BARBRI Acquires Legal AI Startup Lega to Scale Hands-On AI Fluency Training Across Law Schools and Firms
BARBRI, the legal education company, has acquired Lega, a legal AI startup founded by Christian Lang, a former junior lawyer at Davis Polk. Lang will join BARBRI as Head of Innovation, overseeing AI skill development and readiness strategy for students, law firms, and legal organisations. Lega's small staff will also move across. Lega operates a SaaS platform — described as a generative AI lab — alongside hands-on, workshop-based learning experiences, positioning itself as a bridge between AI awareness and AI fluency. The deal is designed to deliver Lega's experiential learning model at scale: hackathons, simulations, and lab-style exercises that BARBRI could not previously offer through its existing SkillBurst and BARBRI AI course catalogue. BARBRI Co-CEO Lucie Allen framed the acquisition as completing a competency stack: foundational AI knowledge through existing courses, now extended to practical, judgment-level capability through Lega's methodology. The deal arrives as a separate BusinessLDN survey of over 2,000 London business leaders finds that 50% of firms believe their workforce already has the AI skills required — down from 63% a year earlier — with the proportion reporting significant skills gaps hitting 15%, up from 4% in 2025.
Why this matters
The BARBRI–Lega deal is a structural bet that AI training in law has moved past awareness into a competency-gap problem that requires experiential, judgment-based pedagogy rather than passive instruction. With 83% of in-house legal teams unable to formally measure AI ROI (per Axiom's 2026 report, covered separately in this briefing), the upstream cause may be precisely the thin training investment Lega was built to address — most legal professionals received just two to five hours of AI-specific training in the past year. The London skills-gap data reinforces the commercial logic: demand for structured AI fluency programmes is accelerating across both private practice and in-house functions. For law firms, a vendor that can credibly certify AI-ready lawyers — rather than just sell licences to tools — is increasingly differentiated.
On the Ground
As a trainee, expect AI fluency to become a measurable onboarding benchmark, not an optional CPD credit. Firms that adopt programmes like Lega's will be able to point to structured competency assessments, which changes what partners expect from junior lawyers from day one. Supervising partners may begin asking whether trainees can run AI-assisted contract review with appropriate quality-control discipline, not just whether they have access to the tool.
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