Eugenio Ribón, dean of the Madrid Bar, named Lawyer of the Year 2026

The San Raimundo de Penafort jurists' association has awarded its Lawyer of the Year 2026 prize to Eugenio Ribón Seisdedos, dean of the Madrid Bar Association (ICAM), Expansion reports.

According to the ICAM statement, the jury particularly valued "his solid professional career, his commitment to the defence of the legal profession and his drive for initiatives aimed at strengthening the legal profession and the institutions that represent it, as well as the institutional action carried out this year to preserve legal certainty, the right of defence and the proper balance of procedural safeguards".

Eugenio Ribón Seisdedos, managing partner of Ribón Asociados, has built a career of more than 25 years combining legal practice with academic, doctrinal, training and institutional representation activity.

An award with an institutional reading

The San Raimundo de Penafort award, from one of Spain's most established jurists' associations, is usually read as a thermometer of the profession's priorities. This year the focus falls on the institutional defence of the legal profession: legal certainty, the right of defence and procedural safeguards, three themes that have marked the judicial year, from the application of Organic Law 1/2025 on efficiency measures for the public justice service, whose keys we analysed here, to the debates on the organisation of the bar associations and the representation of the profession.

Under Ribón's deanship, the ICAM has maintained intense activity in training and member services, in addition to a very visible public position on the year's major institutional affairs. The Madrid bar, the largest in Spain by membership, is also a relevant actor in the profession's continuing education, as reflected in the congresses of its sections that we review in our agenda.

The profession, in a week of recognitions

The award to Ribón arrives in a week of intense institutional news for the Spanish legal profession: the General Council of the Spanish Bar has broken records with its real estate law course, with more than 10,000 registered, a story we tell in our training section, and the debate on the future of the profession (technology, firm structure, talent recruitment) remains open across all collegiate bodies.

For the Agente Lex newsroom, the recognition of a sitting dean underlines something we have been observing in the sector's day to day: the growing weight of the institutional in legal practice, where defending the profession has become as permanent a task as defending clients.

San Raimundo de Penafort and the profession's awards

The association, named after the patron saint of jurists, grants this recognition annually to figures from the legal profession, the judiciary, the prosecution service and the academic world, and its verdict usually coincides with the matters that most occupy the profession at each moment. Choosing a sitting bar dean, with a motivation centred on legal certainty and procedural safeguards, points to institutional defence as the task the association wanted to reward this year above strictly forensic or academic achievement.

The prize adds to the recognition of a career that has combined one's own firm with teaching and institutional representation, a mixed profile increasingly frequent among those on the front line of Spanish bar politics.

The date and venue of the award ceremony will be announced by the association in the coming weeks, in an event that usually brings together representatives of the judiciary, the prosecution, bar associations and the academic world.

Source: Expansion. This piece is informative and does not constitute legal advice.