, insurance disputes, personal injury…
Shame there aren't any lawyers who help folks out with the real world situations.
<chuckle> Read the article, seems reasonable.
Connect with Neil on LinkedIn -> 404 page.
All righty then.
(edited for missing word!)
Alternatively, arguably better: Keep a master domain for each identity and update social media accounts for that identity on a page in the master domain.
That said, I thought exactly the same reading the article. If he thinks he's already one of the more tech savvy ones, that only proves the point of the article he's criticizing.
There are some firms that understand the value of efficiency (especially those that do fixed-fee or value-based billing), but most of the largest firms aren't especially interested in increasing efficiency.
I call BS on this. Doing more in less time means you can do even more than before and kill your competition.
There is nothing but upside in advancing technologically for pretty much every industry.
There are a few law firms that are heavily automated. But they are mostly larger, class action, pay per result, type law firms vs your standard law firm.
If the firm can handle clients in 1/2 the time, they can take on more clients. They don't have to advertise themselves as being "better" or something.
Payroll, for all businesses, is a huge limiting factor on abilities. Which means, you can't just "staff up" and become larger overnight.
Not to mention, you might not require a small army of paralegals and secretaries anymore... fewer staff can get the same load accomplished.
It even opens the door to charging flat-rates for certain services, instead of by the 1/10th hour or whatever.
The point is, doing more in less time is always better... even if you decide to kick back and relax with your newfound time.
And while they could hypothetically get more clients, this aspect of the business is based on relationships (and is a burden for senior partners). Partners know that if associates are more efficient, there's a chance they would lose money, and a chance they could win more new clients and add those in too. But at the end of the day, that just puts them roughly where they were before — with fully-occupied associates, and a book of business that is the same size. For partners, it's all risk and no reward.
I repeat - there is zero downside to modernizing and using tech for any business.
You have to adapt and figure it out... before your competition does. Perhaps that means changing your billing model or something - whatever, figure it out.
All of this "no automation - no technology" chanting is wild to see.
Majority of what a law firm does is low skill or no skill. Copying documents, looking up case law and citations, filling in documents from templates, etc. None of this requires highly skilled labor, and a lot of it can be automated or made easier for fewer people to accomplish the same output.
• description of task
• time spent on task (in 6 min increments)
• name of person who did the task
• billing rate of said person
• total cost for the task
Unless a firm that "fires half its staff" also doubles its billing rate, it will not make more money. And good luck to the firm that tries to double its billing rate. It is very difficult to convince clients that you're worth that much (or that you should be getting all the benefit from advances in technology).
I'm not saying firms shouldn't make changes, I'm saying they really don't want to. Eventually they will, just like they eventually got rid of typing pools. But it took much longer than it would have if the incentive structure in firms were different. They are married to the billable hour.
Filling out standard documents and such can (and often is) charged by the job. Some common case types even are billed by the job, instead of hourly.
Majority of firms do not handle complex cases that require deep knowledge and skill. We can compare this to accounting automation, such as Intuit/Quickbooks. Are they for every business? No - but for a ton of standard businesses they are a perfect fit, and Intuit makes a ton of money in the process.
This resistance to modernizing will kill some firms in the process.
So many standard things are handled with flat rates these days. You're not the first one needing to incorporate, or respond to an ADA complaint, etc. These are cookie-cutter things, and can be handled very quickly by the firm.
So - accordingly - they charge a flat rate. You don't get a choice usually.
Very few firms handle complex, specialized issues that require unknown amounts of time. Rate billing is for those situations.
No client is demanding to be billed every 6 minutes, having no idea what the ordeal's cost will amount to. That is compelled by the firm, because of the unknowns involved.
Law firms with better reputation can and do charge more per billable hour. Presumably, results factor in to that, so anything that produces better results for the same effort should, over time, increase the $/hour rate. (Or, if only relative and not absolute performance matters, missing out on an improvement adopted by other firms will drop the sustainable $/hr rate.)
Also, not all lawyers are employed in law firms, and many are employed in places where their time is cost not revenue.
Remember that software like WordPerfect which was very much not WYSIWYG had a long life with certain audiences like attorneys because they were used to it.
If it really is a billable hour problem the auto mechanic industry has already solved it: standard hours. Various services are documented at a given number of hours which is what you get billed by most shops even if it takes the mechanic half the time.
For instance, discovery is a lot more complex than doing a standard operation on a car and the variance in hours worked depends heavily on specific details of the case which lends itself very poorly to charging a standardized price for discovery.
This is a rare but wonderful point of view, particularly among non-technical-field professionals.
The clear thrust of the article Neil is critiquing, right at the top:
- "A study of attitudes to lawtech carried out by The University of Manchester, University College London and the Law Society finds that a lack of understanding by, and encouragement from, senior managers is proving a barrier to the uptake of technologies such as artificial intelligence."
Neil's framing:
- "Pretty much every day, I read something to the effect of 'lawyers are clueless when it comes to tech lol' ... sigh"
From the article:
- "less than a third (32%) use even basic lawtech, such as legal databases and contract review software."
From Neil:
- What on earth is "lawtech"?
From the article:
- "'The legal profession is at a crossroads, with new technologies that promise to transform virtually every aspect of the legal services sector starting to gather pace,' she said. 'However, our report suggests that this transformation might not be as rapid as some would think. It is clear that there is a business case for adopting lawtech, but people are not necessarily equating this to how it will benefit them personallySenior managers and leaders within law firms need to think about creating a clear connection between the benefits to the organisation and the benefits to the individual, if they want to get the buy-in they need from their professional colleagues.'"
There are some lawyers that get tech, but many more have only a very surface level understanding, if that. Especially the “senior managers” the article is directed towards. I understand this article is directed at the UK, but my favorite example of this is SCOTUS justices learning that text messages are routed through, and stored on, intermediary servers. Chief Justice John Roberts, during oral argument in Ontario v. Quon (https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...): “I thought, you know, you push a button; it goes right to the other thing” followed by Justice Scalia: “You mean it doesn't go right to the other thing?”
I actually mentioned to my last lawyer that there is established and well used technology that can show changes between documents. She seemed uninterested and a couple of days later I had to email her about a clause that got dropped in one of the Word doc email tornados the day before.
I see no mention of any kind of version control in this article. It seems crazy to me but I guess that would drive down billable hours.
Ultimately, a tool like Juro would be pretty cool, but if you're the guy trying to get the contract done you're not going to introduce a new thing to the workflow. Everyone will object.
While negotiating over a contract, seeing the changes is very useful. It's very common. Talk to someone who is in procurement or who is in sales.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, most of my "knowledge" about the legal profession comes from the TV show Suits.)
Pretty much everyone uses track changes in Word, though. And if not they should.
(FWIW, I think embedding Git support in MS Office would do a lot towards VCS adoption outside of tech.)
Interesting observation over the last few weeks of playing with OpenDocument is that the revision control feature works by creating new local style for every change, which creates total havoc when you try to diff the .fodt or content.xml by external tools.
1. I know a lawyer who did comp sci at Stanford before doing his law degree at either Yale or Harvard I forget which. He was very knowledgeable about all the licensing, IP protection issues etc relevant to software.
2. I work regularly with an ex-dev who is now a lawyer who specializing in infosec and data privacy issues. He runs packet captures on sites and checks for unintentional data leakage/gdpr violations when sites somewhere call out to google tag manager or put 3rd-party trackers somewhere. In an enterprise context there are a bajillion places this can happen so it's great to have a lawyer who understands what's ok and not but also is technical enough to use curl against a rest api or can run (and understand) packet captures when different web actions occur.
I created software to expedite discovery analysis of labor disputes, and when pitching it to lawyers I was literally told “you’re saying you created something that will take milliseconds to do what would take me weeks? Why would I want that? I get paid by the hour.”