Legalese co-founder Meng Weng Wong said in a recent video presentation that: ‘Law today is where software was 20 years ago.’ Can you expand on that idea?

Who are the lost tribe of programmers? Lawyers! If you look across the professions, the one most similar to software is legal. The stuff of medicine is health and disease; the stuff of architecture is space and form; law is actors, obligations, prohibitions, consequences, time, rules. These flows of control and consequence are the province of law – and of software.

To manage these matters, programmers have built batteries of software tools: app stores, self-updating packages, code reviews, agile pairing, dependency management, FOSS libraries, Git, pull requests, fuzzing, lint, unit testing, static analysis, m4 macros, IDEs, Haskell, Lambda calculus….

Law has track changes, Microsoft Word, and Latin. It will take time to translate these techniques to the legal industry, but the progression will look similar: we know which parts of the legal stack will depend on others. That’s why we, as programmers, think we have a crystal ball to the future of the legal industry – a view which lawyers themselves don’t have!

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