I was recently asked what I would suggest reading to ‘get into’ legal tech. It’s a good question – but I think slightly wrong-headed. You’ll ‘get into’ legal tech by ‘doing’ it not by reading it. Books are great (shoulders of giants, etc.), but where the aim is to do a thing, there’s no substitute for actually doing it. Books will of course help you go farther, faster, and get less hurt along the way.

This list will always be incomplete, but it’s very incomplete for the time being. My aim is to expand this out into a general reading list in time.

Product development

• Don’t make me think
• User Story Mapping
• Business Model Generation
• Value Proposition Mapping
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Legal profession

• The Future of Professions
• The Great Legal Reformation
• Tomorrowland
• Managing the Professional Service Firm (know the rules in order to break them)

Tech sales and adoption

• Crossing the Chasm
• The Innovator’s Dilemma
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Startup

• The Hard Thing about Hard Things
• Paul Graham’s essays (much wider than ‘startup’)

Tech

• Automate the boring stuff with Python