DLA Piper intellectual property and technology partner Claire Bennett has left the firm to join UK self-driving car startup FiveAI as general counsel.

Bennett joined DLA's London office in 2008 and was made up to partner four years later. Prior to joining the firm, she was an associate at Bird & Bird.

At DLA she acted for Motorola in its high-profile patent dispute with Blackberry – then known as Research In Motion – in 2010.

Five AI was founded in 2015 and now has six offices across the UK. The startup aims to deliver a fully autonomous shared transport service to "transform Europe's cities for everyone". The company will launch its service trial across London boroughs in the first quarter of 2020 and plans to launch with a fully commercialised service by 2022.

Bennett told Legal Week: "There's a lot of buzz around this company. We're relatively small, but right at that sweetspot of being in an area in which the government wants to encourage investment – with AI and the mobility sectors both being target sectors in the government's industrial strategy – and a direction that society needs to go."

She added: "Some of the legal issues that arise are quite unique and groundbreaking, and we'll need to decide what the right direction to go in is. Five years ago you might have thought self-driving cars were science fiction, but we now have the chance to make that dream a reality."

Five AI currently uses Taylor Wessing, Mills & Reeve, and Gunderson Dettmer as external counsel.

Other recent private practice to in-house lawyer moves include Bayer's former US head of law, patents and compliance Jan Heinemann moving to German sportswear and design company Adidas as its new general counsel.