Consider that “Coding for Dummies” book to be a long-term investment.

The demand for lawyers with honest-to-goodness fingers to the keyboard coding experience hasn't fully taken off just yet. Legal minds that come with a handy technology attachment might have better luck finding jobs in an advisory or liaison capacity that touches on many of the practical issues facing today's businesses, everything from compliance issues to incident response plans following a breach.

But that could all change in the next five years as the need for hands-on coding experience rises in correlation with the growth of blockchain technologies.

“The adoption of highly technically skilled individuals has always been slow in the legal marketplace. Where most of those jobs are for the highly technical programmer skill sets that are married either with a legal degree or some kind of legal background tends to be at service providers or software companies that are playing in that legal AI or legal analytics or big data cloud space,” Jared Coseglia, founder and CEO of TRU Staffing Partners, said.

As far as reasons go, this one is pretty straightforward: Corporations want to consult technical experts about their technical problems. Lawyers typically don't enter into the picture until something as fluid as technology has to be made to fit the rigid shape of the law. In those instances, understanding the jargon or workflow at play can still afford a significant advantage.

According to Coseglia, lawyers who have a global perspective on the varying regulations, rules and policies governing the intersection of technology and the law are on the right track to highly sought-after positions and employment. He's never seen so many job descriptions requiring niche skill sets like familiarity with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) pop up in such a short amount of time.

“There is way more demand than there is supply of attorney talent, particularly in what we'll call that two- to four-year associate level, that corporate counsel level that is maybe towards a five-year-plus experience, where they are a niche focus in the privacy/security data governance verticals,” Coseglia said.

It's better to get them while they're young. Brigham Young University's (BYU) law school will be offering a three-hour legal coding workshop presented by the educational organization Code180 on a recurring basis each semester. The idea isn't so much to create an army of hybrid lawyer/coders, but rather to instill a basic understanding that will help students and budding attorneys relate to industries that are increasingly dominated by tech.

Gordon Smith, dean of BYU Law, compares it to being a lawyer for Ford but not having the faintest idea about how cars are made. Knowing even a little something about how the wheels fit onto the frame could prove useful. The same goes for coding.

“It gives you a sense of timing; it gives you a sense of complexity and the adaptability of the code to different circumstances so that you're not just making strange demands of people who seem to have magic boxes,” Smith said.

Just because there is not currently a bustling marketplace for lawyers with strong coding skills doesn't mean it's not coming. Next semester, BYU will launch another class focused on blockchain technology that will move beyond theory and involve hands-on projects.

In the legal field, blockchain tech can be used to automate processes such as the execution of contracts and compliance reporting. This too should be of interest to students or other aspiring lawyers interested in one day finding gainful employment.

“I just had a long meeting with a law firm about this. They have 40 lawyers in a group dedicated to blockchain projects, and [a partner] said if you can train people in blockchain, we will hire them,” Smith said.

That demand might not be going away anytime soon. As blockchain progresses through its infancy over the next five years, Coseglia expects there to be a growing demand for programmers who can apply blockchain skills to legal tasks and initiatives such as smart contracts.

“I think that that's a really interesting field that has a lot of applicable skill sets that go beyond legal technology, but a really ripe opportunity to apply them to legal technology,” Coseglia said.