Will AI Replace Legal Jobs in Spain? Here’s What to Do in 2025

Spain's legal market must face AI in 2025 because the numbers and rules are converging: the legal sector is already sizeable (€16.8bn in 2025) while Spain's legal‑AI segment is forecast to grow rapidly - projected to hit US$50.8 million by 2030 at an 18% CAGR (2025–2030) - a growth story that will change who does routine research and drafting (Spain legal AI market forecast - Grand View Research).

Regulation is moving at pace too: Spain's AESIA and the RD Sandbox (twelve projects were selected in April 2025) create real-world tests for high‑risk and general‑purpose systems, so firms must plan compliance as well as efficiency (Spain AI regulatory tracker - White & Case).

With studies showing up to 65% of jobs' tasks could be AI‑complemented, short practical upskilling - like Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work - helps lawyers learn prompts, tools, and verification guardrails to stay relevant and client-ready (Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus).

“Predicting future issues is a key challenge for law professionals servicing clients and offering advice. The work of the FLSC is intended to be useful to law firms, judiciaries and academic institutions worldwide, and with a global heatmap, benchmarks and risk assessments, the report is designed for practical use and guidance.” - Soledad Atienza, IBA Future of Legal Services Commission

In Spain today, AI is no longer a futuristic promise but a working colleague on the simplest - yet most time‑hungry - parts of legal work: generative models already draft contracts and litigations texts, speed legal research, flag risky clauses in due diligence and automate routine client Q&A, freeing lawyers to focus on strategy (see a clear overview of generative AI uses in the Spanish market on LegalMondo).

Firms are moving from experiments to production: Pérez‑Llorca's pilot with the Leya platform shows how a Spanish firm can process large volumes in conversational form, link to Iberley's national database for up‑to‑date legislation and keep confidentiality by integrating with document managers.

Practical use cases in Spain mirror broader trends - faster multi‑jurisdictional research, contract lifecycle automation, predictive analytics to weigh litigation odds, and chatbots for intake - so tasks that used to demand a junior's week can now be skimmed in minutes.

The takeaway for Spanish lawyers is pragmatic: treat AI as a precision tool that speeds routine work but still requires human oversight to catch nuance, bias and data‑security risks before anything goes to a client.

Spain's tech and skills picture is both an asset and a constraint for legal teams: world‑class infrastructure - fibre to about 95% of households and 95% 5G coverage - plus rising digital literacy (66.2% with basic digital skills, above the EU average) make it easier to deploy cloud‑based legal AI and remote cooperation, yet deep specialist shortages threaten smooth adoption (Spain 2025 Digital Decade country report).

National programs such as the Digital Spain 2025 roadmap push AI, 5G and upskilling, but employers still report hiring gaps - from surveys showing over 30% difficulty filling roles to other studies noting as much as 76% of firms struggling for tech hires - so expect longer recruitment cycles and higher salaries for AI and cybersecurity talent.

Add a reported shortfall of some 1.39 million ICT specialists to meet Europe's goals, and the result is clear: law firms must combine smarter hiring (tap regional hubs beyond Madrid and Barcelona), practical retraining that prizes hands‑on skills over credentials, and hybrid work models (telework could be ~38% of hours) to keep legal roles relevant as AI shifts routine tasks into software while human judgement stays central (shortfall of 1.39 million ICT specialists in Spain).

Spain's policy mix is reshaping how law firms adopt and govern AI: a March 11, 2025 draft national AI law, a live market‑surveillance agency (AESIA) and the RD Sandbox - which picked twelve projects in April 2025 - mean regulators expect real testing, not just pilot slides, before systems touch sensitive legal workflows (White & Case Spain AI regulatory tracker).

Complementing rules, the updated national AI strategy and targeted public investment bankroll the stack lawyers will rely on: funding for supercomputing, scholarships and SME support, a push to build Spanish NLP resources with the RAE, and plans for a central Data Office and open data repositories to feed trustworthy models (Spain national AI strategy report - EU AI Watch).

Practically, that means obligations will land across the value chain (providers, deployers, distributors) and regional rules - Galicia's Law 2/2025 is already an example - while Spain's data watchdog is sharpening teeth: the AEPD warns organisations to prepare now as the prohibited‑AI enforcement regime under Article 5 kicks in from August 2, 2025 (AEPD AI Act enforcement update (Article 5) - GDPRLocal).

The result for lawyers: clearer compliance corridors, faster public tools, and a regulatory lab where risky systems are stress‑tested before they bill a single minute - a tangible safety net that turns legal AI from a wild experiment into governed practice.

Regulation is the hard edge of Spain's AI story: AESIA - Europe's first dedicated AI regulator - has been operational since June 2024 and is actively running the RD Sandbox that picked twelve projects in April 2025, turning pilots into controlled, monitored tests before they touch sensitive legal workflows (AESIA 2025 balance report); at the same time the Draft Spanish AI Law, approved by the Council of Ministers on March 11, 2025, seeks to implement the EU AI Act on Spanish soil and create a national sanctioning regime that will assign duties across providers, deployers and distributors (White & Case AI regulatory tracker for Spain (March 2025)).

For law firms this means three concrete implications: classify systems by risk (from prohibited to high‑risk to limited/transparent uses), expect AESIA inspections and eventual fines once full powers apply, and use the RD Sandbox learnings to prove safe deployment - imagine a dozen live experiments stress‑testing models before a firm ever bills a client for AI‑generated advice.

The bottom line: governance is now operational in Spain, and compliance is as much a market entry ticket as technical accuracy or cost savings.

AI is reshaping who does the nitty‑gritty of legal work in Spain: generative models and automation are already taking on repetitive contract review, document triage and administrative drafting - tasks that bog down teams - while freeing frontline staff for higher‑value strategy and client work (see practical use cases in the Generative AI in Spain legal sector - LegalMondo overview).

That shift will displace routine hours but create new, in‑demand roles inside firms and public bodies: AI governance owners, compliance specialists trained for AESIA/EU rules, legal‑tech integrators and upskilling leads who translate tool outputs into defensible advice.

Spanish numbers underline the trade‑off - roughly 20% of firms already use AI but many are still experimenting and flag skills shortages as a key barrier (Banco de España analysis of AI adoption in Spanish firms), while BCG finds Spain leads Europe in worker AI use but lags on training and leadership guidance - gaps that firms must close to turn adoption into real job gains (BCG AI at Work 2025 study on Spain's AI adoption).

In the public sector, Esade's work shows generative AI can slash admin time - imagine a town‑hall inbox that frees several hours a week - so the immediate imperative is pragmatic reskilling, risk governance and re‑designing workflows so lawyers steer outcomes rather than chase paperwork.

“Spain's leadership in AI adoption is a great sign of our digital maturity, but we now need to go beyond tool deployment and embrace real transformation.” - Alfonso Abella, BCG

Stay practical and start with skills: prioritise short, targeted upskilling (digital literacy, AI basics and verification) because Spain already posts 66.2% basic digital skills and is pushing lifelong learning through its National Plan for Digital Skills - the state toolkit is there to help bridge the ICT gap (Spain digital skills snapshot - European Digital Skills and Jobs Initiative).

Sign into proven programmes and firm-level training - companies like Cuatrecasas are already running repeatable Digital Skills for Lawyers cohorts - so join structured courses rather than ad‑hoc tool tests (Cuatrecasas Digital Skills for Lawyers program).

Apply for or learn from EU upskilling initiatives too: the European Digital Skills Awards 2025 highlights ready-made models for workplace reskilling (look for the Digital Upskilling @ Work category) and can point to funded pilots and partners (European Digital Skills Awards 2025 - Digital Upskilling @ Work).

Practically, combine a short course, a prompt-and-guardrail checklist, and a pilot project inside the firm so that what once took a junior a week can be skimmed in minutes - while human judgement remains the final check.

Law firms in Spain must treat 2025 as the year governance, smart procurement and targeted talent moves stop being optional and become survival skills: set up a cross‑functional AI governance committee with a named owner for each system, adopt risk‑based policies that map to the EU AI Act and national rules, and make procurement a compliance exercise - require vendors to provide documentation, data lineage and model‑level evidence that supports AESIA‑grade audits and RD Sandbox testing (Spain's Draft Spanish AI Law, AESIA and the RD Sandbox are already shaping duties and inspections; see the Spain AI regulatory tracker - White & Case).

Procurement checklists should mirror data‑governance priorities (traceability, bias audits, robust logging) so firms don't inherit regulatory risk, and talent strategies must blend hires (AI compliance leads, legal‑tech integrators) with rapid reskilling programmes that teach verification, human‑in‑the‑loop controls and vendor oversight.

Practical governance tools - clear roles, documented intake and continuous monitoring - turn compliance from a cost into a competitive signal for clients and regulators; for playbooks on designing these structures, firms can follow enterprise governance guidance like Publicis Sapient's framework for accountable AI (enterprise AI governance guide - Publicis Sapient), because a well‑run governance engine is the firm's best defence and productivity multiplier.

“If you don't have a well‑defined framework or clearly articulated responsibilities, things are going to slip through the cracks, and that can have significant unintended consequences on individuals and groups. Data breaches, for example, can carry steep fines that are enough to shut companies down,” explains Sucharita Venkatesh, senior director, risk management, at Publicis Sapient.

Public-sector tools and experiments are becoming the go-to playground for legal teams that want reliable, locally grounded AI: Spain's ALIA programme is a public, open multilingual infrastructure that already produces models tuned to Spanish and the co‑official languages and is explicitly designed for civic use, so lawyers should watch its pilots and datasets closely (ALIA explainer: ALIA and foundational models (datos.gob.es) and the project site ALIA public AI infrastructure official site (ALIA.gob.es)).

ALIA‑40B - a 40‑billion‑parameter foundational model trained for months on MareNostrum 5 - processed some 6.9 billion tokens in a 33‑terabyte corpus (roughly the equivalent of 17 million books), and early pilots include a Tax Agency trial and a Health pilot for heart‑failure detection; in the justice space that translates into more accurate machine translations between co‑official languages, virtual paralegals tuned to Spanish legal vocabulary, and richer RAG backends built on public documentation.

The practical takeaway for firms: monitor AESIA‑verified outputs from ALIA, map pilot results to defensible workflows (who verifies citations, who owns client disclosure), and treat ALIA‑based tools as a public‑sector sandbox that can speed routine work without handing over final responsibility.

“The ALIA project represents an extraordinary effort to provide us with our own data, language models and resources in the competitive environment of artificial intelligence. At its core, ALIA works with texts in more than 35 European languages, ensuring a representation of 20% for the languages of Spain, which makes it the AI system that best reflects our linguistic and cultural reality.” - Mateo Valero, Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Checklist and next steps for legal professionals in Spain (2025): start by mapping every AI system your team uses to the EU risk tiers and assign provider/deployer duties under the Draft Spanish AI Law so responsibilities aren't left to chance - see the government's draft bill for the Good Use and Governance of AI for obligations and prohibited practices (Draft Spanish AI Law - DLA Piper summary); build documented, role‑based AI literacy programmes (short, evidenceable modules and records) to satisfy Article 4‑style expectations and protect the firm from liability (AI literacy guidance for employers - Eversheds Sutherland (Spain)); pilot high‑risk or general‑purpose systems in controlled environments and surface those learnings to governance (use RD Sandbox lessons and AESIA coordination to prove safe deployment) (AESIA & RD Sandbox overview - White & Case (Spain AI regulatory tracker)); require vendor dossiers (data lineage, bias audits, logging), versioned playbooks and human‑in‑the‑loop sign‑offs so every AI output is auditable - think of the AI playbook like a stamped client file: versioned, auditable and signed.

Finally, monitor regional rules and sanction regimes and convert compliance into a client confidence signal rather than a mere cost of doing business.

“the skills, knowledge and understanding that allow providers, deployers and affected persons, taking into account their respective rights and obligations in the context of this Regulation, to make an informed deployment of AI systems, as well as to gain awareness about the opportunities and risks of AI and possible harm it can cause.”

Short answer: not wholesale replacement, but a fast reshaping - routine tasks will be automated and roles will evolve rather than vanish. Spain already leads Europe in workplace AI adoption, yet the BCG data show a clear skills gap (78% regular use but only 36% feel well trained), so the real risk is unemployed time, not unemployed lawyers; generative systems are already trimming work that once took a junior a week down to minutes (Generative AI impact on Spain's legal sector - LegalMondo analysis).

The practical response is simple: map systems to risk, insist on governance, and invest in short, hands‑on training so teams redesign workflows to capture AI's value rather than merely deploy tools - exactly the levers BCG recommends (BCG report: Spain AI adoption and value gap).

For lawyers who want actionable upskilling, focused programs such as the Nucamp AI Essentials for Work teach promptcraft, verification guardrails and workplace use cases in 15 weeks, turning adoption into advantage (Nucamp AI Essentials for Work 15-week syllabus).

“Spain's leadership in AI adoption is a great sign of our digital maturity, but we now need to go beyond tool deployment and embrace real transformation.”

- Alfonso Abella, BCG