'Vibe coding lawyers': How AI is changing work at Trilegal

"We have vibe coding and Biryani sessions on Fridays…”This is not a scene from a tech startup or a weekend hackathon. It is a statement by Nikhil Narendran, a partner at Trilegal who heads the firm’s digital innovation group.Naturally, our host Praveen Gopal Krishnan was taken aback. Lawyers who are coding away? Who could imagine?Praveen was even more surprised when Nikhil said he almost never types and only uses Wispr Flow now. “You are the first non-tech person to say that,” he admits.This episode takes you inside a law firm that is aggressively using, collaborating, and experimenting with AI.About 75% of Trilegal’s lawyers currently use AI at various stages of their workflows. Several projects are underway and some prototypes are even created in-house. In fact, legal AI platform Lucio was incubated inside the firm and is its primary service provider. All of this is not surprising considering how tech forward Trilegal has been. For context: they started using Slack in 2012.In this episode, host Brady Ng tries to understand what Anthropic’s plugins mean beyond the immediate market shockwaves. Nikhil unpacks this through the choices made at Trilegal over the last couple of years, getting into the details of SLMs, custom-GPTs, multi-LLM systems, context windows, and much more.This is an episode on legal AI  — a rapidly-growing space that does not get enough attention in our tech conversations.This is our first attempt at diving into the AI usage of a non-technical industry. What did you think of it? Would you like to hear similar stories? What other industries are you curious about? Write to us at [email protected] episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Rajiv CN.---Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.---Additional Resources Trilegal's Rahul Matthan on the firm, the partnership, and the principleshttps://www.lucioai.com/https://wisprflow.ai/Lawyers don’t like tech. Businesses don’t like legal teams. Spotdraft wants to fix it allHarvey reportedly raising at $11B valuation just months after it hit $8B