Martin Bartlam

Martin Bartlam is one of the City of London's most prominent fintech and structured-finance lawyers, and he invests personally as an angel in early-stage fintech and blockchain companies. Born in October 1964 and a British national resident in the UK, he has more than 35 years' experience across leading international law firms. He trained and spent roughly seven years at Slaughter and May before moving to Denton Wilde Sapte, where he became a partner. He later spent around five years at US firm Jones Day, where he headed the finance practice.

From the mid-2000s he was at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, where he headed the finance team and served as London Managing Partner (a role he held for about five years, with directorships from roughly 2006 to 2012). He then joined DLA Piper in 2012, where he led the international Projects, Finance and Restructuring team — a group of around 600 lawyers — before becoming the firm's Global Co-Chair for its digital and fintech practices and International Group Head of Finance and Projects. UK Companies House records show he stepped down as a member of DLA Piper UK LLP and DLA Piper International LLP on 29 September 2023.

Bartlam is widely recognised as one of the world's leading fintech lawyers, advising on the application of new financing techniques and technology to traditional structures — including ICOs and token structures, securitisation, capital markets products and derivatives. He has advised high-profile digital-asset clients (for example, DLA Piper's work for Galaxy Digital on its 2023 strategic alliance with DWS) and is active in industry bodies such as Global Digital Finance (GDF), contributing to work on tokenization and NFTs. He has been a frequent conference speaker and ran a blockchain/ICO "masterclass" series, presenting to bodies including the LMA, the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies and the Global ABS conference.

More recently he founded and now serves as CEO of Coded Law (Coded Legal), an AI-enabled legal software platform that embeds experienced lawyers' expertise to help legal teams achieve compliance, cut costs and execute transactions faster.

• Invests as an angel at the seed stage, concentrated in his area of deep professional expertise: fintech, blockchain/crypto infrastructure and digital assets.
• Backs founders building regulated or financial-infrastructure technology where his legal/regulatory knowledge and network add value — e.g. blockchain platforms applying technology to traditional funding and capital-markets structures.
• Tends to co-invest alongside experienced financial-services operators and specialist seed funds rather than lead rounds himself.
• Check size is not publicly disclosed; angel participation in syndicated seed rounds is the observed pattern.