What My Team & Partners Say.

Christian is the architect of my law firm’s automotive sector practice, developing the practice from scratch and turning it into a 25+ lawyers profit center with an unmatched market reputation. I had the privilege to experience his coaching skills first-hand after I joined his practice a couple of years ago. Christian helped me to develop a step-by-step business plan in a structured and efficient process. I profited from his vast experience and know-how. Identifying market opportunities together with Christian was not only successful but I also vastly enjoyed working with him.

Christian Kessel’s sense of market trends and business opportunities and the legal market is outstanding. When coaching and mentoring me and other partners, Christian was always one step ahead of our competition with his ideas for advising opportunities in the legal market and also very clear and frank about opportunities I should not take. That helped me a lot. Christian helped me building my business case from few relationships to more than a thousand contacts and a bulk of engagements, which I am grateful for. When working with Christian Kessel on business development in the legal market you realize quite quickly that his advice is based on deep market knowledge and understanding of trends that he has gained in his long and super successful career as a business lawyer. I’d like to highlight one of Christian’s main principles in business development activities: effectiveness! We always analysed measures to be taken in order to acquire business very seriously under this aspect before taking them. And that paid out.

Christian has a very good sense of business and business development, and as a partner of Bird & Bird, he was fond of the idea that business development should be part of a lawyer’s education and work right from the start of a lawyer’s career. Shortly after I joined his team with 1,5 years of experience as an attorney in an international law firm, he invited me to hold presentations to existing clients, potential new clients and at the firm’s inhouse training events. I have to say that I had not been enthusiastic about this idea in the first place, but he insisted exactly in the right way to make me overcome my initial inhibitions and expand my comfort zone gladly! I discovered that I really enjoy giving presentations and made this a part of my work ever since. He knows how to (gently) push his mentees to reach their full potential while being sensitive to their personality.

I have known and worked with Christian for many years and have always been impressed with his business development and team building skills, as well as with his pragmatic and unselfish approach when it came to referring work to others and sharing success. Christian led not only his own team to be very successful but contributed also as Co-Head of our international Automotive Sector Group very significantly to the growth of this Sector Group and the firm. He is one of the most structured and organised lawyers and business developers I have met in my professional career. During my seven year term as Bird & Bird’s Managing Partner for Germany 2015-2021 I gained particular insight into his way of working, building the business, the team and the firm and his strategic thinking. He has successfully and sustainably expanded our commercial practice in the Automotive and Energy & Utilities Sector Specialist Groups from initially Frankfurt to Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Munich, thereby also providing role modelling for successful and seamless cross-office collaboration of local teams. It was particularly great to see Christian developing several of our associates and counsel into partnership. All of them are very successful and I attribute this very much to Christian’s training and coaching in business development, team building and leading. Christian involves young associates into client acquisition and business development activities very early in their career with a highly structured and very supportive approach. I am very grateful to Christian for this outstandingly valuable contribution to firm. In the future, I hope to continue working with Christian in the field of business development and developing of the respective skills with our associates, counsel and partners. I know first hand how much others can profit from his experience and approach.

Christian has been an inspiring and highly effective leader of our firm’s Automotive Sector Group. He devised and implemented a clear strategy and successfully led the group through a period marked by huge economic and technical changes (financial crisis, emergence of automated and autonomous driving, e-mobility, Covid, semiconductor crisis…). Many members of the group have benefited from Christian’s strong mentoring and coaching skills to build a successful business or manage challenging professional or private situations. Christian combines clear no nonsense advice with true empathy and a positive, enthusiastic attitude. Christian repeatedly organised workshops for our Automotive Group, where he shared his experience of effective business development, including tips on how to find time for BD, how to capture good BD ideas – and how to identify those not worth spending time on. The business development sessions held by Christian are probably amongst the best BD trainings that I attended in my 30 year career as a lawyer in two major international law firms. No other training has provided me with so many concrete, effective and easy-to-remember strategies and tips. And the very impressive business that Christian built over the years as well as that of the team trained and mentored by him show that these strategies and tips work!

I have known Christian for several years in his capacity as partner of international law firm Bird & Bird LLP and co-head of the Automotive Sector Group. His entrepreneurial spirit and business development acumen stood him apart and helped him to build a significant practice. As a more junior partner involved in the Automotive Sector, I found his practical tips on business development and client service inspiring and he has been a wonderful mentor helping me to identify client opportunities and expand my practice. I would thoroughly recommend him.

I recently took part in a 1,5 hour seminar by Christian Kessel on Business Development. After having participated in several BD seminars prior to that offered by Christian, I was expecting to be presented the “same old, same tedious” theories yet again. However, Christian’s seminar had an entirely different approach and very positively surprised me. His hands-on concept, the many practical examples and the personal stories of what worked well and – just as importantly – what did not work for him not only made BD more tangible, but also encouraged me and provided practical support to keep going and find the approach to BD that works best for myself.

Christian Kessel was second to none in generating work within our international commercial practice group. He is very good in training people to be and remain focused, i.e. not only to identify the right topics and strategies, but also in implementing and maintaining them. Our firm hugely benefits from the successful partners which learnt from Christian.

As a lawyer at the international law firm Bird & Bird I have attended several retreats of its international automotive sector group. During such retreats, Christian Kessel, as head of the group, has also always given presentations on how to develop business easily and successfully. What was special about his talks or presentations was that he didn’t just provide generic ideas nor just some friendly encouragements. Instead he gave very practical suggestions coming from his experience: what to do best when you attend a public seminar or conference, how to use business cards most effectively, how to keep in contact with your prospective clients, how to develop your personal network and so on. He shared with us a kind of knowledge which is usually kept well reserved by successful lawyers like Christian. On many occasions I put into practice Christian’s suggestions and I have to say that they definitively worked.

Having known Christian initially as his client and then later working with him day by day as his colleague, I have always been very impressed by Christian‘s strategic vision and clear focus on building his practice and involving me and the whole team actively in it. He was always very good at explaining why this initiative or that activity should be undertaken and I (and we as a team) learnt a lot about strategically and practically pursuing targets and winning new clients. Christian has always been brilliant and very successful in identifying both clients‘ core needs and how to develop new service offerings for them. He has also been on top of likely future developments in the sectors he has been active in. I have always valued his advice and greatly benefited from it on how to successfully respond to such needs of clients as well as industry developments and how to successfully expand my own business as a partner of an international law firm. Following my move from an in-house counsel position to joining an international law firm Christian has helped me greatly by regularly talking me through the issues of developing my own practice and leading me towards successfully building a business case for partnership. And as a young partner he has challenged me regularly with some very pertinent questions on how to further expand my business, build lasting client relationships and develop and grow my own team of associates. I have been very lucky and am grateful for having Christian supporting me as my personal and strategic mentor.

Prior to joining Bird & Bird, I worked for over 7 years on the forensic services team at one of the Big 4 consultancies, where I led a forensic data analytics team. During our mentoring program, Christian helped me really understand the specifics of the legal services sector which translated into being able to prepare a plan for developing a network of internal and external clients. Christian was most generous in sharing his experience and insights during our sessions. More importantly he challenged me with accurate questions which allowed me to analyse the situation by myself and come to my own conclusions. Mentoring sessions with Christian gave me the opportunity to develop my skills, understanding and knowhow in relation to the law firm environment. We focused on problem solving which let me develop and acquire new skills, as well as look at issues from other perspectives.

From the conception of my own business plan to the establishment of my own practice and client base, I benefited greatly from his wealth of experience and profound understanding of the legal and client business. As head of the firm’s international automotive sector group, Christian was instrumental in shaping its strategic direction and business development activities for many years. Owing to his profound understanding of the legal and client business, Christian was a role model for the firm’s lawyers and could inspire them to contribute to the overall success of the sector group.