Robert Ambrogi Blog
BARBRI, the legal education company best known for bar exam preparation, has acquired Lega, the AI startup that launched in 2023 with a focus on large language model governance but which has been evolving into helping legal professionals develop AI fluency through practical, experiential learning.
Legal was founded by Christian Lang, the former president and chief operating officer of Reynen Court, the now-defunct company that aimed to be the app store for legal technology. Lang, who started his career as an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell, is also the founder of the NY Legal Tech Meetup.
Lega will be folded into BARBRI’s growing portfolio of AI and skills training, and Lang will join the company as head of innovation, overseeing AI skill development and readiness strategy for students and partners. The companies said Lega’s capabilities will be integrated across BARBRI’s product suite.
In its announcement, BARBRI described the deal as a step towards moving legal education “from talking about AI to fully engaging with it.” It described Lega as a platform that helps law students, lawyers, and firms build AI fluency “through practical, build-as-you-learn experiences.”
Lucie Allen, BARBRI’s co-CEO, said Lega “brings a highly practical model that helps learners move from AI awareness to AI fluency,” building on AI training BARBRI already offers through its SkillBurst and BARBRI AI courses.
A Company That Has Evolved
As noted, the company BARBRI has acquired is not quite the one Lang launched three years ago.
When Lega emerged from stealth in May 2023, I covered it here as an LLM-governance platform, and that is still how its web page described it as of yesterday. Its original focus was aimed at large law firms worried about lawyers experimenting with ChatGPT outside the firm’s visibility.
Christian Lang
The product offered a single enterprise layer for accessing multiple large language models, with single sign-on, configurable compliance checkpoints, and audit logs — a way, as Lang put it at the time, to create “a safe space for exploration” while retaining governance and control.
Today’s announcement reframes Lega primarily as an experiential learning company — one that runs hands-on AI workshops, simulations, and hackathons for law firms and law schools. The announcement points to Lega’s work with Am Law 100 firms and at legal technology conferences, and says a client AI lab it ran with Fasken won an audience award at the 2026 Skills Law Showcase.
Although I have not yet had a chance to interview Lang, who has been traveling the last couple days, I am ussing that the governance-and-provisioning product that defined Lega at launch is now going away in favor of the AI training.
BARBRI’s AI Buildout
The acquisition is BARBRI’s second AI-adjacent deal in less than two years. In September 2024, the company acquired SkillBurst Interactive, a digital learning company that had worked with a consortium of law firms to develop a multi-module gen AI training course.
BARBRI has since expanded that catalog, with SkillBurst’s AI Fundamentals library having grown to roughly 29 modules organized around a skills framework spanning foundations, core skills, legal workflows, strategic advantage, and risk and ethics.
The Lega acquisition appears to fill a gap on the more applied side of AI training. Where SkillBurst’s strength is structured, on-demand content, Lega’s is described as live, facilitated, scenario-based work.
BARBRI said it plans to expand experiential workshops, simulations, hackathons, and lab-style experiences that bring firm practitioners and law students together around real-world challenges, creating a bridge between legal education and legal practice.
“Lega’s capabilities will be integrated across BARBRI’s product suite to create a unified learning experience for learners,” the company said. “Combined with BARBRI’s global footprint and position across the legal education and professional development continuum, Lega’s experiential learning model can now be delivered at scale to law students, lawyers, law firms, and legal organizations worldwide.”
“Through our work with firms, schools, and legal teams, we’ve learned that success isn’t about finding the right AI tool,” Lang said in the announcement. “It’s about building the fluency, judgment, and confidence to use AI effectively.”