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).

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.

LOL!

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