Vibe Coding Empowers Lawyers to Influence AI Winners, Losers

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Opinion: Law firms must realize that vibe coding can be the most direct form of product research for legal technology ever produced. What lawyers design themselves—and what they don't bother building—is a novel way of discovering an unmet need. Partners should resist the temptation to view this as an 'either-or' scenario in which law firms diverge on accepting internal vibe coding.

Why it matters

The integration of large language models into daily legal practice has been extensive, with 83% of lawyers in 2026 having 'broad AI access.' This signals that the barrier to software development for nontechnical professionals has collapsed. Vibe coding, the practice of building software using natural language prompting, is championed by its evangelists as the future of software development, and its adoption has now spread to law firms and its partners.

The details

Vibe coding tools like Anthropic's Claude Code have improved rapidly, and law firms now can flip the script on how legal technology is evaluated. What lawyers design themselves—and what they don't bother building—is a novel way of discovering an unmet need. Law firms must concentrate their technology spend on the demonstrably valuable tools that emerge from this experimentation, rather than scattering budgets across dozens of overlapping vendors. Any individual firm's homegrown tool will be a temporary advantage at best, as successful tech experiments inside law firms will eventually end up being turned into products by external software vendors and then sold back to the firms themselves.

• In November, tech analyst Benedict Evans explained how AI is 'eating the world' during his annual presentation on the state of artificial intelligence.
• Last month, the author attended LegalWeek in New York.
• Last year, Microsoft Corp. reported that 90% of the Fortune 100 were using its GitHub Copilot product for AI coding.
• SemiAnalysis has projected that at the current trajectory, Anthropic's Claude Code would account for over 20% of all daily code changes by the end of 2026.
• Data shows that 83% of lawyers in 2026 have 'broad AI access,' which is up from 61% in 2025.

What they’re saying

What’s next

Law firms must learn to inhabit the economics of software markets. As has always been the case with enterprise software, successful tech experiments inside law firms will eventually end up being turned into products by external software vendors and then sold back to the firms themselves.