Team size: 37

Career Biography

Przemysław Szymański leads the global Legal & Compliance function at RTB House. Having joined the company in 2017 and assumed his current role in 2019, he has scaled the department into a centralised operation coordinating legal and compliance matters across more than 25 jurisdictions.

His work focuses on structuring the legal function to support the company’s international expansion. This includes the development of negotiation playbooks for commercial contracting and overseeing the company’s posture regarding data protection, intellectual property, competition law, and digital sector regulations, based on standardised risk
assessment frameworks.

He also directs the department’s legal operations, specifically the integration of legal technology and Generative AI tools into internal workflows. These initiatives are aimed at automating high-volume, repetitive tasks, allowing the team to focus its resources on more
complex and high-impact advisory work.

His operating principle in leading the RTB House legal team is defined by a commitment to clear communication standards and an in-depth understanding of the commercial context and objective behind every legal task. The objective is to provide pragmatic and actionable legal support that aligns with the company’s operational requirements.

Prior to joining RTB House, Przemysław Szymański practiced as an associate in international and Polish law firms, where he focused on corporate law, international commercial transactions and energy sector regulatory advice. He also served as group legal counsel in the aviation sector, managing cross-border transactions and financing.

He holds an LL.M. in Commercial Law from the University of Edinburgh and a Master of Laws from the University of Warsaw. He is qualified in Poland as a legal advisor and maintains IAPP professional certifications in information privacy (CIPP/E), privacy management (CIPM), and privacy technology (CIPT).

What are the key projects that you have been involved in over the past twelve months?

Our team integrated GenAI into daily operations to improve efficiency. The team embedded comprehensive playbooks, risk matrices, and detailed company context into customised prompts. This automated standard contract management and compliance tasks while maintaining a human in the loop. The result was high-quality, standardised output and reduced turnaround times, allowing the legal team to focus on complex, high-value matters.

Our team managed the legal framework for new products and features, including the global launch of a self-service platform for advertisers and agencies. Direct collaboration with product teams allowed for resolving all legal and compliances challenges and mapping data flows during the development phase. This ensured new products were compliant by design and ready for immediate global scale.

What are the key trends that in-house counsel should be monitoring in 2026?

The transformation to the “Project Economy”. Project management is displacing operations as the primary driver of business value. In-house lawyers must embrace this process and evolve from “advisors” into “project managers.” It is no longer sufficient for an inhouse team to merely identify and interpret regulatory requirements. They must create value by implementing the response with other teams, while maintaining operational discipline to deliver results: clearly defining project scope and managing stakeholders, risks and timelines.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

Business and technical curiosity. Legal expertise is merely the baseline. The real differentiator is an openness to exploring the company’s technical stack, business model, and market dynamics. The in-house lawyer must deeply understand how the company builds its products or provides services, how it competes, and where exactly its revenue comes from. This context does not just give us answers; it empowers us to ask pertinent questions and get to the bottom of the issues. Only then can we move beyond generic analysis to offer nuanced, pragmatic advice that actually works for the company.

AI is increasingly being integrated into legal teams to maximise efficiency. How can in-house counsel ensure the successful incorporation of these tools without compromising the human element?

GenAI acts as a force multiplier for human intellect; without rigor, it simply scales mediocrity. To avoid producing low-quality “AI slop,” we aim for true “co-intelligence” through intentional context engineering. We must move from simple prompting to strategic AI onboarding, treating the model like a capable but inexperienced team member. We teach it our commercial and technology context, risk profile, and specific legal standards. We also clearly define our communication style to ensure the voice remains ours. In this way, we provide the direction and style, while the AI provides the scale.