Bjarne Tellmann | Law in the Era of AI: Clients, Firms, and the Future of the Legal Industry

The Law in World Affairs program at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs presents an in person talk with Bjarne P. Tellmann, CEO of FjordStream Advisors and former chief legal officer at Haleon and Pearson. A leading scholar on AI’s impact on legal institutions, he currently teaches at Yale Law School.

This talk will take place at the Syracuse University College of Law, in Dineen Hall.

Artificial intelligence is often discussed in the legal profession as a new tool for lawyers. This talk advances a broader argument: AI will transform legal institutions primarily because it is transforming the organizations they serve.

As corporations become AI-enabled enterprises, operating with greater speed, scale, connectivity, and increasingly automated decision-making, their legal departments will need to evolve in parallel, rethinking how legal work is organized and delivered, how knowledge and data are used, and how increasingly powerful AI systems are governed while preserving human judgment and accountability. Those changes will, in turn, reshape the market for legal services, placing pressure on traditional law-firm models built around leverage and human throughput while creating opportunities for new organizational forms, technology platforms and alternative providers.

Drawing on research, three decades of global executive experience, and themes from his Yale Law School seminar on the transformation of legal institutions in the age of AI, Bjarne Tellmann will examine how this chain of institutional change may unfold and what it means for legal leadership, professional judgment, governance, competition and the future role of lawyers. The central question is not simply what AI can do, but how legal institutions will reorganize around its capabilities, how they will govern those capabilities responsibly, and what they will choose to preserve as they do.

Bjarne P. Tellmann is the former founding general gounsel of Haleon (FTSE 20) and chief legal officer of Pearson (FTSE 100), who now writes, teaches and advises on how artificial intelligence is reshaping legal institutions and the profession’s leadership. He is a visiting clinical lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches a course on the transformation of legal institutions in the age of AI, a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, and a regular guest lecturer at Harvard Law School. He also serves on the U.K. Civil Justice Council’s Futures Group, which examines the long-term impact of technology on the justice system.

His most recent book, Law in the Era of AI: Clients, Firms, and the Future of the Legal Industry (Wiley, 2026), argues that AI-driven changes in corporations and their operating models will reshape legal departments, law firms and the wider legal services market from the outside in—and that corporate clients, rather than technology vendors, will drive the next wave of disruption. That perspective draws on three decades of experience across law, business and global institutions in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the United States.

At Haleon, as a member of the executive committee, he co-led the legal and compliance work for the company’s demerger from GSK and subsequently led a global legal, compliance and security function of more than 200 people. At Pearson, he redesigned and digitized the legal function, and he has also held senior roles at Coca-Cola, Aramco and Kimberly-Clark, after beginning his career at Sullivan & Cromwell and White & Case.

He is the founder and CEO of FjordStream Advisors, which advises legal and business leaders on strategy, transformation and leadership, and has served on the boards of several organizations, including Mowi ASA. An alumnus of Harvard Business School, the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics, and Boston University, he is also the author of Building an Outstanding Legal Team: Battle-Tested Strategies from a General Counsel (Globe Law and Business, 2017), and his honors include General Counsel of the Year at the British Legal Awards and inclusion in the Chambers GC Influencers Global 100.