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No, I read the whole thing.
Every single thing you give as an example of how the law is unlike software is essentially true about software. Anyone who's worked in the field professionally for six months could tell you as much.
Will you deal with thousands of years of cases piling on top of each other? No, but you will deal with things in projects that are the way they are because someone did it a certain way a year ago. You will deal with that pretty much every day.
I'm sure a programmer would never write deliberately obscure or convoluted code to guarantee himself or other programmers jobs. Here's an essay about it I was forwarded just this week: . There's also an excellent interview with Bjarne Stroustrup that's been making the rounds for years, essentially stating that he wrote C++ in the convoluted, bass-ackward way he did to keep programmers in jobs for years to come. It's almost certainly fake, but if you work for C++ for very long, you won't be too sure about that -- and C++ is hardly the most 'special' language out there by a long shot.
Anyone who's worked on a software project for any duration has seen design that defies logic and sense. On almost any project, what the client or stakeholders demand of development will almost certainly defy logic and sense. They may smile prettily at logic and promise to build something beautiful from it, but once logic steps behind the proverbial project barn it is quickly tasered and fitted for a gimp mask. The building blocks are logical and orderly, of that there's no doubt, but what is constructed from them is, with few exceptions, most certainly not.
I've seen people who were never cut out to be lawyers lured into practicing law by watching too many TV courtroom dramas. With few exceptions, they were unhappy or terrible at it and made a poor living from the law at best. Equally, I've seen art students and the like "retrained" to be programmers during the height of the dot.com boom. With very few exceptions, they were unhappy at it and generally incapable of performing anything but the simplest tasks satisfactorily.
There's logic and reason and order to both disciplines, but there's beauty and art, too. Even throwing extreme examples like the Johnny Cochrans of the world aside, a truly gifted lawyer can make a great living, including many who work in less than glamorous fields such as real estate law. Similarly, even discarding your early-days-of-Microsoft billionaires, a truly gifted software engineer or architect can make a great living, including many using unglamourous tools and technologies.
In both cases, it's often the combination of people skills and technical/legal knowledge that makes a truly successful professional. I know a (non-trial) lawyer who makes a great living, essentially because he is a very likeable, very natural networker. The most successful developers I've met are similar; they have a facility for working with non-technical clients and bridging the gap between worlds for them that is not easily replaced and impossible to outsource.
Both professions have, in recent memory, drawn many people that would not normally choose them because of the perceived salary or growth opportunities of the career.
Both fields have countless specializations, each with its own volumes of knowledge and lore useless for any of the other disciplines. You can take a patent lawyer and throw him in a murder trial, and while he probably knows the basics he's probably not going to be great at it. You can take an IBM mainframe COBOL programmer and toss him on a .NET web-based project, but I wouldn't expect great results.
I'm not going to tell you these two fields are identical or equivalent. They're certainly not. However, there's more than enough in common there on many levels that it's silly to mock someone for comparing them.
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