ECIJA opens The Garage in Madrid: 700 m² and 70 professionals to build its legal AI bet

ECIJA has inaugurated The Garage in Madrid, a legal innovation and artificial intelligence centre of 700 square metres with a dedicated team of 70 professionals. The firm presents it as the industrialisation of its AI strategy: a space where lawyers, engineers and designers work together to convert generative AI into legal services with their own name and price.

From pilot to product

The Garage's philosophy, according to the firm, is to move beyond the pilot phase that dominates the sector: instead of isolated tests of AI tools, the centre works with a product methodology - identified use case, multidisciplinary team, measured result and scalable deployment. The first lines of work include assisted drafting, contract review and document analysis for due diligence.

The choice of Madrid responds to the concentration of the firm's technological talent in the capital and to the proximity to its largest clients, who participate in co-development programmes.

Lawyers and engineers in the same room

The centre's organisational model mixes lawyers with technological profiles - data engineers, product managers, user experience specialists - under a common management. It is the scheme other firms have tried with innovation laboratories, but at a scale unusual in the Spanish market: 70 dedicated professionals is a significant fraction of the firm's total structure.

ECIJA maintains that the centre pays for itself: the products developed at The Garage are billed to clients as services, and the efficiency gains are shared between firm and client through new fee models.

What the centre will actually build

The firm details that The Garage will work on three product families: proprietary assistants trained on the firm's knowledge base, automation of high-volume repetitive processes - mass claims, contract generation, regulatory reporting - and predictive analytics applied to litigation and negotiation. Each product must pass through a validation stage with real clients before being offered in the market.

The space also hosts the firm's training programme in AI for lawyers and clients, with the ambition of turning technological literacy into a commercial argument: the client who understands what the tool does buys its value better.

The governance question

Concentrating AI development in one unit raises the question every firm faces: who answers for the errors of the tool. ECIJA states that all output from The Garage's products passes through lawyer review with the same signature responsibility as traditional work, and that professional secrecy protocols apply to the centre's data flows.

The sector race

The inauguration adds a piece to the race among Spanish firms to capitalise on legal AI. In recent months several large firms have announced centres, alliances or proprietary platforms, while international vendors - Harvey, Legora, the legal divisions of the big software companies - compete to become the sector's infrastructure. Our analysis on the question of AI ROI in law firms looks at the pending accounts of that race.

The decisive question is no longer who has AI, but who turns it into margin. The Garage is ECIJA's answer.

The centre adds to a string of investments by the firm in its technology perimeter, from its startup accelerator to its digital services divisions. With The Garage, that perimeter gains a physical headquarters and, above all, a P&L: the centre will report its own results, a way of forcing the discipline that innovation rhetoric often avoids.

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