lawyers who code - where to start?

Comments

[Pedro S]

Hey, I'm a lawyer who codes!

I think data science is the best area a lawyer can look into to start coding. If you deal with financial information from companies (I guess tax and antitrust law would be the main areas for this), data science is a great opportunity to improve your analytical abilities (you can move from Excel to a more powerful tool like Pandas) at the same time you will grasp a general sense of what computer science is.

Software development is also of great help to lawyers as it allows for the creation of case management systems or legal research tools, but that's a more complex work more suitable for experienced programmers. Data science is a first step in this direction, but you could already consider yourself more than a lawyer if you are able to make complete programs.

Python and R are currently the most-used programming languages for data science. I've seen a lot of Python and a bit of R and I think Python is easier to learn and equally as powerful. I recommend Udacity's Data Scientist Nanodegree course to learn data science with Python. You learn everything you need to look for other resources yourself after it and they have real humans correcting the projects you submit.