2.3K WORDS · KOHTA KOUCHI
Where law and engineering overlap
Two fields that feel worlds apart, and the surprisingly large surface where they meet.
People assume law and engineering are opposites — one all precedent and prose, the other all logic and code. Spend time in both and the line blurs. A statute is a spec with edge cases; a contract is an API with a dispute-resolution clause.
Studying payment-services and financial-instruments law alongside building FinTech products, I keep finding the same skill underneath: read the rules precisely, find where they're ambiguous, and design so the ambiguity can't hurt you.
That overlap is most of why I do both. The combination is rarer than either alone, and in FinTech it's exactly the seam where the interesting work lives.