How Best Lawyers turned 40% of staff into app builders
Best Lawyers is a 40-year-old peer-review ranking service for attorneys. It is not the company you would expect to show up with a story about non-technical employees building live production apps in under an hour. Yet that is exactly what CEO Phillip Greer and SVP of Research and Product Strategy Elizabeth Petit described in a recent interview on The Geek in Review podcast.
Here is the condensed version of what they built, how they staffed it, and what broke along the way.
The Outcome First
As of the interview, roughly 40 percent of Best Lawyers’ workforce are active vibe coders building internal applications against company data. That number started at around 30 percent and has been climbing as more departments onboard.
A question raised in a 9:30 meeting now regularly produces a working internal application by 10:30. Projects that previously required Excel formulas, Power BI reports, development queues, and weeks of waiting are gone. The company no longer uses Power BI or Tableau. Every department runs dashboards it built itself.
️ How Greer Built the Foundation
Greer spent the holiday break in December and all of January building the infrastructure. His engineering background informed the architecture: before anyone could build anything useful, all the company’s data needed to live in one accessible, self-aware layer.
He connected SQL databases, accounting data, HubSpot, Gong, and Google Analytics into a unified API layer. The goal was a system where each data source understands how it relates to the others. A firm record in Gong maps to the same firm in HubSpot and in the analytics data. When someone queries across those systems, the layer already knows the relationships.
On top of that data layer, he built the Best Lawyers App Store: a secure Claude-powered environment where employees vibe code applications against company data without touching production systems, leaking data to external AI services, or breaking anything downstream.
What Non-Engineers Actually Built
Petit came from a research background, not software engineering. After a 30-minute onboarding session with Greer, she built research and KPI dashboards that track nominations and voting in real time during Best Lawyers’ annual rankings process.
The head of content built expense-tracking systems for paid media budgets. The marketing team pulled Google Analytics into a full-funnel conversion dashboard. The finance team started generating data pages that used to take a week or two in Excel.
Greer’s framing: the hardest creative work was never writing the Excel formula. It was deciding what question to ask once you had the data. The App Store removes the formula step and puts the creative decision front and center.
The Engineer Question
Announcing that every employee would become a builder created a predictable reaction from the engineering team. Greer described significant skepticism. These were craftspeople who had spent careers writing quality code, and the implication felt like a demotion.
Petit’s response was to run bi-weekly sessions where engineers showed each other what they had been vibe coding, in a low-stakes environment. The framing Greer used: vibe coding is not Guitar Hero to a real guitarist. Both the craftsman and the vibe coder are building real things. The methods differ; the output is real either way.
Over time, engineers found that the App Store changed their job in a useful direction. Instead of building another intranet reporting screen, they were solving architecture problems. When one employee tried to pull hundreds of millions of analytics data points into a single app and kept crashing it, an architect stepped in and redesigned the API layer to feed data in manageable slices. That kind of infrastructure work is what engineers actually want to do.
Greer also moved the data architecture from SQL to Elasticsearch so the first read comes from a faster multi-server environment rather than a single-server SQL bottleneck. Those are the projects engineers had been waiting for.
The Governance Model
Greer did not stay as the infrastructure owner. He identified one programmer, Seth, who had the strongest interest in AI infrastructure and trained him for a week on the system. Seth now runs the API library. When vibe coders need more data sources or new capabilities added to the App Store, they go through Seth.
Greer’s observation: knowing what to build is now harder than being able to build it. When the bottleneck shifts from execution to judgment, the muscle you need to train is scope.
⚠️ The AI Vampire Problem
Petit named a real side effect. The feedback loop in vibe coding is immediate. The machine never gets tired, never goes to dinner, and never stops responding. That creates what Greer called the AI vampire effect: people keep working because the system keeps producing, and cognitive fatigue accumulates faster than people notice.
The fix is human judgment about when to stop, not a technical guardrail. That is harder than it sounds.
The GEO Layer: What This Means for Search
Separate from the internal transformation, Greer outlined how Best Lawyers is thinking about Generative Engine Optimization. The short version: SEO is not dead, but it is no longer sufficient on its own.
Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini now give users answers without surfacing the familiar list of blue links. Law firms and ranking services that saw 15 to 30 percent drops in web traffic experienced this directly. The content that feeds those AI overviews has to be structured differently than content optimized for traditional crawlers.
Greer’s argument is that third-party peer-reviewed data carries a different trust signal in GEO than content a firm produces about itself. Best Lawyers’ 40-year peer-review history and established domain authority make its rankings a credible signal that AI systems can weigh when deciding who to cite.
Smithy AI: The External Product
Best Lawyers also shipped Smithy AI, a tool that helps attorneys and law firm marketers generate profile content without copy-pasting the same biography across every directory. Smithy reads Best Lawyers’ structured data alongside content already on a lawyer’s website and produces a draft.
Petit’s framing: it gets you roughly 90 percent of the way there. It is not a copy-paste of existing content, and it can iterate on its output if you want a different angle. Human editorial judgment is still required before publishing anywhere.
The name comes from Gregory White Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and one of Best Lawyers’ original co-founders.
The Replication Playbook
If you want to run a version of this inside your own company, the sequence Greer followed is worth noting:
- Build the data layer first. Connect your core systems (CRM, analytics, finance, sales) into a unified API layer where the data sources understand their relationships to each other. Without this, vibe-coded apps will either crash or produce unreliable outputs.
- Create a safe sandbox. Employees will not experiment if they think they can break production data or leak sensitive information. The App Store model isolates vibe coding from real consequences.
- Hand off infrastructure ownership early. Greer trained one person, Seth, for a week and stepped back. The CEO should not be the head vibe coder. Find the person on your team most interested in AI infrastructure and make it their job.
- Run show-and-tell sessions. Bi-weekly demos where employees show what they built created social proof and dismantled the stigma that vibe coding was beneath technical staff.
- Let engineers own the hard problems. Architecture, data governance, query performance, and guardrail design are what engineers want to work on. Free them from intranet forms and reporting screens, and they will solve the problems that actually matter.
Best Lawyers also added Artificial Intelligence Law as a formal practice area in the 2026 edition of The Best Lawyers in America, reflecting how AI-related work has spread across technology, intellectual property, privacy, employment, compliance, litigation, and counseling. The long-term economic question for law firms, according to Greer and Petit, is not how many hours AI saves but how firms explain, price, and defend the value of human judgment once routine production gets dramatically faster.
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