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.
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.
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.
Rituals and Your Honors
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.
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.
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.
Whose truth is it?
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.
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.
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.
Sharing the work
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?
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.
It’s all text
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.
The tools, though, could not look less alike. The programmer is the carpenter who builds his own workbench: the editors we write code in are programs too, written by our own guild, and there are hundreds to choose from. Trying the newcomer is practically a sport, and tuning your own (the colors, the shortcuts, every detail) can swallow whole evenings. The two oldest camps, vi and Emacs, have spent half a century arguing over which one is better, in what the guild calls, with a straight face, the “editor war”.
The lawyer, meanwhile, opens Word. I’ve spent years among lawyers and I have yet to see one draft in anything else. And there’s logic to it: a contract’s draft travels back and forth between firm, client and counterparty, each side marking its changes, and that round only works if everyone uses the same program. In a trade that negotiates documents, the shared tool beats the perfect tool.
Versions are where the kinship becomes undeniable. Whoever edits text for a living needs memory: what changed, who changed it, when. Word gives the lawyer that memory twice over: track changes records each correction with author and date, and version history keeps the document’s earlier copies. And the markup is the negotiating table: each strikethrough is a proposal; each margin comment, a little pleading.
That memory gets managed, though. The file is headed for the counterparty, and the markup talks too much: what you hesitated over, how much you were ready to concede. So before sending, the lawyer accepts the changes, deletes the comments and leaves the document clean. The full history stays home, and the trip between firms is what breeds that collection of file names everyone recognizes: “Contract_final_v3_FOR_REAL.docx”.
The programmer keeps it in git, a history that stores every version of every file, with the author, date and reason for each change. That memory travels with the project: whoever receives the code receives the whole history, back to the first line. Software can afford that candor: whoever gets the history is pushing the same project, sometimes alongside thousands of others editing the same text without stepping on each other. Linus Torvalds created it, by the way: the benevolent dictator from a moment ago. On how to write, no two programmers agree; on how to remember, the whole guild picked the same tool.
The two guilds even arrived at the same invention by separate paths. When a lawyer returns a contract, a redline comes with it: the copy that shows, struck through and underlined, only what changed from the previous draft; the careful ones also compare the two versions themselves, in case something changed without a mark. When a programmer proposes a change, they send the diff, the list of lines added and removed, computed by git from the two texts: there, the caution comes built in. Different name, same idea, and the same reason: nobody wants to reread the whole document; you review the difference.
Under the tools sits the deeper kinship: both trades manufacture text that acts on people. The lawyer’s rules are executed by judges, companies and citizens; the programmer’s, by a machine, and they decide which news you see, whether the bank lends to you, how long your paperwork takes. Few pages leave an office with that much power over other people’s lives. That’s why the uncomfortable visitor, the AI that writes, didn’t knock on these two doors by chance: it arrived where text rules.
The unforgiving clock
But the difference that changed my job is another one, and a single conversation captured it. A few months ago, in Barcelona, I was talking about AI in the justice system with Diego Palomo, a well-known Chilean scholar of procedural law, the rules that govern how lawsuits run. I mentioned, in passing, the challenge of keeping the language models updated so they keep getting better. He was puzzled. Why keep updating them? Wouldn’t they be good enough at some point? The question surprised me. It surprised me more to notice I had never asked it myself.
We were each speaking from our trade’s clock. Law’s clock is built to finish: deadlines expire, rulings become final, cases close. Software’s clock never finishes. We live by iterating: ship an imperfect version, watch where it fails, fix it, ship again, sometimes several times a day. Our whole professional instinct takes that cycle for granted, and AI built by programmers inherits it: propose, get it wrong, try again. The bad draft is cheap, because today’s bug gets fixed tomorrow.
In litigation that tomorrow doesn’t exist. A brief is filed once, and if it carried a mistake, it’s too late. Chilean procedural law even has a name for this: preclusión, the door that locks behind you when a procedural stage closes. Under that clock, distrusting a technology that sometimes makes things up is plain professional prudence.
I started Trifolia when I noticed that my lawyer friends and relatives wouldn’t touch AI, and I chose to understand that resistance rather than dismiss it. At first I thought it was a language problem, and that stage produced an article and an open course. Underneath the language sat this other thing: the clock. An AI for lawyers can’t be a coding assistant with the vocabulary swapped. Its trial-and-error loop has to run behind closed doors, before anything gets filed: verify sources, cite where each claim comes from, leave the last word to the lawyer. Iterate in private, because in public there is no second chance. That’s what I work on today at Trifolia.
And outside Chile?
A caveat about method: my software experience is international; my legal experience is Chile only. I don’t know how much of this describes lawyers everywhere and how much describes only Chile’s. If you practice law in another country, or you’re an engineer embedded among jurists of another tradition, I’d love to compare notes: write me at [email protected].