After a distinguished in-house career that has seen him lead legal teams at FTSE 100 companies including Haleon, GSK and Pearson, and a recent stint as deputy GC at Saudi Aramco, Bjarne Philip Tellmann has taken a step back from day-to-day lawyering. At the tail end of 2024, he launched advisory business FjordStream Advisors, where he works with leadership teams in legal departments and law firms on strategy, and provides executive coaching for GCs and other senior leaders. Global Legal Post caught up with Bjarne to discuss his new business, his forthcoming book on law in the era of AI and how he believes the GC role is going to evolve against this shifting backdrop.
Can you tell us a bit about your new venture, FjordStream Advisors?
FjordStream Advisors has three general lines of business. First is advisory work, and there we focus on technology, digital transformation, AI, the impact of AI, and how both law firms and legal departments should be thinking about that and going about it the right way. Second is executive coaching, and we focus on senior legal leaders, both law firm partners and GCs. And then the third is speaking and thought leadership workshops. Outside of FjordStream, that third strand intermingles with my own personal work; I’m a senior visiting fellow at the LSE, I teach at Harvard quite often as well and I’ve just finished a book on law in the era of AI (‘Law in the Era of AI: Clients, Firms, and the Future of the Legal Industry’), which Wiley is publishing in April.
Where do you see GCs and legal departments struggling most with digital transformation?
Legal departments and GCs have a different set of challenges from law firms. Very often, what I see is a lack of focus on what problem they’re trying to solve. So they have a tendency to focus right away on the technology – what AI tools should we acquire, rather than what problem are we actually trying to solve? What is our fundamental purpose, our unique selling proposition, and then what problems are hindering us from achieving that purpose, and then how do we design for that? And only at the end of that whole flow, start thinking about what technology might be best suited to help elevate that solution. Another area I’m seeing a lot of challenges on is just how to organise, sort, cleanse and tag data, and a lack of awareness of the criticality of data as the driver for everything that you try to implement. For law firms, it’s a different set of problems altogether. It’s really more around how you build innovative ways of leveraging technology that don’t threaten the underlying business model in ways that force you to shut that down. So it’s an innovator’s dilemma challenge more than an implementation one.
What kind of coaching do you provide to GCs and other leaders?
My coaching is really a blend of coaching, mentoring and advisory, so it sits in a sweet spot between the three. A big part of it is transitions, so leaders who are entering into transitions in their careers, whether it’s a law firm partner who has hit mandatory retirement and has never thought about this before – how do I manage my life? Or transitions for people who’ve just stepped into a new role, whether it’s the GC role, a CEO role or even a deputy GC role. And then in some cases, it’s GCs who’ve been in the role for a while but really would like someone just sitting beside them. It can be a lonely place, so having an experienced partner you can talk to who doesn’t have a stake in your decisions is sometimes very helpful.
Speaking about transitions, what made you swap day-to-day lawyering for your new role?
I’ve been doing lawyering for 30 years, almost 18 years of which as a GC. And being a GC is like running a sprint; at some point, you get tired of doing the same thing. I was finding that it was taking more energy away than it was giving me, and I was drawn to the more strategic aspects of the role. To me, that’s the energy-giving part of it. I had got to a point where I didn’t feel there was a lot more to get out of this phase of my life, and so surrounding myself with activities that exclusively give me energy just felt like an incredible motivator. So at this stage, it’s less about scaling a business and it’s more about surrounding myself with things that I find purposeful and energy-giving, so that was my primary motivation.
Your book examines the impact of AI. How do you think the GC role will evolve in a world of increased AI use?
The GC role is evolving towards becoming an orchestrator of multiple systems – a fragmented supply base and a diverse multidisciplinary team. That’s the managerial aspect of it. And then on the advisory side of the role, it’s really becoming what Anthea Roberts (a leading international law scholar), who I met at Harvard when I was teaching last year, calls dragonfly thinking. And she uses the dragonfly metaphor because it can see 360 degrees and is the world’s most efficient predator as a result of that vision. She thinks about it in terms of risk more broadly, and that’s a very good metaphor for the role of the general counsel. Today, it’s becoming multifaceted in terms of the risk profile that you need to take into account and also the number of roles that you need to oversee and manage. So it’s really evolving towards becoming a dragonfly role in some ways, but at the same time, a role where on the administrative side you’re just going to manage a much more complex and fragmented ecosystem than ever before.
What most stood out from your research when you were writing the book?
The core insight that led to the book – and one that just doubled down as I wrote it – was that the primary nexus of disruption for in-house legal departments is coming from the companies they represent. And when you look at the pace of change that large companies are undergoing in terms of AI investments, in terms of how they’re reorganising their profit models around AI, that’s going to have a knock-on effect on legal departments, which in turn has a massive impact on the rest of the supplier system. I looked at Walmart as a case study, and I was blown away at how a traditional company like Walmart was able to secure a $1trn valuation, which really only tech giants have. It now has a PE ratio that exceeds most of the big tech companies on the back of being able to combine a technology infrastructure and their legacy infrastructure in very innovative ways. So that was one really interesting insight from the book that I took away.
What is your best piece of advice to any young in-house lawyer who wants to advance into a leadership role?
This is a question I get a lot from students. The advice I would say is if you aspire to the legal career that your grandmother had with a corner office and a partnership that stays stable for 40 years, and you retire with a gold watch, I think you’ll be setting yourself up for disappointment. But if you aspire to being part of an industry that’s undergoing significant change, and you want to be part of that wave of disruption, where you want to broaden access to justice, where you want to lower fees, where you want to come up with new service delivery vehicles and you want to think about ways in which technology can expand services, then there’s no more exciting time to be in this space. So it’s really about leaning in and it’s about staying open to change and learning new skills and being creative. I have a combination of relief that I’m at the opposite end of the spectrum career-wise, and at the same time, regret that I can’t be part of that wave in the next 20 years and shape that in quite the same way that someone who’s 25 can do.
Now that you’ve stepped back from in-house work, do you have more time to relax and if so, how are you spending that time?
I’ve actually been busier than I’ve ever been – the days just fly by. But there are three activities that I’ve endeavoured to do more of. Cooking is one. I love to combine things and learn new skills around that. Travelling is the other. We drove Route 66 in May for an entire month, which was super fun and highly enlightening. And reading is the one that has been a constant throughout my life. I try to read voraciously across disciplines and gather ideas and use books not as something I have to finish; if I read half of it and I don’t find it engaging, I just stop. One that I’m re-reading right now is ‘The Inside Counsel Revolution’ that Ben W. Heinemann, Jr. wrote a few years ago. It’s really a magnum opus to the changing role of the general counsel, and I encourage anyone who’s interested in the space to read it. I’m also reading a book on the age of the Vikings (‘Embers of the Hands – Hidden Histories of the Viking Age’ by Eleanor Barraclough), which is a depiction of Viking life not from the vantage point of warriors and chieftains, but just from everyday, regular people. I’m re-reading ‘The Sun Also Rises’ by Hemingway and I also highly recommend ‘Competing in the Age of AI – Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World’ by Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani, which is a brilliant set of insights into what changes AI is having on corporate structures and strategies.
Email your news and story ideas to: [email protected]
