Cuatrecasas is an international law firm that operates and serves clients in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. With a multidisciplinary and diverse team of over 1,900 professionals from 29 nationalities, the firm specializes in all areas of business law.

The Cuatrecasas team is always looking to apply technological innovation across its practice areas to enhance their client service offerings.

When Cuatrecasas started experimenting with generative AI applications in early 2023, the firm realized that this new technology’s capabilities would transform the way lawyers work.

“We wanted to be at the forefront of using this technology in the legal sector and set out to investigate the applications available in the legal market,” said Idoya Fernández Elorza, Partner and Head of Knowledge Innovation. “We were clear that it was necessary to understand generative AI in depth to evaluate its quality and accuracy as well as its weaknesses and risks.”

Cuatrecasas began their generative AI assessment by setting clear objectives and evaluating tools for quality, reliability and security. Initially rolling out Harvey to 150 partners and senior associates, they soon recognized the value for the entire firm. Soon after, the firm scaled its Harvey roll-out to 1,200 lawyers across 26 offices.

For the broader firm rollout, Cuatrecasas created expert teams of engineers and knowledge lawyers in each practice area to lead experimentation, refine prompting techniques, and share best practices for integrating Harvey into daily legal work across all offices.

“We collaborated with the Harvey Customer Success team to organize a highly successful training event available both live and online,” said Fernández, who’s also Financial Times’ Intrapreneur of 2024. “The event attracted over 750 Cuatrecasas lawyers and covered Harvey’s new functionalities and prompting techniques. Leading partners also shared their top success stories.”

As a result of this approach, Cuatrecasas saw high adoption rates, strong satisfaction and an active team of advanced Harvey users who continually experiment and share insightful findings with their peers.

“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.

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

With attorneys incorporating Harvey as a regular part of their daily workflows, the firm has established hundreds of use cases, such as using Harvey as a sparring partner to help build arguments, analyze weaknesses, conduct document analysis, prepare for cross-examinations and draft opening statements.

In March 2024, the firm’s Colombian banking team streamlined a due diligence engagement requiring the review of 150 credit agreements. Using Harvey Assistant, the team cut their time spent on due diligence review by 50% compared to previous methods. Harvey efficiently extracted key terms like change of control, assignment provisions, shareholder obligations and asset guarantees. This allowed the banking team to focus on performing higher-value tasks such as advising the client on potential risks for the transaction.

“Today, with the new functionality of Harvey's Vault, this process would be even more efficient,” Fernández said. “Harvey Vault allows us to upload all the agreements at once and generate an Excel file containing all the required concepts, along with references to the documents.”

Cuatrecasas labor attorneys used Harvey during a complex labor restructuring process for a client with various work centers.

“The Cuatrecasas team had to prepare a justification report for the collective dismissal with an extremely tight operation schedule due to negotiations with the Ministry of Labor and the unions,” Fernández said. “To prepare a first draft, the specialist team uploaded to Harvey the technical report from the process expert along with the standard report model prepared by our team of knowledge lawyers specialized in labor law. Harvey provided an accurate first draft of the legal report content, with the appropriate references so that the work can be further developed from there with a specialist in the field.”

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.

“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.

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 thinking has allowed the team at Cuatrecasas to proactively consider any scenario or solution—using Harvey to provide unexplored insights and potential avenues to build stronger arguments.

This new approach will drive better client outcomes.

“The emphasis is on activities that deliver greater value to the client,” Fernández said. “I am confident that AI will transform the way we lawyers work. Our goal is to leverage our collective knowledge to develop tailor-made solutions for our lawyers, distinguishing us from generic alternatives. We have begun with our 'Cuatrecasas Research Tool,' and we aim to explore many other innovative tools."