Automating Legal Evidence Management: How a Programmer Works Only 10 Minutes a Day

A Reddit post about "using automation to finish work" quickly went viral, garnering over 80,000 up‑votes and thousands of comments. The author, an IT specialist employed by a mid‑size law firm, described how he turned his daily evidence‑management tasks into a fully automated workflow.

His firm was migrating its evidence‑management system to the cloud and needed a single person with cloud‑admin privileges. Rather than spending eight hours a day on the job, he spent about a week writing, debugging, and polishing a simple PowerShell script.

The script scans local drives for new files, generates hash values, transfers the files to the cloud, and then re‑hashes them to verify integrity—an essential step for courtroom admissibility. After the script runs, he merely clocks in, checks the logs, and clocks out, spending roughly ten minutes at his desk each day.

He earns close to $90,000 a year, and while some view his approach as lazy, he argues that he is simply completing the work he was hired to do, freeing time for personal projects. The core script consists of a few lines of batch‑style PowerShell code sourced from online searches, customized to handle large folders and skip problematic directories.

Discussion in the comments turned to the ethics of hiding automation from employers. Similar stories have emerged, such as a programmer who automated a six‑year workload to ten minutes and was later fired, and another who deliberately introduced errors to conceal the extent of automation.

These examples raise questions about job security, transparency, and the moral implications of automating tasks that were traditionally performed manually.