What motivated you to not only talk about but also implement legal tech?

Juan: Our organization has a pressing need for efficiency. With 55,000 employees and gross sales exceeding €11 billion in 2023, Carrefour Spain is rapidly growing. This translates to just one lawyer for every €440 million of gross sales.

Our legal team consists of very talented and hardworking individuals—just 35 of them. And the amount of work keeps increasing.

It is not personal fulfilment I am seeking; it is about addressing an urgent business requirement. This has been the key driver of our legal innovation journey. As my team sometimes says, “We do Legal Tech to survive.”

What is your role?

Juan: I am the General Counsel and Board Secretary of Carrefour Spain. I oversee all legal matters across the company, including commercial contracts, real estate transactions, litigation, compliance—which encompasses data protection and ethics—and corporate governance.

My role involves providing strategic legal advice to Carrefour’s senior management and managing the Legal Department to ensure it operates effectively.

When did you realise that human talent alone would not solve your bandwidth issues?

Juan: Like many General Counsel, I had anticipated this challenge for some time. But it was around 2006 when resource constraints became so significant that we had to seriously start experimenting with tech systems to boost productivity.

Since then, we have upgraded it multiple times. Today, with a clear understanding of our requirements, we use a third-party vendor (iManage). Now, we have over a million documents stored digitally.

Your team did not stop there. What did you build next?

Juan: Of course, we had to go much further. While we could now retrieve documents more quickly and ensure greater accuracy through version control, we were still manually producing thousands of legal documents each month.

Since that was not sustainable, we began using a document automation tool (Docxpresso). Once again, we started small, focusing on a few document types, and then gradually improved and expanded the system over time.

So you achieved some key gains, but was that enough to convince your internal business partners?

Juan: Even with these tools, there was still a perception at times that legal was slowing down the business. We realised that we needed to build a stronger muscle for continuous innovation in how we work.

In 2022, we launched the NEXT project—a transformation initiative aimed at creating the "Legal Department of the Future". Simply put, our goal was to establish a framework that ensures we continuously seek new and better ways of working while securing stakeholder buy-in to implement solutions we were confident would make us more productive.

What does NEXT stand for?

Juan: The NEXT Project is designed to transform Carrefour Spain's legal operations through legal tech adoption and process optimization. The project focuses on four pillars:

• inNovation: Improving our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by streamlining and elevating legal operations.
• tEam: Developing digital skills for lawyers and assistants through training and personal branding.
• client eXperience: Optimizing processes while ensuring security and legal quality.
• Enablement by legal-Tech: Adopting tech tools to meet not only efficiency targets, but also our department's goals in equality, sustainability, and governance.

So you launched NEXT in 2022, what are the outcomes of the projects over the last four years?

Juan: In summary, it has clearly improved the legal team’s operations. We can now achieve more with fewer resources. Importantly, as was our goal from the outset, it has also enhanced the experience and satisfaction of our internal "clients".

The NEXT project has introduced the following improvements:‍

• ‍Automation Tool: Enhanced the tool that has already generated over a million documents for users without legal expertise. This continues to save significant time and allows the legal team to focus on more strategic tasks.‍
• Legal Site: A central hub offering easy access to legal resources, FAQs, the "Legal Academy" for regulatory training, and legal updates. This has significantly simplified how employees across the company find and use legal information.‍
• Look Up Project: A data-driven initiative launched to analyse and deliver proactive legal answers.
• ‍Real Estate Dashboard: Partnered with an external team (PwC NewLaw) to develop a management dashboard for real estate contracts, leveraging AI and data analytics.‍
• GenAI: Integrated a generative AI tool (Harvey) to provide instant legal answer.
• ‍Training Sessions: Delivered extensive training to ensure the smooth adoption and daily use of these new tools.

Innovation journeys often hit rough waters. What challenges did you face?

Juan: At first, some of the business colleagues weren’t thrilled—they thought, “Why are we doing legal’s work?” Tasks like filling out contract templates felt like legal’s responsibility.

However, our innovation projects stand on broad shoulders. It is integrated with Carrefour's Digital Retail Strategy 2026, as Carrefour aims to become the global leader in digital retail by adopting a “data-centric, digital-first” approach company-wide. Aligning the legal innovation strategy with the organisation’s broader goals definitely helped us. Involving our business partners early in the process did too. Once they got past the initial hesitation, our business partners quickly realised what efficiency gains could be achieved.

Today, our contract automation tool is considered an essential part of their workflow. It now generates up to 17,000 documents per month, with more than 350 business colleagues using it every day. We also have other company business lines requesting access to the Legal Department’s tool to automate and streamline their operations.

Some of the key lessons learned include the importance of involving end-users early in the development process, the necessity for regular feedback and iterative improvements, and the critical role of collaboration between legal, IT, and business units in successful implementation.

And what about your own team’s reaction?

Juan: I’m fortunate to work with a team that embraces legal innovation. Initially, some members were hesitant about the additional templating work when we started the contract automation project.

However, once they began using the tools, they wanted to do more of it. They recognised the opportunity to eliminate many mundane tasks and create room for more strategic work.

Now, our team is highly proficient in leading legal innovation projects and skilled at using and testing new tools.

Over time, the legal department has become a role model within the company, consistently exploring and sharing new solutions that benefit other teams. We take the lead in testing new tools and scoping proof of concepts (POCs) for the wider organisation. For example, our POC with the generative AI tool (Harvey) proved successful, and other teams, including our tax and HR departments, have since adopted the solution.

What recommendations do you have for in-house counsel considering a similar innovation initiative?

Juan: Choose a solution that genuinely aligns with your organisation’s needs. Few things are more frustrating than investing budget, time, and resources only to end up with a “white elephant.”

For those just beginning their legal innovation journey, I recommend starting with the basics. Focus on foundational tools and processes before exploring more complex initiatives.

But don’t fall too far behind. If you still don’t have a document management system, I’d shout, “RUN! Get one today!”

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Juan Riego is the General Counsel of Carrefour Spain, a member of the Executive Management Committee, and the Secretary of the Board of Directors.