Cuatrecasas is an international law firm that operates and serves clients across Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. With more than 1,900 professionals from 29 nationalities, the firm advises on all areas of business law and is consistently recognized among Europe’s most innovative law firms.

Driven by a culture of excellence and experimentation, Cuatrecasas has made technology and innovation central to its strategy — embedding Harvey across the firm as part of its broader AI initiative, the CELIA Project (Cuatrecasas Legal Expert in AI).

When Cuatrecasas began experimenting with generative AI in early 2023, the team quickly saw that this technology would fundamentally change the way lawyers work.

“We wanted to be leaders in using this technology in the legal sector,” said Idoya Fernández Elorza, Partner and Head of Knowledge and Innovation. “To do that, we had to understand generative AI in depth — its potential, its risks, and how to integrate it responsibly into daily practice.”

After an initial pilot involving 150 lawyers, Cuatrecasas launched a firmwide rollout of Harvey across 26 offices. The firm also created dedicated AI champion groups — knowledge lawyers, engineers, and practice leads — to drive experimentation, training, and adoption.

“Here at Cuatrecasas we are mad about technology,” said Omar Puertas, Partner. “We don't wait for the pain points to arise. We anticipate them and work very hard to develop solutions that allow us to deliver in ways that are unthinkable for our clients, for our competitors—at the very cutting edge of what lawyers can do with technology.”

With Harvey, the firm looked to determine how the right platform could help attorneys deliver on client needs in a better and faster way.

Through the CELIA Project, Cuatrecasas built a holistic framework around governance, training, and knowledge integration. “There’s no transformation without training,” Fernández added. “Within weeks, every lawyer at the firm knew how to prompt efficiently and use AI to deliver better results.”

Today, more than 80% of Cuatrecasas lawyers use Harvey daily, generating over 3,300 prompts. Roughly a quarter of those users make more than 30 prompts each week.

“Harvey is a tremendous tool that fits perfectly with our culture and our way of approaching legal thinking and legal delivery,” said Puertas.

Cuatrecasas uses Harvey daily across the firm to help lawyers think, analyze, and deliver with greater precision and speed. Harvey has become an essential companion across practice areas — powering legal research, drafting, and document review through tools customized to the firm’s workflows.

At the core is the Cuatrecasas Research Tool powered by Harvey, which integrates more than 3,000 curated templates, legal briefs, and memos from the firm’s knowledge base. “It’s one of the best ideas we’ve had regarding AI,” Fernández said. “The tool ensures that every output is grounded in our collective expertise.”

“If we think about due diligence work in an M&A matter, we have designed custom workflows to streamline the initial phase,” said Fernández. “That means that they extract the key concepts very quickly and can dedicate their time to review, identify anomalies or risks, and design the strategy for negotiation.”

Using Harvey, teams cut their time spent on due diligence review. Harvey efficiently extracts key terms like change of control, assignment provisions, shareholder obligations, and asset guarantees — allowing lawyers to focus on risk analysis and negotiation strategy.

Cuatrecasas lawyers also use Harvey to prepare first drafts of complex legal documents. For instance, the firm’s labor team used Harvey to generate an initial draft of a collective dismissal report based on internal templates and expert data — producing a high-quality first version ready for specialist refinement.

By generating a first draft using Harvey and specific case details, Cuatrecasas created a high-quality starting document that reflects their expertise. From there, their lawyers refined the draft, applied their knowledge, and tailored it to the client’s needs.

For Cuatrecasas, Harvey’s impact is measured not only in efficiency but in the quality of legal work produced. Time is reinvested in strategy, risk analysis, and client engagement.

Harvey’s real value for Cuatrecasas is in enhancing every lawyer’s legal ability.

“The key benefit of using Harvey is that it forces you, through prompt engineering, to think very deeply about the problem you are trying to solve,” Puertas said. “This process inherently enhances your problem-solving skills. The numerous solutions you consider make you a better lawyer. With Harvey, you gain the ability to outperform yourself rapidly and almost limitlessly.”

This new way of working is helping Cuatrecasas lawyers focus on the activities that deliver the greatest value to clients — and setting a new standard for innovation in the legal sector.

“I believe some tasks will be handled exclusively by technology, others will be a synergy of human efforts and technology assistance, and some will remain entirely human-driven,” Fernández said.

This new approach will drive better client outcomes.

“AI won’t replace legal judgment,” Fernández said. “It amplifies it. Our goal is to use Harvey to channel our collective knowledge and continue building tools that make our lawyers — and their advice — even stronger.”