In the last two years, my office has been working with civic hackers—Code for DC, DC Legal Hackers, and others—and organizations like US ODI and the OpenGov Foundation to build open-source tools to make DC’s law more accessible. Increasingly, we are working to expand our efforts and join with partner cities through the Free Law Founders. I’ve even learned to code in Python, Node, and am learning Ruby.
In the last year, though, I had a realization: it is time to bring the hackers in-house. It is time for government lawyers to embrace innovation and to retool our practice for the digital age. We need to stop using bad tools—or worse paying overpriced vendors for proprietary software that works some of the time—and instead work with developers. In turn, instead of building one-off applications and fighting with legal teams, developers can be a