I was a software engineer before I found my way to law. My first job in law was as a legal assistant at a boutique IP litigation firm in Silicon Valley. It wasn't long before I brought grep to bear on discovery, and began to understand just how much opportunity there was throughout the industry. I was then recruited to join a project at Stanford, where I built a PACER crawler and the first prototype of what later became Lex Machina. Then I went to law school, returned to that firm, launched my own solo practice for startups, and, eventually, found my way to a legal tech R&D team at Airbus. A few of us spun that out as co-founders of Syntexys, a contract analytics startup with strong NLP and pre-LLM AI chops. These days, I'm an in-house trademark lawyer, which is a practice area I have always enjoyed. I'm on the board of Free Law Project, and have never stopped programming since I started at age 10.