Coding For Lawyers

Posted: Sept. 19, 2026

My Coding for Lawyers class had pretty humble beginnings. I owe a big thank you to Colin Starger at the University of Baltimore School of Law for believing in the idea and helping make it happen. From the start, I was not trying to turn law students into full-time programmers who would leave the law behind. The goal was much simpler. I wanted lawyers to understand the technology they use a little better, to be able to communicate with developers and IT people, and to start noticing the parts of legal practice that could be automated or improved with technology. That was really the whole idea behind the class, and it is still what I think makes learning to code valuable for lawyers.

Most of the class, was an introduction to Python. We started with the basics like variables, if statements, loops, lists, dictionaries, and functions, then spent a few classes looking at things like databases, websites, encryption, APIs, web scraping, and working with documents and spreadsheets. Every lesson was grounded in something a real lawyer would do. Creating eligibliyt calculators, motion drafting programs, code to analyze data for marketing letters. The best part was seeing what students did with it. For their final projects, they had a chance to build something related to the law, and they came up with some really cool ideas. What I enjoyed most was seeing the students who got bitten by the legal tech bug the same way I did. Once that happens, you start looking at every repetitive or frustrating legal process and wondering whether there is a better way to do it.

Then AI came along and made teaching the class a lot more complicated. Tools like ChatGPT Claude can now write a surprising amount of code for you, which raises a pretty basic question: what exactly should we be teaching students anymore? I still think the fundamentals matter because you need to understand enough to know whether the AI is giving you something useful or something completely wrong. But the balance has definitely changed, and I am still figuring out what the right version of this class looks like in the AI era. If anyone is thinking about teaching something similar, I am happy to share lesson plans, assignments, slides, or anything else I have learned along the way.