About

Headquartered in Berlin, Bombardier Transportation is one of the world’s largest companies in the rail vehicle and equipment manufacturing and servicing industry. Its head of group corporate, M&A and legal affairs is Dr Alexander Steinbrecher, who joined the legal team of Bombardier Transportation as legal counsel after legal studies in both Germany (bar exam and Dr jur.) and the US (LLM). Since then he has progressed in the corporation and was promoted to his current global and strategic role in January 2018, taking on more responsibilities in the commercial matters of the business, such as dealing with complex negotiations and taking on board positions of group companies. Commenting on his current role, Dr Steinbrecher says, ‘Advising the business in corporate affairs, indirect procurement and legal affairs including antitrust and other regulatory matters complements my skill-set of an operational in-house lawyer. And working on M&A transactions and outsourcing projects in various jurisdictions is a big challenge, a lot of work and highly rewarding, if the deals get done. It has been a great learning and development for me, both as an in-house lawyer and corporate professional’. In addition, Dr Steinbrecher has been lecturing at the European University Viadrina School of Law in Germany in the areas of commercial conflict management (since 2004), arbitration law and practice (since 2017) and corporate dispute resolution (since 2019). Since 2017, he has also been acting as an “of counsel” at a dispute resolution boutique law firm. As head of group corporate, M&A and legal affairs, Dr Steinbrecher has put strong emphasis on the personal and professional development of his legal team, established a ‘can do’ attitude in the team where the focus is on problem solving and not legal opinions, and created transparency within the legal team. He has also measured the commercial impact of their legal work and has been vocal about it in the organisation. In 2019, Dr Steinbrecher co-founded the Roundtable Innovation & Legal Tech to foster the innovation and advancement of in-house legal teams of Germany companies. ‘I regularly publish and speak about legal innovation and legal tech in Germany’, he says. Talking about his view on the evolving in-house legal role over the next few years, Dr Steinbrecher states, ‘Within the next years, in-house legal teams will diversify (less lawyers, more paralegals, knowledge and project managers and shared service teams). We will have changed our output: from legal mails, memos and PowerPoint to digital process design that embeds the law and provides self-service access for non-lawyers (legal apps, contract generators and work-flow or process software). We will have more time for legal brain work and strategic advice as we outsource legal legwork to off-shore (alternate) legal service providers. Legal spend to external law firms will thereby decrease and the insourcing of legal work will continue. Alternative billing will be the norm and not the exception because legal services will become commodities with a price tag where law firms will be disrupted by advisory firms (the big four) and (alternate) legal service providers. The legal profession will be disrupted similar to the banking profession. What fin-tech has been doing to banking will be similar to what legal-tech will be doing to lawyering’.