I'm Going to Law School. Here's Why.

For a while now, I keep coming back to the same question.

Am I keeping up with this pace?

Not so long ago, being a software developer felt like a reasonably “safe” bet. Demand was everywhere, and skilled people were valued for it. I had carved out a niche for myself in the strange world of blockchain, and I was confident in my ability to manage projects, coordinate teams, and see goals through to completion. There was an unspoken belief that if I kept sharpening my craft, I’d be fine — more than fine, even. Then, somewhere along the way, that belief started to crack.

AI began writing code. At first, simple functions. Then, before long, fairly complex logic — done in minutes, where a junior developer might have spent a full day. A few months later, given a well-structured brief, it could take a project from spec to completion on its own. What I felt watching that wasn’t fascination. It was a quiet, unsettling anxiety.

I always knew technology moved fast. That wasn’t news. But this was different. It wasn’t about learning a new framework or picking up a new language. The act of writing code — the act of building something — was itself losing its edge. The skills I had spent years accumulating were being commoditized, and fast. And commoditized skills, in the end, get replaced.

So what kind of person was I going to be in this world?

I sat with that question for a long time.

I could have kept going — become a developer who wields AI better than anyone else, moved up the stack, pivoted into architecture or product strategy. Those paths existed. But something felt off. Even if I followed one of them, it felt like I was sidestepping the real question rather than answering it.

I needed to figure out what I actually wanted, first.

When I’m honest about why I loved development, it was never really about the code. It was about making something and putting it out into the world. About that thing actually reaching someone, actually mattering to them. The impact. My product being used, problems being solved, the world being — in some small way — different because of something I made. That was what kept me going.

But the more I followed that thread, the more I kept arriving at the same place.

Where does the biggest impact come from?

Any individual product has a ceiling. No matter how well it’s built, if it can’t change the environment it operates in, its reach is limited. And what is that environment, exactly? When I thought it through, it came down to the society people live in — and underneath that, the institutions, the rules, the law.

Law governs the world. That sounds abstract, but I mean it literally. What contracts are enforceable, what liabilities attach to whom, what rights get protected — all of that is determined by law. A single platform can reshape how hundreds of millions of people live, but how that platform is allowed to operate is a question the law answers. Technology can sprint as fast as it wants; how society receives it, regulates it, and ultimately makes sense of it gets written in legal language.

So what would it mean to be someone who could speak that language?

I came to believe it was more than just becoming a lawyer. It meant being someone who understands technology and can think in legal terms — someone who can see how the world works from two different vantage points at once. There are things only that kind of person can do. And those things looked a lot like what I’ve always wanted to spend my life doing.

I have to talk about the law itself.

When I first started learning it — almost by accident, through a general education course — I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I had expected something dry and heavy on memorization. What I found was something else entirely: a discipline that takes deep questions about people and society and works through them with logic. Careful, precise, relentless logic.

Why does a concept have to be defined this way and not another? When two principles collide, which value takes precedence? How can the same set of facts lead to completely different conclusions depending on how you frame them? That kept catching me off guard. It didn’t feel like memorizing rules. It felt like training a whole new way of seeing.

And a surprising amount of it overlapped with what I’d learned as a developer. Breaking down complex requirements into logical components. The instinct to find edge cases. Thinking ahead to how a system might be misused. Arriving at a single, concrete solution — the cleanest implementation — from a tangle of competing constraints. Legal thinking and developer thinking turned out to be more alike than I expected. Or maybe, without realizing it, I had already been doing something close to legal thinking all along.

That realization did a lot to solidify my decision.

I find myself using the word weight a lot.

Some people walk into a room and change the gravity of the conversation. When they say something, it can’t be brushed aside. That quality comes from different things — age sometimes, experience other times, and sometimes from the sheer depth of someone’s expertise.

I wanted that weight. Honestly. After years in development, I started to notice something: technical expertise alone wasn’t enough to engage with the world the way I wanted to. I could earn a seat at the table, but becoming someone who could actually reshape what happened there — that seemed to require something more.

A lawyer has that weight. Not just in terms of social standing, but in the way their expertise can actually intervene in reality. A single line in a contract, a ruling, an opinion — these can affect the lives of enormous numbers of people. The scale and the nature of that influence matched what I was looking for.

I also became convinced that when I eventually go back out into the world and try to do something significant, the gap between people who understand law and people who don’t will matter. Someone who knows technology and law — I could see what that combination might make possible in the years ahead, and it was hard not to get excited.

The decision wasn’t easy.

It meant putting down what I’d built up. Letting go of the familiar and becoming a beginner again. The older you get, the heavier the anxiety of starting over becomes. What if I can’t do it? Is it too late? Is this actually the right direction?

Those questions haven’t gone away. They still show up sometimes.

But after I made the decision, something happened. A feeling I hadn’t felt in a while: that particular tension of not knowing how things will turn out. Excitement and fear tangled up together. I was glad to feel it. It felt like being alive in a way that staying somewhere safe and familiar doesn’t allow.

Maybe that sensation was what I was looking for all along.

Someday, as someone who speaks both of these languages, I want to engage with the world the way I’ve always imagined.

For the first time in a long time, I’m nervous — in the best way.