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Comment by jorgeleo | Hacker News Reader

Lets start teaching what code is by ... chapter 1 Regex????

If the author is reading this:

WHY? out of all the horrors, why?

Regex is not necessarily the best intro to coding, but for a lawyer, it will animate much of what follows by quickly delivering value. At least in my practice, we'll commonly encounter terabyte-sized productions of data during litigation, and the search tools are just awful. For folks in litigation, the power of regex, once past the learning curve, will quickly provide value and might motivate them to dig deeper.

If anything, this list of topics is not law-specific enough. I'd suggest a tutorial on the format of doc production of load files, tesseract, and pdf-manipulation tools for those dealing with doc productions. And a tutorial on relational databases would be very useful for those lawyers drafting discovery requests trying to extract "documents" from ERP systems.

That question is answered in foot note one of chapter 1: http://codingforlawyers.com/chapters/ch1/

Maybe try reading a thing before breaking out the multi-punctuation and caps? ;)

That footnote does not answer the question. Why start with regex?

somewhat agree that it's a tough topic to start with, but regexes are one of the few things that can be immediately applied. a lot of the practice of law (esp. early in your career) is pretty mundane and repetitive stuff. couple that with attorneys love of OCR, you get a lot of copy/paste/hours of editing workflow that can easily be solved by a quick find and replace with a handful of regular expressions. (you could also argue that the root cause e.g., storage mechanism, should be changed, but often times that is a nonstarter or at least heavily resisted)

edit: also, a lot of services like westlaw/lexis have a very rudimentary type of regex searching capacity (i think just * and some connectors) so it's not 100% foreign to many lawyers

to be honest though, most attorneys need training in basic desktop publishing software to start with. i've seen things done in microsoft word that no man or woman should ever have to see.

I would actually vote version control as chapter 1 of Coding for Lawyers. Also not "coding" per se, but immensely important - anything to get past "importantdocument.version.13.3.barkingcat.doc" hell.

I sent a pull request with a chapter on diffs[1]. They're important in their own right, but also as a good precursor to the inevitable git/github/version control chapter[2].

[1] (https://github.com/vzvenyach/codingforlawyers/pull/10) [2] https://github.com/vzvenyach/codingforlawyers/issues/5

The end note is just a legal in-joke which could be paraphrased as: 'because I say so, so there!', but he does give good reasons in the first paragraph (and the legal profession would not have to be persuaded of the usefulness of more powerful automated search).

LOL!

He lost me at REGEX in the title... it gives me an allergic rash

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