How Cuatrecasas Transformed Legal Case Management Through Agile Innovation

Discover how a leading law firm streamlined case management and enhanced cross-team collaboration by adopting agile methodologies with Planview AgilePlace.

Cuatrecasas, a leading international law firm, received a clear directive from leadership: lead with technology. The PMO understood the value of work management innovation and sought a solution to help lawyers manage complex legal cases and be a catalyst for overcoming resistance to technological change in the legal sector. The goal was to make lawyers’ lives easier by enabling them to maximize workflow efficiency, prioritize work more effectively, and increase visibility across departments while respecting the traditional nuances of legal workflows.

Cuatrecasas PMO chose Planview® AgilePlace as the foundation for its new approach to legal case management. “AgilePlace offered the usability and look and feel we wanted. We saw we could adapt the system to our needs instead of changing the way we work, which we knew would help with adoption,” says Leo Tilie project specialist at Cuatrecasas. “The implementation started small and gradually grew as teams saw the value and suggested it to colleagues.”

Founded in 1917 in Barcelona, Cuatrecasas is a leading law firm with more than 1,200 lawyers and 800 staff across multiple international offices. The firm specializes in areas including mergers and acquisitions, litigation, tax law, labor law, and financial law. Under visionary leadership, Cuatrecasas has grown significantly over the decades, combining legal excellence with a strong commitment to innovation and corporate responsibility.

With a growing international footprint, Cuatrecasas needed a way to coordinate complex legal casework across departments, teams, and geographies without disrupting the firm’s longstanding practices that have made it successful. Their technology journey began with strong executive vision to be early adopters of technology to optimize productivity, transparency, and case management. They had a long way to go to get there. Most work was still managed using sticky notes, spreadsheets, notebooks, and email, whichever method each lawyer and staff member preferred.

“We apply innovation in all areas, using technological processes and resources to complement our legal activity to the benefit of our clients,” explained Tilie. “But when it came to case workflows, we had no real visibility. It was still analog, difficult to delegate tasks and manage the tasks of so many people. The existence of a project portfolio, methodological standard, rules, and management tool became a must.”

To deconstruct silos and establish sharing and alignment, the CIO commissioned its PMO to formalize order and provision necessary tools to equip its lawyers. The PMO began the search for a visual-friendly, attractive, and comfortable application that would become the standard across the organization.

Cuatrecasas began exploring Lean and Agile methodologies within its IT department as early as 2012, starting with manual Kanban boards and visual management practices. As the PMO formalized its approach and agile methods proved effective, interest grew in expanding the approach to lawyers. In 2018, they selected Planview® AgilePlace for its simplicity, ease of use, and cost to digitize and scale these practices, initially deploying it for a medium size legal team involving around 15 people. From there, usage grew gradually, expanding across departments as the general manager wanted to formalize it for the whole firm and lawyers suggested it to their colleagues.

As AgilePlace gained traction, the PMO recognized that traditional team boards created collaboration and confidentiality challenges. “Some legal teams exceed 200 people, making it impractical to manage all work on a single shared board, especially when case-sensitive information was involved,” says Jaume Echevarría, project leader at Cuatrecasas. “We shifted to a model where each lawyer has a personal board tailored to their own caseload and priorities.” This structure gives lawyers greater autonomy and privacy while still enabling broader coordination across the firm.

To bridge the gap between personal and team visibility, the PMO designed automations that enable users to copy cards from individual boards to higher-level boards by specialty or department. This allows for a centralized view of progress and workload distribution without exposing confidential client information. They also implemented unique card types by practice area and leverage AgilePlace’s flexible architecture to ensure the platform adapts to their needs, not the other way around. “This methodology and tool have become crucial for us,” says Tilie. Together, they support everything from task delegation and scheduling to case oversight and capacity planning or lawyers’ workload.

While project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions are commonplace for industries with complex workflows, they’re only recently gaining favor in the legal industry, driven by firms like Cuatrecasas. Planview AgilePlace has become integral to Cuatrecasas operations, helping the PMO enforce consistent practices across all offices. With this mind, the growing PMO continues to lead the firm’s digital transformation, aligning technology investments with business needs and management processes.

Cuatrecasas' legal teams are beginning to embrace a continuous improvement mindset, rare in the legal industry.Since implementation, there is efficiency and visibility across caseloads, proving PPM has its place, even in non-traditional PPM spaces. Automations streamline collaboration and help securely manage hundreds of lawyers’ workflows. Legal project managers use AgilePlace to assign, track, and manage workloads with greater clarity and accountability. And while this initiative was technology driven, it was also grounded in the client’s experience. Better task prioritization and resource allocation means better case management, which, in some cases, has increased client satisfaction.

Cultural transformation has been a somewhat unexpected but welcomed result, as IT has evolved from a support function to a strategic business partner. “We have become more business-centric, offering solutions for lawyers to do their best work,” says Tilie. This result aligns with the firm’s goal to provide the highest quality legal services, innovate in the legal field, and contribute positively to society.

With the foundation laid and momentum building, Cuatrecasas is scaling AgilePlace globally to its lawyers’ teams. As the firm continues to expand into Latin America and evolve its legal operations, AgilePlace will remain central to driving standardization, visibility, and continuous improvement. “It is now more necessary than ever to have a system of this kind for our lawyers,” says Jaume Echevarría. “We want to break with territoriality by creating cross-functional teams beyond territories and specialties. In short, we are in full transformation, and it is time to act.”