About LegalQuants

2. What's the origin story of LegalQuants?

LegalQuants began in November 2025 as a WhatsApp group. There were just a handful of people in it, pulled together by Jamie Tso after he kickstarted the vibe-coding movement. He organised two hackathons with Manus and Replit in rapid succession, and it drew in like-minded, highly talented lawyers who were building. Most of them had been building alone, and the group was the first place they found each other.

The market did not see it that way. It dismissed this category of talent as “vibecoders” and “cowboy lawyers” and judged their work against production software on security and maintainability. But after a conversation with his high school friend, who used to work at Jane Street as a developer, Jamie came to the realisation that the dichotomy between “lawyer-built tools vs vendor-built tools” was the wrong frame. What mattered was lawyers who scale their own judgement with AI and capture the economic value of doing so. On 15 January 2026 he published the seminal essay “The Jane Street of Law: The rise of the Legal Quant” and named the category. “Legal quants” is now an industry term, used by leaders including Norm AI CEO John Nay to describe their lawyers.

Jamie met his co-founder Raymond Sun in that same WhatsApp group. He considered Raymond the original legal quant. Raymond had solo-built the Global AI Regulation Tracker to 70k+ users, which became the most wanted connector for the Claude for Legal plugin.

The two met in person for the first time in Tokyo in May 2026. Over several days they agreed to make it their mission not only to let legal quants find each other, but to let the market find them. LegalQuants was formally incorporated as a private company in mid-April 2026 and set out to build that market.

The LegalQuants Residency (launched in May 2026) is the first iteration of what that market looks like for legal quants, where experienced legal quants are paid to teach fellow lawyers how to build their own tools. As of today, LegalQuants remains a bootstrapped company.

3. What has LegalQuants built?

The academy is the LegalQuants Residency. Over four weeks, a cohort of lawyers from law firms, in-house teams and legal engineering companies each build a real tool. The first week is preparation; the next three are mentored building. Every resident is paired one-to-one with a mentor who is building in their own practice, not just using commercial products. Residents have three one-hour sessions a week and two webinars a week with outside speakers. The rest of the work fits around the resident's own schedule. Residents leave with a working tool and a clearer view of what is possible beyond commercial tools.

The community is where members keep building. It includes member channels, a public member directory, LQ Brain (a shared knowledge base) and roundtables. Members build LQAI and other open-source work together. LegalQuants contributes open-source work to Anthropic's Claude for Legal plugin and to OpenAI for Law.

The standard is LQ Assess: an observed work session where a lawyer builds under time pressure and is graded by practising legal quants. Today it is the admissions floor for the community.

4. Who runs LegalQuants?

LegalQuants is run by its two co-founders, Jamie Tso and Raymond Sun. There are no employees. We periodically invite distinguished members to serve as mentors on the LegalQuants Residency, which is a paid role for the duration of a cohort. Mentors speak for their own work, not for LegalQuants. We have not appointed regional, community or practice leads.

5. How can I work with LegalQuants?

If you are an aspiring legal quant, see our Community Guidelines for the ways in.

If you represent a law firm or an in-house team, we can train your lawyers to become legal quants through the LegalQuants Residency. Lawyers from firms including Latham, Weil, Sheppard Mullin, Willkie Farr, A&O Shearman and Dorsey & Whitney have already attended. Where you would rather hire than train, we run a targeted search across the membership. Write to admin@legalquants.com and tell us what you are trying to solve.