Neon Law
  • Fractional CTO
  • Litigation
  • Fractional GC
  • Legal Services
  • Sign in

Rust in Peace

A talk by Nick for Rust NYC

Rust in Peace is a eulogy to my programming career. Over the past year, teaching coding at Apple, I realized nearly all my students were vibe coding and had stopped needing me. That was the signal to go back to practicing law.

Our firm runs its entire practice on the Neon Law Navigator, Rust-built software that flexes its great ecosystem. We built our practice to enable all lawyers to vibe-code custom client experiences and tell our clients' unique stories. In this presentation, you'll see how this all fits together beginning with how we architected the data, chose Rust-first vendors, and leverage agentic tooling for coding and lawyering.

Navigator is only possible because the ecosystem is this good, because the LLMs are this good, and because communities like RustNYC are this good. Please come to my retirement party and let us get crabby together.

Start →View all slidesView as Markdown
1

Chapter 1

Intro

  1. 1May my soul rust in peace
  2. 25 Years at the Fruit
  3. 34 years finance data & platform engineering
  4. 41 year teaching programming
  5. 5What I realized is
  6. 6Decided to be a lawyer in New York
  7. 7What our firm does
  8. 8NeonLawNavigator
  9. 9Agenda
  10. 10Las Vegas, 2011 — where I learned to program
2

Chapter 2

The Rails Lesson

  1. 11Convention over configuration
  2. 12The database was a shared design
  3. 13Controllers — where a request becomes a decision
  4. 14Parameter handling — the shape of what comes in
  5. 15Middleware — the layer I didn't know I needed
  6. 16"It works on my machine"
  7. 17How new all of this still was
  8. 18From Rails conventions to Navigator
  9. 19A eulogy for my programming career
3

Chapter 3

Shared craft compounds

  1. 20Keep domain seams in Rust, where interest compounds
  2. 21Widely available — governed in the open
  3. 22A cautionary tale — Java, Oracle, and the price of a single owner
  4. 23Say it with your whole chest
4

Chapter 4

Six ways to know a change holds

  1. 24One giant change deserves more than one glance
  2. 25The compiler asks whether the program can be true
  3. 26Clippy and rustfmt ask whether the code speaks our dialect
  4. 27Tests ask whether the promise still holds at the boundary
  5. 28Bloom turns verification into a learning loop
  6. 29Marketing copy must explain the way, not only the claim
  7. 30Three workshops, three people, one method
  8. 31Fast generation, slow enough verification
5

Chapter 5

From Law to Workflow

  1. 32The goal — deterministic workflows from law
  2. 33Step 1 — read the law
  3. 34Step 2 — write the behavior before the code
  4. 35"It works on my machine" — so we stopped trusting my machine
  5. 36Step 3 — the template: a questionnaire and a workflow
  6. 37Step 4 — the attorney gate is a graph invariant
  7. 38Step 5 — signature is a modular step
  8. 39Step 6 — the filing, run durably
  9. 40"It works on my machine" — even when my machine dies
  10. 41Why a workflow beats a prompt
  11. 42Privacy-preserving operations are part of the product
6

Chapter 6

Rust All the Way Down

  1. 43We did not start all Rust
  2. 44From Postgres to Rust — over a bridge, since dismantled
  3. 45The runtime story: keep the seam, change the engine
  4. 46One deployment bucket; many matter repositories
  5. 47Rust where we can own the path; partners at the edge
  6. 48Rust reaches the places lawyers work
  7. 49I want a commercial relationship with everything I depend on
  8. 50Always the latest, always Rust
  9. 51Swap the seam — it still works
  10. 52The crates we actually run on
  11. 53Ethics is part of the stack
  12. 54The simplest developer environment I can get away with
  13. 55The online developer environment
  14. 56"It works on my machine in the cloud — and on yours, and on my client's"
  15. 57Where we are today — live by August 20
  16. 58Betting on ourselves — Rust in peace
7

Chapter 7

Wrap Up

  1. 59Take the method home
Neon Law
BlogContactFoundationNavigatorPresentationsWorkshops
Contact us — contact@neonlaw.com+1 510 800 2080
  • Nevada
    5150 Mae Anne AveSte 405-9002Reno, NV 89523
  • New York
    12 E 49th St18th FloorNew York, NY 10017
  • Washington
    720 Seneca StSte 107-715Seattle, WA 98101

© 2026 Shook Law PLLC and Neon Law Foundation

This is attorney advertisement. Nothing on this site is legal advice. Neon Law is the trade name of Shook Law PLLC, and an attorney-client relationship begins only with a signed retainer between you and Shook Law PLLC. Published flat fees cover the scope each one names and do not include third-party filing fees. Every legal matter is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar result.

Shook Law PLLC is a proud supporter of the Neon Law Foundation , a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Neon Law Foundation is a Nevada nonprofit corporation and a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. It does not practice law and cannot represent you.

Nothing on this site is legal advice, and nothing here creates an attorney-client relationship.

5150 Mae Anne Ave Ste 405-9999, Reno, NV 89523
support@neonlaw.orgTransparency & public disclosures

Powered by Neon Law Navigator #26.8.20-hotfix.4

Open source — neon-law-foundation/navigator GitHub stars 2