Recorded at Legal Geek London 2026, this episode features Christian Bartsch, CEO of Bird & Bird, the international law firm known for its tech and sector-driven approach. Before taking the CEO role, Christian spent around thirty years as a tech lawyer, and he still sees himself as one at heart. Earlier that day, he took the stage to talk about the advantage of humans in an AI-enabled world.
In this conversation with Hidde Bruinsma, he goes deeper into what that means for lawyers, for juniors coming into the profession, and for how a global firm leads AI adoption from the top. What makes this conversation stand out is the combination of ambition and realism. Bird & Bird aims to grow to over 1 billion in revenue by 2029, yet Christian is clear that growth is the outcome of a strategy, not a strategy in itself.
He explains how AI fits into that picture:
-Why the human advantage lies in judgment: AI can produce answers, but it cannot take responsibility, and human talent has to move up the value chain from collating information to interpreting it for the client
-How juniors will need to climb that value chain much earlier in their careers, and why he compares it to the rise of in-house legal teams in the 1990s -Why sector-driven law firms will not just survive but thrive, and how that sector focus shapes Bird & Bird’s go-to-market strategy and new offices in Tokyo, Riyadh and Lisbon
-The green AI claim scanner, an award-winning tool that checks environmental marketing claims across hundreds of thousands of web pages, and why it is a service the firm could not have offered without AI
-Why law firms will need to build ecosystems with clients and vendors, and how to stay distinctive when every firm has access to the same AI and the same platforms
-What a hybrid lawyer is, and what it is not: not just handing someone an AI licence and hoping for the best, but lawyers who move from being sole producers of work to architects of it
-The rollout of Legora across the firm, with more than 200 multilingual workshops in six months, a digital academy and a global prompt library, aimed at common capability rather than common usage
-Why access to technology does not equal adoption, and adoption does not equal transformation, and the balance between moving too slow and losing competitive advantage or moving too fast and risking governance and trust
-Why AI output can look very plausible and still be completely wrong, and how building friction into training helps juniors think independently, check sources and defend their answer to a partner or client
-His view on pricing, with innovation pricing specialists on board and the hourly rate as one option on a wider menu
-The promise he made to his people: that they will be the best trained tech lawyers in the world
Christian offers a clear-eyed view from the top of an international law firm: AI brings efficiency and new opportunities, but the firms that win will be the ones that combine machine capability with human judgment, train everyone without exception, and keep the client at the centre.
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