Thomas Söbbing is a lawyer with international experience, having spent more than 20 years working for leading companies. In senior legal roles, including positions reporting directly to the CFO, he was involved in corporate decision-making, the management of legal and regulatory risks, and the development of robust governance structures. Today, he is a professor of civil law, digital law and legal ethics relating to artificial intelligence, focusing in particular on the legal, ethical and organisational foundations of AI governance and responsible AI. Thanks to his seminal publications on digital law and the legal issues surrounding artificial intelligence, he is recognised as an expert at the intersection of law, technology and corporate governance. As early as 2017, he was recognised by The Legal 500 as “Most Influential Lawyer in Business”.

Prior to his appointment at Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences, Söbbing held senior positions at KPMG, Siemens, Deutsche Leasing, CRIF Bürgel and SOLCOM, most recently as General Counsel. In these roles, he was responsible for international contractual and governance projects, led large legal departments comprising several teams, and oversaw complex transformation and digitalisation initiatives. Among other things, he oversaw Siemens AG’s highest-value contract (around 8 billion euros), conducted contract negotiations with several hundred companies – including around three-quarters of the DAX-listed corporations – and was included in the General Counsel Powerlist by The Legal 500.

His academic work consistently combines business practice with legal research. He began exploring the legal implications of digitalisation at an early stage and published the first German-language specialist book on AI law. Furthermore, he is the author of the standard work on IT outsourcing and was the first to demonstrate how the Nobel Prize-winning Contract Theory developed by Oliver Hart (Harvard University) and Bengt Holmström (MIT) can be methodically applied to complex IT contract structures. In total, he has published nine specialist books and nearly 300 academic articles, which have been widely cited in legal literature.

His current research focuses on AI governance, responsible AI and the question of how regulatory requirements, ethical guiding principles and corporate decision-making processes can be translated into sustainable governance models. The aim of his research is to develop practical governance structures for the responsible use of artificial intelligence in businesses and public institutions.

In addition to his academic work, Söbbing has many years’ experience in executive education. He has delivered more than 400 management seminars for companies and executives and advises organisations on the strategic implications of digital transformation, regulatory innovations and the use of artificial intelligence.

Söbbing has a strong international network. He has taught at Oxford, Cambridge and Liechtenstein, amongst other places, before accepting a post at Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences. Furthermore, he has participated in specialist conferences and research programmes in Stanford, Vancouver, Singapore, Shenzhen, Venice, Vilnius, Lausanne and Geneva, where he has engaged in discussions with representatives of leading technology companies, international organisations and academic institutions, including Google, Meta, OpenAI, NVIDIA and the United Nations.

Söbbing studied law in Münster, Düsseldorf and Washington State; he was a research assistant to Prof. Dr Thomas Hoeren at the Institute for Information, Telecommunications and Media Law (ITM) at the University of Münster; and he completed executive and research programmes at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Shanghai and St Gallen.

In addition to his professorship, Söbbing is Of Counsel at the commercial law firm Gabor Partners, a member of various academic and international networks, and programme director of the Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes in Business & Law at Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences. He is also committed to supporting early-career academics and provides pro bono expert opinions for the German National Academic Foundation. He is a member of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), the Harvard Law School Association of Germany and the Friends of the Aspen Institute Germany.