The vibe coding revolution is upon us!

We are seeing posts on LinkedIn every other day about lawyers who have vibe coded solutions.

The age of AI is changing everything!

But, is this really going to change everything? Maybe for some people, but unlikely for large firms and enterprise legal teams.

In the 90s, many law firms bought expensive PCs to decorate the desks of partners. These PCs sat idle, gathering dust as literal “shelf-ware”. Today, there are many firms who have bought enterprise wide licenses to generative AI tools that are also under-utilized. In this blog piece, we ask the question of how we can solve this, and what lessons we can learn from the PC experience in the 90s.

As the market continues to accelerate in the widespread adoption of generative AI tools, a gap is beginning to emerge. Legal work can be produced at great speed by AI, but AI slop is tainting otherwise accurate and correct legal advice. This it the gap we want to close.

How do we build tools that help human experts verifying legal work?

There is an elephant in every law firm’s board room right now. Very few people have any ideas about their “AI strategy”, because very few people are thinking about the strategy for their law firms. The spade of announcements about successful adoption and rollout of generalist AI tools is evidence supporting this lack of “AI strategy” at most firms.

When looking at problems that customers want to solve, we often find ourselves asking the “five whys”. Almost always, we reach the preliminary conclusion that, for lawyers, their core problem is an information problem. So, if we can retrieve better information for them, then we solve their problems.

After much contemplation, we realized that information is the old and slightly outdated answer…

More and more legal tech vendors are releasing tools with the same (or highly similar) features. Maybe it’s because gen AI makes it so easy to build. So, when everything becomes same, same, same, how do you pick the winners? And, how do you mitigate the risks of picking not a winner?

Oz Benamram issued a prediction for the market: we should be prepared for AI self-service legal chatbots in two years. How likely is this scenario to occur? Are law firms and businesses ready? Are the signs already flashing in neon red for those who are paying attention?

Even the latest LLMs remain susceptible to prompt injections. The risk is not only theoretical. We conducted a series of experiments to identify some real scenarios where even prudent lawyers may be at risk.

For those of us working with legal tech, we often find ourselves needing to build solutions (whether because a solution doesn’t exist, or nothing quite closes the last mile). This blog post shares the methods we use to discover how to “start with the problem".

Has the increased attention on Gen AI experiment and adoption been harmful to the broader legal tech ecosystem? Is Gen AI's dominance crowding out better solutions? Or are we just in an awkward but necessary transition?