More than 100 legal professionals built over 50 working applications at LegalTechTalk’s first Vibeathon last week, where Vibecode.law, Replit and Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer hosted a competition for general counsel, law firm partners, innovation leaders, academics and students to build without needing to code.

Rather than writing software by hand, participants use natural-language AI coding tools to turn an idea into a working app, building solo or in small teams. The LTT format was built to be accessible, with drop-in surgeries, live demonstrations and guided sessions running throughout so anyone could build at their own pace. The aim was not production-ready software on day one. Instead, organisers wanted to give legal professionals a way to demonstrate an idea rather than describe it, and to test concepts that might otherwise have stalled in committee.

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“For years, the gap between having a good idea and building it was enormous, and most ideas never made it past a slide deck,” said Chris Bridges, a community leader at Vibecode.law and a partner at Tacit Legal. “The Vibeathon collapsed that gap. People who have never written a line of code walked in with a problem and walked out with a working prototype.”

The other founding members of Vibecode.law are Alex Baker of Legal Tech Collective and Matt Pollins of Lupl.

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The founders say that the response at LTT far outstripped expectation and the 50 apps beat a pre-event target of 15, with entries judged across three categories: Lawyer Training, People, Planet & Justice, and Freestyle.

“What struck all of us was the range of people in the room,” said Alex Baker, “General counsel building alongside trainees, academics next to partners. When you lower the barrier to building, you find talent and ideas in places the industry usually overlooks.”

The overall category winners, announced live on stage, were:

  • Prosecution Analyser, a patent intelligence platform that turns fragmented EPO prosecution files into a coherent case story, built by Mark Hickling of CMS and winning Freestyle (https://lnkd.in/e6cW24QJ);
  • Chartered Territory, a due diligence platform that protects ordinary people buying property in India, built by Sneha Ganapavarapu and Ranjani Ramesh and winning People, Planet & Justice (https://lnkd.in/ef7cay5e); and
  • Black Mirror, an interactive training platform that helps turn junior associates into independent strategists, built by Alisa Kuckeland and a team at Freshfields and winning Lawyer Training (https://lnkd.in/eit_YxsC).

Two People’s Choice awards, voted by attendees, went to:

  • Counsel Bid, a procurement platform that makes law firm quotes transparent and sends a slice of every matter to charity, built by Anna Crosse (https://lnkd.in/e9e-nW65), and
  • ClearCube DPA Checker, which checks the data processing agreements of commonly used tech vendors, built by Alison Berryman of ClearCube Law (https://lnkd.in/e5yYgzqK).

Judges also highly commended:

“In the same way as we wouldn’t advise a client to vibedraft an SPA, we don’t believe vibecoded software is production-ready out of the box”, said Bridges. “But we do believe it’s the most powerful tool on the planet to get ideas out of your head, and the best way to learn how the underlying technologies work.”

The full list of entries is at https://vibecode.law/inspiration/challenges/legaltechtalk-vibeathon-2026