Former Sidley Leader Embraces ‘Future,’ Joining AI Law Firm

Sidley Austin’s former executive committee chair is pivoting from leading one of the world’s largest law firms to a two-month-old AI-native law firm.

Mike Schmidtberger, Sidley’s executive committee chair from 2018 to 2025, has joined Norm Law LLP as chairman, partner, and head of the investment funds and regulatory practice. Schmidtberger stepped down as Sidley’s executive committee chair last spring under firm rules that require the chair to step aside after turning 65. Schmidtberger continued working as a partner at the firm before retiring last month.

“I walked through the doors at Norm Ai and confronted the future and completely changed my mindset about what I was going to do with my post-Sidley time,” Schmidtberger said in an interview with Bloomberg Law.

The emergence of AI-enabled law firms and legal tech startups has provided Big Law attorneys with career paths that didn’t previously exist. Norm Ai says it employs more than 30 attorneys and pioneered “legal engineering,” where those lawyers build AI agents for legal work. The Big-Law-focused startup Harvey says it hires lawyers to work in sales and build legal workflows. Harvey and other legal techs like Casetext and Ironclad were founded by former Big Law attorneys.

Norm Law LLP, which launched in November, says it offers “AI-native legal services” where AI agents developed by attorneys complete initial drafts of work, and lawyers supervise and review the outputs. The firm targets clients in financial services and is being built in collaboration with Blackstone Inc.'s in-house legal team. Blackstone in November invested $50 million in Norm Ai, an affiliated company that makes AI agents. Coatue, Vanguard, Bain Capital, and New York Life have also invested in Norm Ai.

Schmidtberger will recruit attorneys to Norm Law and help sell the still novel idea to clients. A member of Norm’s legal advisory board initially connected Schmidtberger with CEO and founder John Nay, he said.

Norm Law is one of a handful of new entities registered as law firms but using AI to complete work that is then reviewed by lawyers. The new firms are trying to leverage AI-driven disruption to find different ways to offer legal services to corporate legal teams. Norm Law charges clients based on outcomes and value, Nay said.

Norm Law can’t do everything, but it can complete legal work more efficiently and maintain consistent standards across a company, Schmidtberger said. There are many things that Big Law does well, but Norm frees up companies and law firms to focus on more innovative work, he said.

“We, in a way, are going to coexist very comfortably with Big Law,” Schmidtberger said.

As part of its initial staffing, Norm Law said former Brown Rudnick partner David Sorin and former Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft partner Mike Rupe are joining as partners. Norm Law has also hired some senior associates and will hire more partners in the coming months.

“The human resources aspect to this is incredibly important,” Nay said. “It’s not just the technology, it’s how do you bring together the people and the process and that proprietary technology in a way that makes all of this more effective for the client?”

Nay wouldn’t say how many clients Norm Law has, but said the law firm was built after having conversations with Norm Ai users who are trying to use AI more effectively. Those conversations “gave us a lot of confidence about the opportunity here on the AI-native law firm side of things,” he said.

Schmidtberger will represent clients while he grows and manages the new firm.

“Mike, leading a top six firm in the world, brings a lot of that leadership perspective of how to build a really successful law firm,” Nay said.

Sidley’s annual revenue doubled during Schmidtberger’s tenure as executive committee chair, Norm law said in a statement. Schmidtberger said he prioritized building Sidley’s knowledge management capabilities.

“We would invest in hardware, and we would invest in software so that we understood what we knew, who knew it, or where to find it, and that we would become a collective intelligence,” he said.

Among other leadership roles at Sidley, Schmidtberger was managing partner of the New York office and global co-leader of the investment funds group.