your mention of lawyers reminds me of the Kia Motors outside counsel technology audit[1]. Many lawyers waste ridiculous amounts of time doing busywork. In my day job, I spend many hours visiting customers and spend much of that time adding automation for them, simple bash scripts that allow them to do things much more quickly. Yesterday, I taught someone the rename command[2]. Previously, they had been spending an doing it manually with the mv command. I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people.
> I am constantly reminded about the amount of low-hanging fruit there is out there for automation that is currently handled extremely manually, sometimes by some very well-paid people.
On the other hand, they have job security that way.
I've seen the same thing, and encountered huge amounts of pushback from the same people.
If I automate, they no longer have 80 hours of work to do every week. How are they gonna get promoted then? By being competent or something?
A few of my friends who are aspiring lawyers are terribly depressed because of their current work. They honestly thought they were going to walk straight into 100,000k/year jobs. Now they're pushing paperwork all day for a third of that salary :\
[1] http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i... [2] http://linux.die.net/man/1/rename