This article was published by Financial Times. The newspaper highlights the following:
By many counts, the Spanish legal industry is a success story. In some respects, it is a model for law firms elsewhere in Europe. Spanish law firms have been successful in growing their businesses at home and overseas. Of the large legal markets around the world, Spain is also the one where the Big Four professional services firms are strongest — a threat that lawyers in many other countries are only recently having to face.
On another measure, Spain is one of the most innovative legal markets in Europe. In the FT’s Innovative Lawyers index for Europe in 2019, six of the top 50 were from Spain, more than from any other European country, except the UK.
One of those firms is 20-year-old Ecija, which grew rapidly on the back of a strategy to dominate technology, media and telecoms work in Spain. “For us innovation was not a choice, but an obligation. We needed to innovate and differentiate ourselves from the others,” says managing partner Alejandro Touriño.
“When I started 10 years ago, our clients were TV producers and musicians. Now they are financial institutions, pharma and insurance companies, because technology is present in all those sectors,” says Mr Touriño.
Corporate and banking law firms in Spain have been busy over the past decade advising on government bailouts and the restructuring and consolidation of its banks. Today the economy remains sluggish, but the top Spanish law firms have seen strong revenue growth.
A growing portion of that revenue is from outside Spain. Spanish law firms have established a strong presence in Portugal, as many large companies treat Iberia as a single region. Increasingly, however, their focus is on Latin America.
Furthermore, clients and company in-house legal teams have also grown, modernised and internationalised. At Santander, the bank, the legal team is managing an increase in lawsuits relating to distressed banks at the same time as new regulations come into effect requiring them to review and redraft tens of thousands of legal agreements. General counsel Oscar Garcia Maceiras says the changes have driven banks to implement new technologies, develop new skills and transform how they think of their in-house roles.
Read the article in the following link.
