Tanya Sadoughi - Why Lawyers Should Become Builders. A story on vibe coding

A banking lawyer at one of the world's largest law firms teaches herself Python on weekends. She builds an AI-powered billing tool in a Jupyter notebook. Months later, that tool is rolled out across the entire firm.

Tanya Sadoughi is Linklaters' AI and Innovation Lead Lawyer for Global Banking. When ChatGPT launched one month into her innovation secondment, she saw the opportunity before most others did. She talked to every lawyer in the banking practice, mapped every pain point, and built a working prototype herself.

That prototype became the WIP Summariser, now deployed firmwide. Today she leads a team of five AI lawyers inside a global network of twenty.

Vibe coding is changing how lawyers work. Not by replacing them, but by turning them into builders. Tanya explains what that looks like inside a major international law firm. From hackathons that spark curiosity to agentic systems that solve problems at scale.

You'll learn

• Why the AI lawyer role should always be filled internally
• How a weekend prototype became an enterprise tool at Linklaters
• What vibecoding means for the legal profession
• Why hackathons are the best way to spark AI curiosity at law firms
• How Linklaters scaled from one to twenty AI lawyers
• What lawyers and engineers can learn from each other

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Chapters

0:00 Introduction

2:04 Will lawyers become builders

4:53 Growing up in a pizza shop in South Yorkshire

9:17 A viral YouTube channel at 15

11:16 Why she chose law

13:29 Becoming a banking lawyer at Linklaters

15:42 The itch for something different

17:35 ChatGPT launches one month into her innovation role

19:28 First experiments with large language models

23:18 The billing problem nobody could solve

27:26 Learning Python on weekends

31:31 The moment the prototype worked

35:31 Hackathons and sparking curiosity at law firms

40:23 From one AI lawyer to twenty

43:47 Vibecoding five apps in one week

46:31 What engineers and lawyers can learn from each other

51:23 Why every law firm needs an AI lawyer

53:01 More builders not more tools

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