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The bar for building software has dropped as low as it’s ever been.
‘Just a ChatGPT wrapper’ sounds like an insult, and I guess it is. But a whole bunch of what you might call ‘legacy SaaS’ could equally be called ‘just an Excel plus workflow wrapper’.
Replit is amazing. Lovable is fantastic. We can dismiss ‘vibe-coding’ all we want, but I’ve built with these tools, I’ve used apps and POCs that my colleagues have made and they’re robust and compelling. They made them in minutes - not weeks.
It’s not quite the same as when YouTube made everyone a creator, but it’s close. So if software development has been democratized, what does it mean for one of the oldest tensions in legal technology: do you buy, or do you build?
Back in the olden days - let’s say 2023 - build vs buy was a no-brainer. Building software meant engineers, designers, product managers working furiously to get something that solved problems, had great user experience and was stable. Maybe 1 in 50 tech-forward legal teams worked at a company that had those resources spare and willing to devote their time to legal.
Layer on top the failure rate of internal software builds and it was a pretty straightforward choice. You bought.
Fast forward to today and legal teams with the right mix of skills and curiosity can vibe code just about anything - without depending on legal tech vendors or internal resources.
It might be cheaper and faster to build a point solution in-house with what are now mass-market tools, than to go through the beauty parade of evaluating that particular corner of legal tech, making a business case and then buying a platform.
If your pain point is summarizing a doc, you don’t need legal tech: you need ChatGPT. If you want to build a ticketing system, you don’t need legal tech: you need Zapier.
So far, so good. But … when you reach a certain level of complexity, or risk, or monetary value … your vibe-coded solutions will start to creak. And then break.
It might be that you need a custom workflow that’s right for your business and for your ideal customer. It might be that your regulatory environment needs a specific scenario for personal data. It might be that you can’t send sensitive customer data to a third party in California.
It might be that the one integration that’s essential for the industry you serve is just a bit clunky when you run it via your vibe-coded solution.
This is where legal tech vendors can and should be adding value that can’t easily be reproduced with off-the-shelf tools.
But you are not buying software. You are buying the experience and expertise of a vendor that deeply understands user behaviour and has iterated thousands of times to create the perfect solution. The question is, when you look at your vendors … do they deliver that?
If not, and for everything else, there’s ChatGPT.
Richard Mabey is the CEO and co-founder of Juro, the intelligent contract automation platform. Under his leadership, Juro has scaled rapidly, backed by $38 million in venture funding from prominent investors including Eight Roads, USV, Point Nine Capital and Seedcamp, and the founders of companies like Indeed, Gumtree and Wise.
Richard trained and qualified at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, working as an M&A associate in London and New York. He gained an MBA from INSEAD, and then spent time at LegalZoom, learning to build legal tech products.
Frustrated by the manual legal processes that slow down businesses, Richard co-founded Juro in 2016, with a mission to help the world agree contracts faster. Beyond Juro, he hosts the "Brief Encounters" podcast, makes angel investments, and supports other ambitious ventures from the boardroom. Richard is a Fellow of the RSA, an adviser to The Entrepreneurs Network and sits as a Non-executive Director of Bright Blue.