Gordon Cassie is the CTO at Toronto-based Closing Folders, a platform that facilitates collaboration on corporate and commercial legal transactions. He has been coding for approximately a decade.

What kick-started your interest in coding?

“As a kid I was always interested in computers. During high school I learned a little bit about web development and found it interesting but it wasn’t really until undergrad that I started to code in any significant way. A friend of mine had an idea for a business that would be an online marketplace. I really wanted to do something entrepreneurial and so I got involved and took on the responsibility of building the site even though I didn’t really know how to do it. That got me going on PHP and SQL and then eventually Python.”

How does coding help you as a lawyer?

“When I was working as a lawyer, knowing how computers work and what they are capable of helped me do things more efficiently. Early on as a lawyer I had an assignment that involved pulling data from about ten different data sources in various counties in Florida. The supervising lawyer had told me to go to each site and manually copy down every row of every table. I was definitely not doing that so I wrote a script to pull all the data and aggregate it in a single csv file.”

What languages can you code in?

“Python and Javascript are what I spend 80% of my time writing.”

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