A software engineer among lawyers | Edu RamírezA software engineer among lawyers<br>July 5, 2026 · 9 min · Edu Ramírez | Translations:Es<br>Ca
Table of ContentsRituals and Your Honors<br>Whose truth is it?<br>Sharing the work<br>It’s all text<br>The unforgiving clock<br>And outside Chile?
I hadn’t worn a dress shirt to work since my university internship. Fifteen years of programming in jeans and sneakers and, from one day to the next, back to ironing, because I now work among lawyers. I still feel slightly in costume. And that’s fine: dressing like the guild that hosts you is a form of respect.<br>Programmers tell ourselves we’re the informal ones. Try the reverse experiment: walk into an engineering office in a suit and tie, and count the looks. Nobody forbids it, but the noise is real, the same noise I’d make showing up in court in sneakers. Both guilds wear a uniform; one of them swears it doesn’t.<br>Some context before I go on. I spent fifteen years building software at companies in Chile, Germany and Spain. I come from a family of lawyers, and I founded Trifolia, an artificial intelligence company for lawyers. My legal world is entirely Chilean: a civil-law system where much of litigation still happens in writing. Keep that in mind; I’ll come back to it at the end.<br>Rituals and Your Honors#<br>The deep difference, I think, is this: law rests on shared beliefs . A contract binds because we all hold that it binds; a ruling counts because judges, lawyers, parties and the state treat it as valid. Rituals keep that belief alive. The robe, the “su señoría” (our “Your Honor”), the solemnity of oral argument work like liturgy: they remind everyone that this is serious.<br>Software rests, in theory, on something else: the program runs or it crashes, whether we believe in it or not. We have titles too — senior software engineer, tech lead — but maybe that’s why they stay in the org chart and never make it into a greeting: nobody says “good morning, Mr. Tech Lead”. You call the boss by their first name and contradict them in public, if the data backs you. Our one exception comes with irony built in: the creator of a famous program sometimes carries the half-joking title of “benevolent dictator”. That’s what people call Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, the system that runs much of the internet. Even our honors laugh at themselves.<br>Then add the pronouns. Spanish has a formal “you” (usted) and an informal one (tú), and Chile leans on usted far more than Spain does. Living in Catalonia, I had been losing the habit. Getting back my usted took longer than the shirt.<br>Whose truth is it?#<br>For a lawyer, the truth of a case can hold several values at once: the plaintiff’s, the defendant’s, what could be proven, what the ruling fixed. And not out of cynicism. The system exists because reasonable people look at the same facts and conclude differently.<br>Engineers laugh at that, until we look in the mirror. Our faith goes to metrics: how long the page takes, how many errors per hour, how many users come back. But choosing the metric is choosing the lens , and I’ve watched teams fight over the “truth” of a system with the passion of two litigants.<br>Both shores also carry author’s pride. I know programmers with immovable ideas about what good code looks like, and lawyers just as proud of the pen behind their briefs. This past year, the same uncomfortable visitor knocked on both doors: an AI that writes. Watching each guild process that visit, somewhere between curiosity and fear, has been the most symmetrical thing I’ve found in the two worlds.<br>Sharing the work#<br>The most unexpected clash came from open source. In software it’s normal to publish your work so anyone can use it, study it and improve it, for free; much of the internet runs on donated code, and donating it earns prestige. When I tell this to lawyers, the reaction runs from surprise to rejection: publish my briefs, my templates, my clauses, for my competitors to use?<br>I have a theory, and I offer it as a theory. A lawyer’s work scales with hours: however good the team, there’s a ceiling on the cases it can take, and its knowledge is its inventory. A program, in contrast, can serve millions of people without its author working more, and sharing pieces grows the pie for everyone. Where work is sold by the hour, sharing looks like giving away the inventory. Change how the trade scales and you change the trade’s morality.<br>It’s all text#<br>Strip away the uniforms and watch only the hands. The lawyer spends the day reading and typing: contracts, briefs, reports. So does the programmer: a program is text, instructions written letter by letter in a language the machine understands. Two keyboard trades.<br>The tools, though, could not look less alike. The programmer is the carpenter who builds his own workbench: the editors we...