Blaum Dettmers Rabstein is a full-service law firm with offices in Bremen, Hamburg, and Munich. Its advisory work ranges from transport and maritime law to IT and employment law, as well as commercial and corporate matters. Many mandates are international in scope and therefore require not only specialized expertise, but also strong coordination and consistent processes.
Two lawyers in particular shape the firm’s practical legal-tech approach: Jan-Malte Böttcher and Tom Gördes. Both bring perspectives that are firmly rooted in day-to-day legal practice and shaped by unusually hands-on career paths.
Jan-Malte Böttcher has been with Blaum for almost ten years and has been a partner for the past three. As a specialist lawyer for IT law as well as commercial and corporate law, his daily work focuses less on standardized corporate structures and more on complex, often novel constellations that cannot easily be covered by templates and for which established models often do not yet exist.
“I handle the topics where you have to think beyond the document: structures, consequences, compliance, EU requirements.”
Tom Gördes’ path into the legal profession was anything but conventional. As he puts it:
“I actually wanted to study nautical science and go to sea.”
Tom has been with Blaum since 2019—first as a research assistant, then as a trainee, and now as a lawyer. His work sits at the intersection of transport-related issues, IT law, and process-intensive advisory work. Early on, he deliberately sought operational insights, worked in-house, helped build up a law firm, and focused extensively on how legal processes could be made more efficient and automated.
What both lawyers share is clear: for them, legal tech is not an experiment, but a strategic component of modern legal services. They see technology as infrastructure that ensures quality and makes legal expertise scalable.
Use Cases for AI at the Firm
With BEAMON AI, Blaum quickly identified several particularly relevant areas where the tool could be tested and then increasingly used productively. At the same time, everyday practice is showing that the potential use cases go far beyond these initial applications and continue to expand with each new use.
I. Document-Intensive Analysis
Tom describes cases in the transport sector where delivery notes and invoices spanning thousands of pages have to be analyzed. In the past, this meant days of manual review. Some clients were willing to pay for it; others were not. But it still had to be done.
“I used to sit down and check everything one by one for days. Now I can get a preliminary evaluation within minutes.”
With BEAMON, these initial assessments can be generated almost at the click of a button. This significantly reduces manual effort and creates more room for substantive legal work—where human expertise truly creates value for the client.
II. When There Are No Templates Yet: Structuring New Legal Topics
Jan-Malte’s mandates often begin where questions are new, unclear, and scarcely commented on—for example, with new regulations or industry-specific compliance requirements. In such situations, it helps to have a first draft, a rough structure, or a sparring partner. As he explains:
“I don’t want the AI to think for me. I want a direction: where should I look, what do I need to consider, how do I structure the topic?”
Here, BEAMON acts as an orientation layer that helps teams navigate regulatory unknowns more quickly before the actual legal deep dive begins.
III. Workflow Optimization and Orientation with AI
Beyond analysis and research, AI is playing an increasingly practical role in day-to-day work at the firm. Jan-Malte describes how, after client calls, he initially collects unstructured notes and then lets BEAMON turn them into a first structured contract framework.
“I can just say freely, without worrying about punctuation or order, what I want—and in the end it’s sorted and presented to me in proper German sentences.”
Tom also uses BEAMON AI as a thinking and drafting partner:
“You don’t have to ask the AI to solve the problem for you, but let it help you as a sparring partner.”
BEAMON AI supports not only with drafting assistance, but also with controlled creativity: new perspectives, alternative lines of argument, or impulses that help break out of standard templates. Tom describes the effect this way:
“It’s quite simple: BEAMON helps me and many colleagues think of things we might not otherwise have considered. Or to take a different perspective.”
Use cases now extend beyond contract drafting into several other practice areas—from employment law and corporate structures to individual transport and compliance matters.
IV. AI in Client Communication
Both lawyers emphasize that AI at Blaum is not only changing internal workflows, but also the client experience. Faster summaries, clearer next steps, and higher responsiveness are immediately noticeable. Tom recalls:
“Clients get a summary five minutes after the call and ask: how fast can you type? That saves me 90 minutes of work.”
BEAMON AI helps automate these follow-ups efficiently, making responsiveness part of service quality rather than an additional burden.
For both lawyers, however, one thing is clear: AI does not replace legal judgment. It reduces friction and creates room for strategic advice.
V. Finding Sensitive Contract Data Faster
A vivid example of BEAMON AI in practice arose during a due-diligence situation: around 600 documents had to be reviewed on short notice to determine whether they contained specific information such as bank details or contractual data, and whether these met certain requirements.
Instead of manually extracting data from hundreds of redacted pages, Jan-Malte used BEAMON Extract to analyze the documents collectively and automatically highlight relevant sections. The results could be reviewed immediately in a structured way, and he even demonstrated the analysis live during a client meeting.
“We save clients time they don’t need to pay for pointless work, and invest our capacity in the truly substantive questions.”
Projects like these show how technology can relieve legal teams: routine tasks are accelerated, review processes remain transparent, and lawyers can focus more on the legally decisive assessments.
The Future of Legal Advice: Supported by AI, with More Focus on Tactics, Judgment, and Responsibility
At Blaum, BEAMON AI serves as an operational layer between legal expertise and repeatable execution, and both lawyers see further use cases ahead. The excitement about having an AI assistant that improves, corrects, accelerates, or simply makes work more pleasant in so many everyday situations still feels as fresh as on day one.
Tom recalls how he first learned about BEAMON:
“I had joined a webinar, but I was already at the airport on my way on vacation. I found it very exciting and immediately had ideas for use cases in my own work and the firm’s. I followed everything on my phone.
The possibilities fascinated me so much that the flight attendant had to urgently ask me to finally switch on airplane mode.”
BEAMON AI has thus become a fixed component of modern legal work at Blaum and continuously opens up new possibilities for using legal expertise more efficiently, consistently, and sustainably.
Blaum’s position is not that AI replaces the role of the lawyer. It supports it. In highly specialized proceedings, disputes, or negotiation situations, the decisive factor remains human: understanding client needs, making tactical decisions, and implementing legal positions in practice. Tom puts it vividly:
“AI can prepare the basic framework. But decades of practical experience determine which levers really need to be pulled.”
BEAMON AI handles repetitive groundwork, but strategy, negotiation skills, and responsibility clearly remain with the lawyer. Jan-Malte adds:
“The legal situation is one thing. But that’s often not really the problem. The real question is: what happens in practice, what is the right next step? That’s what clients want and need us for.”
Blaum expects that simple, standard questions will increasingly stop reaching law firms, as clients will be able to check many things themselves in advance. For the firm, this is not a threat but a shift toward higher-value advisory work: clients are better informed and bring more questions, more ideas—but sometimes also unrealistic expectations. This means more responsibility for legal advisors, along with greater need for judgment, strategy, and focus on complex mandates.
By combining legal judgment with structured automation, Blaum is developing a future-proof model of legal services: efficient, consistent, and strongly client-oriented.
The Best Hacks: How to Get Really Good Results from AI
Both lawyers emphasize that quality depends heavily on how you use the tool. Over time, they have learned what is possible and share a few of their tricks. Tom sums up the key insight quite pragmatically:
“I first prompt to get a prompt. And the results are much better.”
Instead of testing multiple prompts or iteratively refining results, he lets BEAMON AI help structure the task and formulate a precise prompt from the outset. So he doesn’t ask for the answer first, but for a suitable prompt—and then works with that.
Jan-Malte’s tip:
“You shouldn’t just say what you want, but also what you don’t want as a result.”
Often, it’s hard to define exactly what a good answer looks like or what you expect. But it’s often easier to say what you don’t want. Give it a try.
Thank you both for the conversation!