Looking to leave law behind and asking for help

1 points by papasmrf 11 years ago | 4 comments

I am a lawyer barred in NY and SC, currently practicing in SC in my own office. My college degree is in Biochemistry and I took Math through Calc II.

During law school (2003-2006) I took up learning some HTML, CSS, and Javascript during my free time. I was able get myself up to building a decent static website at that time, but I am not a front end designer. After being in practice a few years I decided to go back to learning code, taking up PHP, MYSQL, and Javascript again, this time mostly jQuery, and lately dabbling in CodeIgniter and Laravel, emphasis on dabbling.

I eventually set up a website for SC attorneys for automated creation of court forms, which is currently a break even operation.

My law practice is mildly successful, but it has proven very difficult to keep the family budget going when legal fee income is so unpredictable. Law practice is a bit of a mismatch with my personality, as I do not have the aggression that some other litigators have, so while I do go to court occasionally, my practice is mostly transactional. Thankfully my wife has a good job that has kept us going quite well.

I want to try to take the next step here in the coding area and see if anybody would like to discuss a remote coding/developer relationship. I would shutter my law practice for such an opportunity. Admittedly I am still in the learning stage, but I learn quickly. Thanks to all.

LeoSolaris 11 years ago |

Morning!

I am a programmer in Lexington. For more local gigs, I'd recommend checking out Tech After 5 if you're in one of the three major cities, or close enough. It is a casual bar meetup sponsored by larger businesses. It makes a great way to get local contacts in the IT industry. IT-ology is also a great resource in SC. They are a non-profit I volunteer with that focuses on pulling new talent into IT.

Remote work is hard to find even if you're pretty experienced. For a side project, I ended up starting up my own little business, but I started out looking for remote work. You could explore business backed open source projects, especially the smaller businesses and startups. Becoming a quality contributor for a program that you're passionate about tends to lead to recruitment offers.

papasmrf 11 years ago | |

Hey thanks for the suggestions! I love going to tech meetups, they make for a refreshing change from the normally stuffy lawyer events I attend on occasion. :)

So you started your own business full time now? I would love to be ale to do that with my own project, but getting users has been slow going so far.

mpcadosch 11 years ago |

Hey!

A friend and I are experienced full-stack web developers starting a company in the legal technology space. We'd be really interested in speaking with you, are you free sometime this week?

papasmrf 11 years ago | |

Sure thing, I can free up some time at some point this week. Interested to hear what you have in mind.