Bjarne Tellmann, '95: Reinventing and Redefining a Major In-House Legal Department
In 2014, Bjarne Tellmann, ’95, was named senior vice president and general counsel of Pearson PLC. With headquarters in London and New York and more than 40,000 employees in more than 80 countries, Pearson is the world’s largest company in many fields, including general publishing, textbook publishing, digital learning technologies, and private English-language instruction.
When Tellmann joined Pearson, the company was engaged in a major transition from a decentralized holding company to a vertically integrated organization. The previous structure had often resulted in attorneys serving their functional or geographic units without a holistic view of the organization’s needs. “We really had about ten separate legal departments, which were reporting to local management and not to a single corporate GC—with all the risks and inefficiencies associated with that,” Tellmann says.
His charge was to fully rethink and reconfigure the way that legal services are provided. With his team, he identified five key dimensions to address. He says: “We had to wholly revamp the organizational structure of the legal department, creating a global matrix to get our people as close to the business as possible. We had to rethink the department’s mission and its strategic priorities, committing to become less reactive and more pragmatic, proactive, and protective of the business. We had to implement five major new technologies that would help us be more effective and efficient, and we had to get a much better handle on our global risk exposure.”
He is also reinventing the way that Pearson engages with outside counsel. “We were top-heavy on outside spend,” he observes. “So much is happening in the profession to make possible new kinds of relationships; we have a duty to closely examine all of our relationships and maximize their payoff.” In the UK, he instituted a series of panels at which firms pitched their services to Pearson. “It was a great experience,” Tellmann says. “They came bearing gifts, saying they could do great things if we gave them the chance. We saw what an array of excellent firms is out there for us, and we learned a great deal about how to work most effectively with them.” Similar panels are scheduled for the US.
Also charged with finding annual cost savings of two million dollars, he exceeded that expectation with savings of more than seven million dollars in his first 18 months. For the innovations he has led at Pearson, he was named to The Lawyer magazine’s “Hot 100” list in 2015.
The son of a Norwegian diplomat, Tellmann lived all around the world as he was growing up. By the time he came to the Law School, he spoke five languages and had earned a martial arts black belt, played leading roles in a film and on television, and received a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. He describes his experience at the Law School as “completely mind-altering”: “So much of what I had previously experienced, studied, and observed came together for me at the Law School. One after another, great professors showed how the law is a richly woven tapestry, a confluence of so many things, including human nature, the arts, incentives, and centuries of thinking about how society and its organizations can best be structured and regulated. There were so many moments when complexity was resolved into stunning clarity.”
His experience after the Law School also helped prepare him for his current responsibilities. During the 13 years before his appointment at Pearson, he held top legal positions at Coca-Cola, including time overseas as the chief legal officer for the Asia-Pacific region and several years at corporate headquarters, managing an 80-person team deployed across four continents.
Now, as he leads the reinvention of the 200-person legal department of a nine-billion-dollar global company, Tellmann says, “There are plenty of challenges and almost uncountable opportunities to keep learning how to do things better. Thanks to the perspectives and skills that I started developing at the Law School, I am confident that we’re going to succeed.”