Buy vs build: did vibe-coding kill legal tech?

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.