India’s first ‘vibe-coding’ hackathon for lawyers opens registration

The Indian LegalTech Network (ILTN) and vibecode.law have launched India’s first “vibe-coding” hackathon for lawyers.

The three-week ILTN × vibecode.law Vibeathon 2026 invites lawyers, law students and other legal professionals to use AI-assisted coding platforms to build working tools aimed at solving problems in legal practice.

The submissions close at 5 pm IST on September 11. No prior coding experience is required to participate.

“Vibe coding” refers to a form of AI-assisted software development in which users describe what they want to build in natural language and use artificial intelligence to generate, modify and refine the underlying code.

Under the format, participants will work on legal problems and develop functional tools using AI-assisted development platforms.

Trilegal is sponsoring a total prize pool of ₹1.5 lakh, comprising ₹75,000 for the winning team, ₹50,000 for the runner-up and ₹25,000 for the second runner-up.

The firm will also offer an internship to law students who are part of the winning team.

The judging panel for the competition includes Head of Legal Technology at Trilegal Dipti Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas Komal Gupta, Director of Applied AI at Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Rahul Chhabra, Chief Legal Futurist at LawDroid Sateesh Nori and Assistant Professor of Legal Practice at Jindal Global Law School Spriha Bhandari.

The organisers said the initiative seeks to address a longstanding gap between identifying problems in legal practice and having the resources or technical expertise needed to turn those problems into software.

They held that AI-assisted development tools have lowered the technical barriers to creating such tools, including for users without coding experience.

The Vibeathon aims to test this approach in India by giving lawyers three weeks to identify and build solutions to legal problems.

All submissions will be hosted on vibecode.law. It is an open community platform launched earlier in 2026 by Chris Bridges of Tacit Legal, Matt Pollins of Lupl and Alex Baker of Legal Tech Collective.

Eligibility and team criteria:

• The Vibeathon is open to Indian nationals only.

• Every team must include at least one lawyer, in-house counsel, or law student.

• Solo entries are also permitted.

Coding experience: No prior coding experience required

Registration details:

Interested participants can register here.

For more details visit: https://vibecode.law/inspiration/challenges/iltn-vibeathon