Built on a Weekend: Damien Riehl and Mike Bommarito Show What Vibe Coding Can Really Do

Why It Matters

Vibe coding accelerates legal‑tech creation and standardization, giving firms a competitive edge through rapid, interoperable AI‑driven solutions.

Key Takeaways

• Vibe coding builds legal tools in single weekends using AI.
• Folio expands Sally ontology to 18,000 tags for universal interoperability.
• Open-source Folio Explorer offers password‑free browsing of legal taxonomies.
• AI‑generated legal documents blend human and model contributions seamlessly.
• Law firms can prototype solutions faster, cutting development cycles dramatically.

Summary

The Law Next episode spotlights "vibe coding," a rapid AI‑driven development approach used by Damien Riehl and Mike Bommarito. By leveraging generative‑AI coding assistants, they create functional legal‑tech tools over a single weekend, turning concepts into production‑ready software without traditional engineering teams.

Their flagship effort, the Folio Project, forks the existing Sally ontology—already adopted by LexisNexis, iManage, Microsoft, and others—and expands it from a few thousand to roughly 18,000 standardized tags. With these tags they built a suite of utilities, including a no‑login Folio Explorer that lets users browse and search legal taxonomies instantly, eliminating the friction of password‑protected platforms like WebProtege.

A striking example is the Vatican’s Catholic Data Commons, where Folio tags are applied to Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More texts, demonstrating the ontology’s reach beyond secular law into ethical and religious domains. The hosts also address skeptics on Reddit who dismiss AI‑coded tools as toys, countering that real‑world lawyers are already deploying these solutions in practice.

The broader implication is a paradigm shift for law firms and legal‑tech vendors: development cycles shrink from months to days, interoperability becomes native, and open‑source standards lower barriers to entry. As AI coding matures, firms that adopt vibe‑coded solutions can prototype, iterate, and deploy faster than competitors, reshaping the legal‑technology landscape.

Original Description

We don’t usually say this, but for today's LawNext, you’re going to want to watch the video version, if you can. The audio will be good, but the video will be great. You can find it on YouTube.

Why? Because we’re going to be talking today about vibe coding, and you're going to want to see what our guests are showing today, not just hear them tell about it.

Those guests are Damien Riehl and Michael Bommarito. By day, Damien works on AI products at Clio and Mike is CEO of 273 Ventures, a company that provides AI strategy and services for law firms and legal professionals.

But outside their day jobs, they are also founders of the ALEA Institute, the Institute for the Advancement of Legal and Ethical AI, where a central focus of theirs is the FOLIO Project, which is seeking to develop and maintain open legal standards and a comprehensive ontology to enable different legal systems to communicate with each other. FOLIO is an outgrowth of the SALI Alliance, whose ontology was largely developed by Damien.

So what does any of this have to do with vibe coding?

Well, in connection with their FOLIO project, Damien and Mike have been building an array of tools for tagging and enriching legal documents (FOLIO Enrich), for mapping law firm taxonomies (FOLIO Mapper), for browsing and editing legal ontologies (FOLIO Ontology Explorer), and much more. (See the full list of FOLIO resources.)

And they’ve built all of it by vibe coding. Not over months, not with a team of developers, but on their own, often in a single weekend day, using AI coding tools.

When Damien first showed LawNext host Bob Ambrogi what he and Mike were developing, Bob thought, “It's not enough for me to just write about this. It really has to be seen, in action.” So he asked Damien and Mike to come on LawNext, share their screens, walk us through what they've been building, and show us what vibe coding actually looks like in action when it's applied to serious legal technology problems.

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THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS

This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.

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Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Vibe Coding and Guests

03:00 Understanding the Folio Project

06:06 The Role of the Alia Institute

08:59 Vibe Coding: Tools and Techniques

11:43 The Future of Legal Tech and Vibe Coding

14:09 Open Gloss: A New Project

17:31 Implications for Legal Research

18:53 The Changing Landscape of Legal Consulting

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