Reptiles also prefer warmer climates... It's all starting to make sense now.
- NLP applications, many practitioners and judges may not trust the software especially if implemented by a hobbyist and prefer many paralegals review manually. I'd pursue this more out of interest or to solve a personal workflow issue but be wary of generalising unless it becomes your main focus.
- Integrations with word/excel can definitely be useful. I wrote a bunch of simple VBA add-ons in Excel to help with mundane parts of managing a large e-discovery. But I found it a real slog to learn the word/excel specific stuff, so wouldn't recommend it as a first hobbyist project.
- Learning how to ingest various docs and do regex saved me the most time. If you do a lot of e-discovery and your firm's platform of choice supports regex just learning that grammar is probably the best bang for buck. Downloading and searching a smaller number if files locally can also be good. Was always disappointed when the files I wanted were in a "secure" dealroom so I couldn't legitimately download or scrape them.