Bird & Bird Lawyer Creates BunTool, Free Legal Bundle Maker

Bird & Bird lawyer, Tristan Sherliker, has launched BunTool, which makes PDF bundles for court and other legal settings. The product is free, works off your desktop, and is already in use by law firms and barristers. However, he doesn’t see this as a vibe coding project, but rather as a market-ready product. (See AL Interview below.)

And if you’re wondering why this is a big deal, as Sherliker’s site explains: ‘Bundles in court are important, because a court can’t follow along with the evidence unless everyone is looking at the same thing.

‘Knowing what to put in and how to present them is a skill – but assembling them, paginating and bookmarking them is a pain. The Court’s rules can also be difficult to follow.’

In short, this is one of those bottleneck problems that legal tech was born to solve. And Sherliker has built a professional grade product that he’s offering for free to address this need. While it can be used by skilled lawyers, it can also be used by litigants in person.

He added: ‘Since its first release, it has been used by court users of every kind: litigants in person, local authorities, pro bono advocacy and welfare charities, established law firms, and mediators and barristers in countries across the world.’

AL Interview with BunTool founder Tristan Sherliker

Why do this?

I’m a solicitor advocate in IP with Bird & Bird. My background was originally in engineering and this is a separate side project of my own, developed in my personal time.

I’ve been writing my own legal software tools since I was a law student – I remember in my first term at law school, writing a typesetting style to handle all the formatting of legal documents, to make the assignments easier to manage.  Originally these tools were always for my own use, but there’s occasionally an opportunity to make something for others, or to collaborate – things like analysis tools, data visualisation, or even just scripts for organising and presenting evidence like software logs.  We do a lot of tech-forward work at Bird & Bird and as a group we like to work efficiently, so there are more changes than you might think.

BunTool was different. It’s great that our court system is moving towards e-bundles, but I got so frustrated with the layers of rules and formatting requirements we have to comply with – pagination, hyperlinking, bookmarking, zoom levels and font sizes… it can easily take an experienced lawyer an hour to make a bundle with desktop software. Even then it’s error-prone – and when you need to edit it, you have to go through all the steps again! So, I started by writing a script of my own to handle the main tasks and now two years later, it’s developed into a tool that’s helpful to everyone.

At the moment it’s used by many litigants in person, charities, at least two London law firms, and several barristers’ chambers. This is all based on thank-you emails I’ve received, since there’s no tracking.

Are you still working as a lawyer?

Yes! I love my work. I’m in tech & IP disputes, with a heavy skew towards the digital domain. It brings me into contact with some truly amazing people, and there’s always something new to learn about.

Why free?

Mainly because I’ve always been a believer in access to justice. I was a volunteer advocate and worked pro bono regularly before the covid changes, but time became rarer.  This is a way to continue that work.

For basics like bundles, I do think that complex procedure is the enemy of justice. Unrepresented people would have to discover and learn about all the rules – a day’s work! – before even beginning to make their first bundle. Charities and public offices don’t have time to spend an hour making these things up.

Po bono and open source software is a great synergy, so it was easy to adopt a FOSS model for BunTool.

How do you see legal tech now?  Is this a vibe code project?

As lawyers, we should face up to the fact that we’re in the information business. And we’re in the information age, so things should be ideal for us! But culturally so many of us have been lagging behind that curve.

I think it’s fantastic that this is changing and AI is lowering the barrier to entry for the information-first mindset. I hope the adoption continues, but I don’t think we’re at the stage where vibe coded tools are reliable as infrastructure yet.

So BunTool certainly isn’t vibe coded! All the functionality is written by hand. AI made a great bug-checker and sounding board for development. One exception is the visual site design – I’m not much of a designer and I had Claude run that up for me.

What tools did you use to make this?

A whole range of free software; Linux; Microsoft VS Code; and my trusty Alice keyboard.

Thanks Tristan, and congrats.

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You can find more about BunTool here.

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A Legal Tech Conference For All of Europe

Legal Innovators Europe – Paris – June 24 and 25.

There will be more news about the conference and key speakers as we get closer to June.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer and Legal Innovators conference Chair.

Note: the conferences are organised by Cosmonauts – please contact them with any queries. 

If you would like to be a speaker at Legal Innovators Europe, especially if you are at a law firm or inhouse legal team in Europe – whether based in France, Belgium, Spain or Germany, or beyond…..then please contact Phoebe at Cosmonauts:  phoebe@cosmonauts.biz

Note: if you are a legal tech company, please contact Robins: robins@cosmonauts.biz or Anjana anjana@cosmonauts.biz

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And if you’re in the US and looking for the next major event to join after Legal Week, then see you in California this June!

Legal Innovators California, the landmark West Coast legal tech event, will take place on June 10 and 11, in the heart of the Bay Area, the home to many of the world’s leading AI businesses – and plenty of legal tech pioneers as well! More information and tickets here.