On the flip side, the lawyers that represented the big tech firms at the time were some of the most impressive people I've ever met.
You could speak to them as a peer when it came to technical issues or system architecture AND they were experts in technology law. Especially impressive given that anti-spam was still in it's infancy and rapidly evolving.
Yeah, I didn't mean to slight lawyers in general, some of my best friends are lawyers (one of them even convinced me to switch to Signal before it was cool).
When I was a lawyer my selling point was exactly that I knew tech deeply, coming from a dev background, and was current as I read Slashdot daily compiled my own Linux kernels etc. It allows punters trust you & is a rainmaking skill.