Lessons From a Lawyer Building Tech

Some candid reflections..

If you are a lawyer starting on the path of building tech, I am sharing my lessons, many learnt the hard way over the past few years:

1) Learn to be a generalist, tech like the law, is vast and there are rabbit holes. You can't create value if you geek out on legal or technical niches unless it's part of the core problem statement.

2) Learn what building full stack needs. It is less important which programming language you know as much as knowing what different parts need to come together to make something work. Example - databases, storage, api, frontend.

3) Think distribution first. Don't assume there is a problem. You might think that you know that there is a problem, as a lawyer. Others might not think so.

4) Don't try to make the tech fit into solutions. That's upside down. Understand the problem and potential solutions deeply, think about the tech later.

5) Tech tools/APIs/releases are shiny objects that make you feel powerful. Resist the urge to get carried away. Build, test, work as critically as you do as a lawyer. Incremental changes might involve big tech feats with little customer value.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

6) If tech seems unapproachable to you and you have to rely on someone else for the detail, to understand basics of what is being built and you want to focus on legal problems while someone else "figures out" the tech - give up, it doesn't work. You have no choice but to learn.

7) You will never be the best software engineer and you don't need to be. When there is a problem worth solving and you get stuck, software engineers will arrive to help. Find the problems worth solving and which people are willing to pay for first, let the rest figure itself out.

8) Building good software is like writing and publishing, drafting and arguing. Logical, needs attention to detail, prone to error, expensive to manage, teach and imbibe, slave to iteration, versioning and careful supervision. Lawyers are natural at this, leverage it well. Don't leave your instincts at the door.

9) Geek out over things that matter to create value and not other things. There will always be someone who knows the math of machine learning, or how to train a language model better than you. But few will know how to marry that with drafting a public offer document.

10) Where you shine is the perspective you bring. Engineers have zero capabilities to solve the problem that you understand even if they know the tech that can solve for it. They know how to drive but don't know the destination. Birds eye view understanding of tech is an enabler of great things.

Skills matter more than knowledge. Agency more than education.

If you are a lawyer jumping on the AI bandwagon, there has never been a more interesting time.

P.S: Contract Expert is live now and you can take it for a spin.