Legal vibe coding is taking off as lawyers turn side projects into working tools

While much of the legal AI conversation is at the enterprise end of the market, with well-funded startups battling for market share among the largest law firms and in-house teams, away from the headlines something quieter is also happening.

Individual lawyers are starting to vibe code their own legal tech tools as side projects, using AI-assisted development to fix the small frustrations of everyday legal work.

From associates to developers

Much of the recent momentum can be traced to Clifford Chance senior associate Jamie Tso, whose LinkedIn posts documenting his vibe-coding experiments have taken off in legal circles.

Tso has been openly sharing tools he’s built for tasks like bulk document analysis and redlining, and making them publicly available. More recently, he launched the LegalQuant Hackathon, which has already produced 20 working legal tech apps just one week after launch.

Others have gone further, with tools that started as side projects now being rolled out inside some of the world’s biggest law firms.

We previously covered the story of Linklaters associate James Phoenix who built an AI time recording tool on the side that is now used across the firm. What once might have been dismissed as tinkering is increasingly becoming genuinely useful within large firms.

A new layer in legal tech

The latest sign of how popular the trend is becoming is the launch of vibecode.law, an open, community-run platform designed to showcase and support legal professionals experimenting with tech.

The project began as a weekend build by Chris Bridges, a partner at law firm Tacit Legal, Alex Baker of Legal Tech Collective and Matt Pollins of legal tech company Lupl. It’s fully open source and positioned not as a replacement for established legal tech, but as an earlier stage in the innovation lifecycle.

As Baker told us, there’s no dominant tech stack people are using yet. Beginners are gravitating towards popular tools like Lovable or Google AI Studio, while more confident users towards Replit, Cursor or Claude Code.

What stands out, he says, is the focus on small, well-defined pain points in everyday legal work.

One example is DocUnlock, a tool that helps lawyers clean up heavily marked-up documents so they can be reused. As Baker says: “It’s not ‘venture-scale’ and will likely never become a standalone business, but it is genuinely useful and neatly captures the spirit of what’s happening here.”

More broadly, he says the project is about “individuals experimenting with creating solutions to their own everyday frustrations, or quickly building prototypes for ideas that could be developed further.”