Florian is Professor of Private and Business Law at the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg (HSU/UniBw), with a research focus on antitrust/competition law, procurement, and contract design. He joined the HSU/UniBw from University College London (UCL), where he had been Professor for Antitrust and Comparative Law & Economics before becoming a Brexit refugee in 2019, and where he had been teaching since 2005.

He has degrees from the University of Tübingen (First State Examination 1998; Doctorate 2004) and Columbia Law School (LL.M. 2002), as well as the full German qualification to practice law (Second State Examination 2000). Florian had visiting positions at Harvard Law School (Visiting Researcher 2011), the University of Würzburg (Visiting Professor December 2017; January/December 2018) and Osaka University (May 2018 until end of March 2019); between 2008 and 2017, he taught tutorials in competition law at the University of Oxford.