Legal’s Future Is “Architect Lawyers” (Whether You Like It or Not)
Legal is heading toward an uncomfortable truth: the people who shape what’s next won’t just “know the law.” They’ll design the systems that deliver it.
Not because everyone needs to become a developer. But because agency is moving down-stack. From committees to individuals. From vendors to builders. From “gatekeepers” to “architects of defensibility.”
And legal has a problem: it has trained generations of professionals to be brilliant inside a bundle that is breaking.
A year ago, “vibe lawyering” hit a nerve. The point wasn’t the punchline.
A year ago I said “vibe lawyering” out loud: the idea that non-lawyers already do a lot of legal work, and it’s more prevalent than the profession likes to admit.
It got eyeballs because it hit a nerve. Not because it was novel.
The uncomfortable part wasn’t “clients are doing legal work.” They always have. The uncomfortable part was agency: people shipping outcomes without waiting for the legal priesthood to bless every step.
That trend didn’t reverse. It got infrastructure.
The bundle is breaking, and it’s not “innovation”
For decades, the legal services bundle held because producing answers was expensive and verifying them was even harder. The firm sold analysis + legitimacy together.
You didn’t buy a memo. You bought the right to rely on it.
Now we’re crossing a threshold where analysis is getting cheaper faster than verification at scale. That changes the shape of the market.
Clients internalize production (drafting, issue-spotting, first-pass research).
They buy legitimacy only when stakes demand it (bet-the-company, novel risk, regulatory edge cases).
The market doesn’t transfer cleanly to new providers. It shrinks.
This is why so much “innovation” in big law feels like efficiency theater: more cash management, more utilization games, more margin defense. That’s not growth. That’s a business model trying to stay vertical while the value is going horizontal.
Incentives drive the world, and legal’s incentives hate agency
Charlie Munger’s entire point was simple: show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.
Legal’s current incentives produce low agency by design:
Investment is tied to committees.
Workflow changes require permission.
Tooling decisions are centralized.
The person closest to the friction can’t fix it.
Inefficiency increases billable hours and the bottom line.
So you get the classic partner experience: “I can change the argument. I cannot, or often, will not, change the process.” The system rewards excellent work inside the box, then acts shocked when no one rebuilds the box.
Also, don’t forget, lawyers have been a cornered resource. A regulated monopoly. Gatekeepers. The high priests. They don’t love intrusion from the peasants.
But monopolies have a tell: they confuse control with value. And when the underlying economics shift, control becomes a cost center.
“Best model” in legal is intelligence × defensibility × control
In most industries, the “best model” is raw capability. In legal, capability alone is not the product. Legal’s product is: intelligence × defensibility × control.
That’s why the market is bifurcating:
Low end: “probably right” tools, cheap, disposable, fast.
High end: “provably right” workflows, audited, governed, institutionally owned.
The middle gets crushed.
But here’s the tweak I’d make to the vibe debate:
I don’t buy that vibed software is inherently unverifiable. Assume models can build secure, enterprise-ready apps. Assume the plumbing gets real. Then it’s not only “middle squeezed.” The real fight becomes: who owns the designs.
Do you want to be intel? Or Nvidia?
Because when you can generate software, execution gets cheaper than architecture. The value migrates to:
the workflow spec,
the policy and controls,
the data boundaries,
the audit trail,
the institutional “right to rely.”
In other words: the blueprint, not the code.
This is the real strategic question for firms and departments:
Are you building for “probably right,” or are you building for “provably right?”
If you can’t answer that, you are not doing strategy.
Fabless legal tech: the future is custom, not packaged
Here’s the analogy I keep coming back to: Nike is fabless. Semiconductor giants are fabless. They don’t own the factory. They own the design, the supply chain, the standards, and the differentiation.
Legal tech is going the same direction.
Foundation models commoditize general intelligence. What differentiates is domain architecture:
What you integrate with
What you log
What you restrict
What you can prove
What you control end-to-end
If models can ship enterprise-grade apps, fabless becomes even more true. The “factory” becomes abundant. Design becomes scarce.
Jordan Bryan piece on “vibe-coding lawyers” is basically a blueprint for where this goes: lawyers building workflow-specific tools, but inside secure infrastructure with approvals, sandboxing, tests, and governance. That is not “apps.” That is an operating model.
And it points to the real shift: software development becomes a literacy, and legal professionals become the people who specify, validate, and govern systems.
Which brings us back to agency.
Agency, stacked: firm → department → professional → system
Let’s talk about agency the way it actually shows up.
1) Agency of the firm
Most firms are optimized for defensibility and cash flow. Not iteration.
Big committees. Slow procurement. Change requires political capital. The front door is guarded.
So when AI shows up, the default move is: buy a platform, run a pilot, announce a “transformation initiative,” and call it a day.
Meanwhile, the real leverage is slipping out the side door: the people closest to the work quietly building their own shortcuts.
2) Agency of the legal department
Legal departments are under pressure to ship faster with less. They cannot afford artisanal lawyering for everything.
So they will:
internalize commodity work,
automate first passes,
reserve outside counsel for edge cases and courtroom persuasion.
That is the shrink.
3) Agency of the legal professional
This is the most important layer because it is the layer with the most upside.
The lawyer who can say:
“Here’s the workflow.”
“Here are the failure modes.”
“Here are the controls.”
“Here’s what we can ship this week.”
…is going to run laps around the lawyer waiting for the committee.
Den Delimarsky describes this as becoming a “full stack person”: someone who can think across constraints, integration points, trade-offs, and execution speed. He even lists the exact questions architects ask: where friction happens, what paints you into a corner, how you validate output.
That is legal’s new core skillset. Not coding. Architecture.
And it’s the cleanest path to personal agency: if you can design the system, you don’t need permission to be useful.
4) Agency of the system
The legal system itself still has in-person moats:
courts,
persuasion,
human judgment under uncertainty,
legitimacy rituals.
But everything adjacent gets rebuilt: intake, triage, drafting, negotiation playbooks, compliance monitoring.
And here’s the punchline: the profession won’t be displaced only by “AI.” It’ll be displaced by clients and operators who can design and run legal systems without waiting for lawyers to show up.
The lawyers “out of the loop” become reviewers of machines, not designers of outcomes.
That is a downgrade in power.
So what does the “architect lawyer” actually do?
Not write Python all day.
They do what architects do:
Define requirements: what “good” means, by role and risk
Design controls: logging, audit, permissions, data boundaries
Specify defensibility: what must be provable, to whom, and when
Build verification loops: tests, checklists, human-in-the-loop gates
Own integration: documents, matter systems, email, billing, knowledge
Ship iteratively: small releases, fast learning, real adoption
They also understand the economics: interesting work still needs a payer. If nobody funds strategic work, money moves elsewhere. That is not a moral failing. It’s just gravity.
The Close: Stop tweaking. Start transforming.
Munger warned that old ideas crowd out new ones. People can’t accept the new because they are wedded to the old. Legal has a lot of old ideas. Many of them are billable.
So here’s the practical move if you want agency:
Pick one workflow you touch weekly. Then work backward from the end state:
Map the steps (including handoffs).
Name the invisible constraints (approvals, risk gates, missing data).
Decide the target: “probably right” or “provably right.”
Design the minimum viable system with controls.
Ship a prototype inside guardrails, then iterate.
If you can do that, you are no longer just practicing law.
You are building the system that practices it.
And that’s where legal is going, whether the committee approves it or not.
Appendix:
Credit to a long list of insightful thinkers and builders in the AI and Legal space. Check them out, they are brilliant.
Spot on. Remembering your "vibe lawyering" take from last year, this feels like the logical next commit. The "legal priesthood" bit always gets me. As someone passionate about AI, it's fascinating to see how even complex bundles are getting refactored.