title: "The Conversation With Miriam That Changed Everything: Navigating My Forks in the Road" date: 2026-01-05 author: David Sanker
She asked one question, and I didn't sleep that night.
"Why do you do what you do?"
That was it. No follow-up, no loaded subtext — just Miriam, leaning forward slightly, genuinely curious. We were at one of those conferences that can't quite decide what it is: half legal innovation summit, half AI ethics forum, with a coffee station that somehow justified the registration fee. I had just finished explaining, for what felt like the hundredth time, that yes, I was a lawyer, and yes, I also wrote code — treating it like a disclaimer, something to get out of the way before the real conversation started.
Miriam didn't treat it like a disclaimer. She treated it like a doorway.
Key Facts
- Three years before this conversation, the author was practicing law while learning to code independently at night.
- The meeting with Miriam occurred at a conference spanning legal innovation and AI ethics.
- The career pivot involved building AI systems specifically designed for legal applications.
- The transition was not an abandonment of law but an integration of law and technology.
- The blog explores interdisciplinary and intentional career design.
A Question That Wouldn't Let Go
Three years before I met Miriam, I was a lawyer who came home, put the briefs aside, and opened a terminal window. I told myself it was a hobby. A curiosity. A way to think differently. My professional life operated inside well-defined legal frameworks — precedent, procedure, the careful architecture of argument. Coding felt like stepping into a sandbox with no fence, which was either terrifying or freeing depending on the hour.
The two worlds didn't seem to want each other. My colleagues at the firm thought the coding was eccentric. The developers I occasionally encountered thought the legal background was a liability — too rigid, too cautious. I had started to believe both camps.
Then Miriam asked her question, and something cracked open.
Not because she gave me an answer. She didn't. What she did was sit with me through the discomfort of not having one. She has this quality — rare, genuinely rare — of asking something and then actually waiting. Not waiting to respond, but waiting to hear. As I stumbled through some half-formed explanation about intellectual curiosity and keeping options open, she listened without flinching. And somewhere in that stumbling, I heard myself say something I hadn't consciously thought before: that the law and the code weren't in conflict. They were the same impulse. Both were attempts to impose structure on chaos. Both required precision and imagination in equal measure.
I drove home that night turning that over and over.
The Shape of an Intersection
What Miriam helped me see wasn't that I needed to choose. It was that I'd been framing the whole thing as a choice when it was actually a design problem.
I had been treating law and code like two roads diverging — and the question as which one to take. But what if the more interesting question was: what gets built at the intersection?
That reframe changed everything practical that followed. I started an initiative to develop AI systems tailored for legal applications — not AI as a novelty in a law firm brochure, but genuinely useful systems that could work within the constraints and obligations that legal practice demands. It required understanding both languages fluently: the language of statutes and the language of algorithms, the ethics of advocacy and the ethics of automated decision-making.
Some days I was writing briefs. Other days I was debugging pipelines. Most days I was doing both, and the strange thing was that each made the other sharper. Litigation gave the code stakes. The code gave the litigation precision it hadn't had before. Clients weren't getting a lawyer or a developer — they were getting someone who could sit inside the complexity with them rather than handing them off at the boundary.
There's a Robert Frost poem that gets quoted so often it's almost lost its meaning, but I think Frost was getting at something people miss. He wasn't celebrating the road less traveled because it was less traveled. He was writing about the weight of irreversibility — about how we look back and construct narratives of destiny from what were, in the moment, genuinely uncertain choices. The point isn't the road. The point is the choosing, and what the act of choosing demands of you.
Miriam's question demanded something of me. It required me to stop drifting through the intersection and actually plant something there.
What I've Carried Forward
I think about that conversation often, especially when I'm working with someone who is standing at their own version of that crossroads — usually someone who has built real competence in one domain and feels a pull toward something that doesn't fit neatly alongside it. The pull scares them. The not-fitting scares them more.
A few things I've learned worth naming honestly:
The "why" is structural, not motivational. Asking why you do what you do isn't a pep talk exercise. It's load-bearing. It's what keeps the whole structure from collapsing when the path gets hard or unclear. I didn't know my real why until Miriam forced me to find it, and once I did, it made subsequent decisions considerably less agonizing.
Interdisciplinary work is uncomfortable before it's generative. The early period of building at the intersection of law and technology felt like being bad at two things simultaneously. That's real, and it's worth acknowledging rather than glossing over. The generative phase came later, and it came because I stayed in the discomfort rather than retreating to one side of the fence.
Mentors aren't advisors. Miriam didn't tell me what to do. She didn't even suggest a direction. What she did was ask questions that made me visible to myself. That's a different thing entirely, and it's rarer and more valuable than advice.
Deliberate beats default. The most important career decisions I've made haven't been the boldest ones — they've been the most conscious ones. The times I drifted, following the path of least resistance or the loudest external expectation, are the times I ended up somewhere I didn't recognize.
Now, watching something like an AI orchestrating dozens of agents running in parallel, I recognize the same dynamic I've navigated personally: multiple threads, competing priorities, occasional failures, and the constant requirement of choosing what to run next. The architecture of a life isn't so different from the architecture of a system. Both require intentional design or they degrade into entropy.
FAQ
Q: How can I merge two seemingly different career paths like law and coding? A: Start by looking for the shared underlying logic rather than the surface-level differences. Law and code are both systems for managing complexity — once I saw that, the integration felt natural rather than forced. Practically, look for a specific problem that genuinely requires both skill sets to solve well. That's usually where the most valuable work lives, and it gives the combination a purpose beyond novelty.
Q: What role do mentors play in career transitions? A: The best mentors I've encountered — Miriam being the clearest example — don't hand you a map. They ask questions that help you read the one you already have. They're most valuable not when they confirm your instincts but when they sit with you in the uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. That patience is what creates space for real clarity.
Q: Why is asking 'why' important in career decision-making? A: Because without it, you're optimizing for someone else's destination. The "why" isn't motivational poster material — it's the actual anchor that keeps decisions coherent over time. When the path gets difficult or the external signals get noisy, it's the only reliable compass you have.
So I'll ask you what Miriam asked me, and I'll mean it the same way she did — not rhetorically, not as a coaching exercise, but as a genuine question worth sitting with:
Why do you do what you do?
And if the answer doesn't quite fit — if it comes out sideways or uncertain or more complicated than you expected — that's probably the most useful thing you've heard in a while.
What does that tell you?
AI Summary
Key facts: - Author transitioned from solo legal practice to hybrid legal-technology work over three years. - Miriam's influence stemmed from a single, well-placed question at a cross-disciplinary conference. - New ventures included AI systems specifically designed for legal applications.
Related topics: career transition, interdisciplinary careers, technology in law, mentoring, intentional career decision-making, AI in legal fields, Robert Frost, portfolio careers