The Lawyer Who Writes Robotics' Rulebook with Michael Bearman
There’s a huge difference between making a robot work in a lab and making it reliable enough to survive the chaos of a real warehouse. For Michael Bearman, Chief Legal and Safety Officer at Vecna Robotics, closing that gap has been a 23-year journey spanning legal, operations, customer deployments, fundraising, safety, and industry standards.
Michael joins Greg to share how he went from outside counsel to becoming one of Vecna’s longest-serving leaders, taking on everything from contracts and customer implementations to financial modeling and even an all-night soldering session before a robot demonstration at Congress. That willingness to jump into unfamiliar problems gave him a front-row seat as Vecna evolved from experimental robotics projects into industrial automation deployed across warehouses and manufacturing facilities.
They explore why impressive robotics demos are very different from commercially viable products, how an early rescue robot helped Vecna learn that lesson firsthand, and why a major FedEx deployment pushed the company toward industrial mobile robots. Michael also breaks down Vecna’s approach to automated forklifts, tuggers, and CaseFlow, including how one customer doubled throughput with half the staff by rethinking the traditional case-picking workflow.
In this conversation, Greg and Michael explore:
Michael’s unconventional journey from outside legal counsel to Chief Legal and Safety Officer, and the many operational, financial, customer, and leadership roles he took on along the way
Why there is such a large gap between a successful robotics demonstration and a system that customers can rely on in real-world industrial environments
How Vecna’s early Bear rescue robot helped build the technology, team, and relationships that eventually supported its pivot into industrial robotics
The FedEx deployment that put more robots into a single site than Vecna’s entire existing fleet and helped reshape the company’s direction
How automated tuggers, forklifts, and CaseFlow tackle different material-handling workflows across manufacturing, automotive, and third-party logistics
Why close collaboration with an early 3PL customer helped Vecna build CaseFlow around the realities of warehouse case picking, ultimately doubling throughput with half the staff at that customer
How flexible Robots as a Service models allow 3PL customers to scale fleets up and down around seasonal peaks instead of paying for idle robots year-round
What Michael looks for during on-site safety risk assessments, from pedestrian traffic and crosswalks to routes that may look good in CAD but fail in the real warehouse
Why interoperability matters as warehouses deploy robots from multiple vendors, and how Michael helped shape the MassRobotics AMR interoperability standard that has now progressed into an international ISO standard
The challenges of writing safety standards for everything from multi-ton industrial robots to dynamically balancing humanoid and legged systems
Why spending time inside real customer facilities has made Michael a better lawyer, safety leader, and contributor to robotics standards
What Vecna looks for when hiring in a startup environment, including intelligence, flexibility, curiosity, and a willingness to figure things out rather than staying inside a narrowly defined role
Why customer trust depends on transparency when something goes wrong, and why hiding information is one of the fastest ways for a robotics company to lose that trust
Michael’s view that warehouses will continue to need people for edge cases, even as automation expands, with human workers increasingly supporting fleets rather than performing every task manually
Why robotics founders cannot afford to cut corners on safety, especially when a single serious incident can have enormous consequences for a young company
For robotics founders, operators, engineers, and anyone trying to move automation from a controlled demo into messy real-world environments, this conversation offers a practical look at what reliability, safety, interoperability, and customer trust actually require.
Learn more about Vecna Robotics: https://www.vecnarobotics.com/
Connect with Vecna Robotics: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vecna-robotics/posts/
Connect with Michael Bearman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bearman/
Connect with Greg Toroosian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregtoroosian/