Johannes Maurer

As a lawyer and software developer, I know my way around both the legal sector and software development. Already during my legal education, I founded a legal tech company and taught myself coding. I am an enthusiastic developer concerned with how the everyday problems of lawyers can be solved or at least eased with the help of software.

Having gained hands-on experience in the legal tech industry from a legal and technical perspective, I am able to provide the missing strategic link between law and tech when it comes to developing new digital business models in the legal sector.

Legal

After my law degree in Heidelberg, St. Gallen and London and my training contract in Frankfurt an New York, I started my legal career at the capital markets practice group of an international law firm in Frankfurt. In 2019, I then joined the legal tech company BRYTER where I am currently heading the business development team. My work there deals with developing automation solutions and digital business models for law firms and corporate legal departments.

Tech

Only after I already had already finished my law degree, I started to teach myself coding. My first programming attempts were with HTML, JavaScript and CSS – just good old web design. After I had completed a series of online tutorials and watched countless videos, I quickly switched to Angular. The reason I chose Angular was because the app which my legal tech company (LEX superior – latin for “the stronger law”) developed was based on Angular at that time. The app itself is a means to easily access and navigate through German and EU legal statutes and supporting legal content. Looking back, having such a concrete project which I could take as an example and eventually also contribute to was the best way for me to really learn coding.

Over the years, I steadily improved my coding skills. After I had mastered JavaScript (more precisely TypeScript) and went through the ups and downs of cross-platform mobile app development using Angular and Cordova, I learnt Go with which I still work with with great enthusiasm. Besides that, I gained experience with Node.js, Docker, Google Cloud Platform and Flutter. Just recently, my focus has been more and more on the “bread and butter toolkit” like Excel VBA and and Google Apps Script, which I also use in my daily work to develop ready-to-use applications which already bring their well-known UI with them.

Blog

This is my personal blog, where I am sharing some insights into how especially lawyers can leverage technology to make their daily work easier. It is aimed at tech-savvy lawyers and those who are just keen to find out, what’s going on behind the scenes of software development and – even better – how they can get started with it. I am, however, not dealing with general legal tech news and what’s currently going on in the market – there is plenty of news outlets and blogs about this already out there which deal with this. My blog therefore primarily deals with the technical side of things, which has so far been rather neglected.