Legal education business BARBRI has bought legal AI startup Lega as part of a strategy to provide ‘experiential AI workshops, simulations, hackathons, and lab-style learning experiences’.
The well-known founder of Lega, Christian Lang, will join BARBRI as Head of Innovation, overseeing AI skill development and readiness strategy for students and partners. See AL Interview below.
Lang was previously head of strategy at Reynen Court, the legal tech ‘app store’, but then created Lega after it hit turbulence in 2023. He has also created several other legal tech projects, including the Inspire.Legal event in New York. Before legal tech he was a junior lawyer at Davis Polk.
As to Lega, the company – which has a small number of staff, who will also be joining – describes itself as helping law firms to ‘safely explore, assess and implement genAI technology’.
Through this deal their ‘experiential learning model can now be delivered at scale to law students, lawyers, law firms, and legal organisations worldwide’.
Lucie Allen, Co-CEO of BARBRI, commented: ‘We have been building the AI knowledge and competency foundation for the legal profession through SkillBurst and BARBRI AI courses, alongside broader professional education offerings such as BARBRI CLE/CPE and Prep for Practice.
‘Lega brings a highly practical model that helps learners move from AI awareness to AI fluency. Together, we are committed to equipping law schools, law firms, and legal professionals for an AI-driven profession.’
–
(Conference advert)
Come and join us in New York and London this November at Legal Innovators!
Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18.
Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5
—
AL Interview with Christian Lang
Why do this, and why now?
Experiential learning has been at the core of Lega’s mission since day one. We started with a simple belief: legal professionals do not become fluent in AI by reading about it or watching demos. They become fluent by working with it, testing it, building with it, and developing the judgment to know when it is useful, when it is risky, and how it can responsibly change the way legal work gets done.
What has become increasingly clear is that the market’s needs have moved beyond AI awareness or even AI adoption. Law firms, legal departments, and law schools are now wrestling with a much deeper question: how do we define, train, and empower the AI-ready legal professionals that will help us win the future?
Through Lega’s generative AI lab—our SaaS platform—and our hands-on, workshop-based learning experiences with leading firms, law schools, and industry events, we have learned a great deal about how to help the profession move from curiosity to capability. BARBRI is one of the most trusted names in legal education, with extraordinary reach across law schools, firms, and legal professionals around the world. By joining BARBRI, we have the opportunity to take what Lega has built and bring practical AI fluency to the profession at a scale we could not have reached on our own.
For me, that is the reason to do this, and the reason to do it now. The profession is at a genuine inflection point, and this combination gives us a chance to help legal professionals cross that bridge responsibly, confidently, and effectively.
Lega is described as both a system for AI training and a kind of educational consultancy. Can you expand on that?
Historically, Lega has had two closely connected parts. First, we built a SaaS platform that gives legal organizations a safe, structured environment to experiment with generative AI, compare models, build AI-powered tools, and explore practical use cases. Second, we used that platform to deliver hands-on educational experiences — including our AI “cooking class”-style workshops — where lawyers, students, and legal teams learn by doing.
That combination is important. We have never believed that AI fluency is simply a matter of giving people access to a tool or trying to bolt AI tooling onto existing processes. Legal professionals need to be inspired by the art of the possible, given room to experiment, and equipped to test where AI actually creates value. That is how they build the judgment, intuition, and confidence to understand how these technologies can transform their practices—and then take the leap to actually do it.
Along the way, organizations are not just asking, “Which AI tool should we use?” They are asking more fundamental questions about training, governance, service delivery, talent development, and what it will mean to be an effective legal professional in an AI-enabled world. When helpful, we have supported customers through advisory work as well. But the throughline is always the same: helping legal professionals build practical AI fluency through safe, hands-on experience.
After launching and selling your own company, what are some of the key things you’ve learned from the experience?
The startup journey has been one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences of my life. There are probably enough lessons for a book, but if I had to distill it, I would say it comes down to mission and people.
You have to care deeply about the problem you are solving. Startups are too hard to sustain on opportunism alone. For Lega, the mission was always to help a profession I care about navigate one of the most important technological transitions of our time in a thoughtful, practical, and responsible way. That is still my mission, and it is one BARBRI shares.
But mission is not enough. You also have to surround yourself with people you trust, people who trust you, and people who are willing to do hard things together. That is one of the things that makes me so excited about joining BARBRI. The team shares the vision that legal education has to evolve for an AI-enabled profession, and they are committed to doing the hard work required to make that vision real. When you have a mission that matters and the right people around the table, you can accomplish things that would have seemed impossible at the beginning.
Congrats Christian, another chapter begins!
—
Come and join us in New York and London this November!
Legal Innovators New York – Nov 17 and 18.
Legal Innovators UK – London, Nov 4 and 5
Discover more from Artificial Lawyer
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.