The CGAE opens the third edition of its free management course for small law firms

The Training Commission of the General Council of Spanish Lawyers has called the third edition of its Management Course for Small Law Firms, an online and free training programme that will start on 10 November. The sessions will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 16:30 to 18:30, and those unable to follow them live will be able to watch the classes afterwards on demand.

The course is free; only the issuance of the certificate of completion, whose request is voluntary, has a cost of 50 euros. Places are limited and registration is managed through the link abgcia.me/cursogestiondespachos26, according to the call disseminated by the Bar Association of Tarragona on 29 October; for more information or questions, the call provides the email secretaria@formacionabogacia.es.

The chosen calendar has its logic: starting on 10 November allows completing a good part of the itinerary before the end of the year - accounting closings, tax campaigns, annual balances - turns management precisely into the hot topic of every firm. Training in November means arriving in January with homework done.

A syllabus built around the firm's business

The call details a programme of cross-cutting subjects that portrays well where the real problems of the small firm lie: economic management, business development, client relations, data protection, digital transformation, civil liability, mental health and time management. It is not a course on legal technique - of that there is an abundant offer - but on everything that surrounds the practice and decides whether a firm is viable.

The institution itself justifies the third edition with an argument unusual in legal training: it repeats it "because many of you asked for it". The accumulated demand of two previous editions is the best indicator that the content responds to a real need of the majority group of the Spanish legal profession, which practises alone or in structures of very few professionals.

Eight subjects, eight pains of the small firm

The programme called allows reading, as on a map, the points where the small firm usually bleeds. Economic management is the first: many firms know the client's file in detail and not their own - margins per matter, real cost of the hour, treasury forecast - and any decision on pricing or hiring is made blindly. Business development addresses the other side: client acquisition in a market where traditional recommendation is no longer enough and digital presence increasingly decides the first contacts.

Client relations is perhaps the most undervalued subject: most complaints and non-payments are born from expectations poorly managed at the start of the engagement, not from technical errors. Data protection and digital transformation arrive together because they are the two sides of the same obligation: the firm that digitises files, signs electronically and uses cloud tools is processing personal data with concrete obligations, and non-compliance is not a remote hypothesis but a real sanctioning contingency.

Civil liability recalls that professional practice has a price of error - and a policy and prevention practices worth reviewing -, and mental health and time management close the programme with what nobody teaches and everyone suffers: the small firm concentrates in one or two people the management, the production, the administration and the acquisition, and without method that cocktail ends in exhaustion or in business decisions made out of sheer tiredness. That an institutional programme devotes hours to these last two subjects says much about how the profession's internal conversation has changed.

Who it is aimed at

Although the call is open to the whole legal profession, the natural addressee is the lawyer who runs their own practice - alone or in a firm of two or three professionals - and assumes, in addition to legal technique, the entirety of business management. It is also useful training for those considering setting up on their own: it allows them to know in advance the complete map of what running a firm involves, from treasury to mental health, before taking the step.

Management, the pending subject of legal training

The lawyer's training rarely includes what in practice decides the survival of a small firm: how to acquire and collect, how to organise time, how to digitalise the administration and how to structure the relationship with clients. That gap between technical excellence and economic viability is what this course tries to cover, with a format designed to be compatible with daily practice: two-hour sessions in the afternoon, two days a week, without travel and without enrolment fees.

The combination of recordings available on demand and afternoon schedule eliminates the two classic excuses - the agenda and geography - for firms outside the big capitals.

The training ecosystem of the institutional legal profession

That the training is online and live, but recoverable on demand, also makes it suitable for the profile that needs it most: the lawyer who cannot close the firm two afternoons a week. The possibility of watching the classes afterwards eliminates the classic frustration of streaming courses, where a visit to the court or a client call left you out of half the session.

The initiative is part of the sustained commitment of the institutional legal profession to management training, a terrain in which the territorial bar associations also move with their own programmes. In our coverage of training and events you can consult other active calls, such as the ICAV courses for legal aid lawyers and access to the ICAS or the COGRASOVA workshop on the new Sustainable Mobility Law.

There is also a less visible value in this third edition: standardisation. When the institution that represents the entire legal profession sets a management syllabus for small firms, it is defining de facto what a well-organised professional practice is expected to master in 2026. For younger lawyers, the course works as a roadmap of what the degree does not teach; for veterans, as a quick audit of which firm processes have fallen behind.

For those who run a small firm - and very especially for the newly established -, the cost-benefit ratio is hard to dispute: free training, optional accreditation for 50 euros, the possibility of recovering the sessions on demand and a syllabus oriented to the daily profitability of the practice. The only thing in short supply is places.

Precision note: the course data - dates, schedule, subjects, modality, prices, registration link and limited places - come from the official CGAE call disseminated by the Bar Association of Tarragona.

Sources

• ICAT: "The Council organises a Management Course for Small Law Firms"