THE AUTHOR:
Prachi Shrivastava, Founding Advisor at Lawfinity Solutions
The EU-India Free Trade Agreement was concluded five months ago at Hyderabad House, New Delhi. For Spain’s leading independent law firms, the announcement came at a pressured moment: the FTA is opening a window, and that window is narrowing from both ends.
A Lawfinity Solutions analysis of publicly documented legal mandates mapped 438 discrete legal instructions in the India-Spain corridor, covering 31 Indian parent groups across 12 practice areas. Indian FDI stock in Spain grew 72 per cent in a single year, from €437 million in 2023 to €751 million in 2024 even before the FTA concluded.
The corridor is already in acceleration. The mandate analysis reveals why that acceleration is not straightforwardly good news for independent Spanish firms.
Forty Points
In the Spain-to-India direction (Spanish companies investing into India) the leading independent firm plays a strategic role in approximately 46 per cent of documented mandates. In the India-to-Spain direction, which is the direction the FTA will accelerate most, that strategic role falls to 6.4 per cent. In 93.6 per cent of India-to-Spain instructions the firm is in an execution, compliance, filing, or defence role.
That 40-point gap has compounded over 12 years of organic growth. The FTA changes its significance.
Advisory work triggered by the agreement includes reassessing rules of origin across LatAm assembly operations, restructuring ETVE holding vehicles against the anticipated investment protection framework, renegotiating professional mobility arrangements for intra-company transferees under the FTA’s 144 sub-sector mobility schedule, repositioning marketing authorisation holdings for pharma groups ahead of tariff elimination on formulations, to name a few examples. This work requires strategic counsel. From now to late 2027, the likely ratification period, companies are not waiting. The highest-value FTA mandates are now being formed.
The Cost of the Execution-Node Trap
For international practitioners, the significance of the 40-point gap is not a localised competitive issue. It is an addressable market problem rooted in the mechanics of how cross-border legal mandates are instructed and what those instructions are worth.
The financial make-up of a strategic cross-border mandate is well-documented. In complex international commercial arbitration, the ICC Commission on Arbitration and ADR’s Report on Decisions on Costs in International Arbitration (2015, para. 70) establishes that party costs, including external lawyers’ fees, expert costs, and related expenses, constitute 83 per cent of overall arbitration costs on average. While public dockets naturally preserve the confidentiality of proprietary firm invoices, applying standard legal market benchmarks to the transaction values within the mandate data reveals the stark reality of this directional asymmetry. Based on standard market estimates in 2026, senior international arbitration partners at elite global firms bill between €850 and €1,300 per hour; senior associates between €450 and €650. A conservative blended rate of €600 per hour applied to the 1,000 to 2,500 hours consumed by a standard non-expedited international commercial arbitration covering jurisdictional challenge, document production, witness statements, expert reports, and a five-day evidentiary hearing, produces a lead counsel mandate value of €600,000 to €1,500,000.
A standalone CNMC merger notification, by contrast, is priced as a defined-scope commodity engagement. Because Spanish antitrust law prohibits bar associations from publishing fee tariffs as a restriction on competition, market rates are deregulated. However, under the procedural tiers established by Ley 3/2013 de creación de la CNMC, an ordinary-form merger notification requires extensive market share definition, horizontal and vertical overlap economic modelling, and a formal response matrix to CNMC Requests for Information. At standard premium independent firm billing rates of €300 to €500 per hour, a typical 100-to-200-hour phase-one drafting cycle yields a fee band of €40,000 to €90,000.
The difference between those two reference points — €600,000 to €1,500,000 at the origination seat versus €40,000 to €90,000 at the execution layer — illustrates the fee compression that occurs whenever a local tranche is absorbed within a global network’s instruction. That compression is not marginal, and it repeats across every mandate in the 93.6 per cent.
If Not You, Then Who
The mandate data also illuminates who is capturing the strategic layer already in place in the corridor, and how.
Cross-border instructions in this corridor do not originate from local general counsel departments in India. They are driven by institutional buyers such as Indian multinational conglomerates and global private equity funds, among others. These stakeholders instruct a single international firm at the point of structuring and leave the independent Spanish firm to receive whatever residue reaches the local layer. Once the global firm holds the master instruction, the referral loop closes internally.
When Tata Motors launched its €3.8 billion voluntary tender offer for Iveco Group in July 2025, Clifford Chance advised across a single global mandate spanning Amsterdam, Milan, London, Paris, Madrid, Düsseldorf, and New York. The Spanish employment subrogation, the CNMC merger filing, the local industrial relations work all ran through the same global instruction, not through independent Spanish counsel. When (Motherson has an 11-country footprint — see Motherson’s investor material citing 22 facilities in 11 countries — with Spanish assets in the perimeter) the Spanish execution tranche went inside the same instruction. Linklaters has operated in Madrid for over 19 years. To see that presence as incidental would be to miss a crucial insight. It is the mechanism by which a single partner call from Mumbai absorbs the local layer without the mandate ever reaching the open market.
Of Multimodal Corridors
There is not just a bilateral corridor here.
Biocon Biologics’ Spanish subsidiary served as a guarantor node in the security structure for a $3.3 billion global acquisition led from London. UPL Iberia’s balance sheet was affected by a $390 million rights issue coordinated across three continents. Argentine companies route Indian royalties through Spanish holding vehicles. A major Spanish infrastructure group acquired an Indian asset through a Singapore seller using a Dutch special purpose vehicle structured to access the India–Netherlands tax treaty, rather than route the deal directly under the India–Spain treaty.
Spain is frequently just one node in a multi-jurisdictional structure. A firm advising only on the Spanish endpoint sees the last 10 per cent of a decision structured elsewhere. The FTA mandates forming now will require seeing the whole picture at the point of origination instead of only receiving instructions on a tranche after it has been carved out in London or Singapore.
There is a further competitive dynamic that the bilateral framing obscures. Within Spain’s independent firm universe, the strategic advisory seat is not evenly distributed. Lawfinity Solutions’ mandate analysis of publicly documented instructions identifies Uría Menéndez as the sub-holding governance coordinator for at least two of the corridor’s largest Indian IT groups. The firm orchestrates regulatory compliance across Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay from its Madrid LatAm desk through what the mandate pattern suggests is a single institutional retainer relationship rather than discrete matter instructions. This is not ground-level employment or litigation advisory — it is high-margin governance work that builds a client moat, and it does not appear in any tombstone.
The Window and Its Edges
The FTA creates a genuine and time-bounded opportunity. The agreement’s services chapter commits the EU across 144 sub-sectors. The pharmaceutical tariff schedule creates immediate AEMPS regulatory advisory needs for the healthcare sector. Across the 438 mandates in Lawfinity Solutions’ corridor dataset, at least five Indian pharmaceutical groups with active Spanish vehicles — Dr. Reddy’s, Torrent, Zydus, Sun Pharma, and Cipla — return no named primary external Spanish counsel in any public court record, exchange filing, or law firm tombstone. The automotive Rules of Origin provisions create compliance obligations this year for Indian groups with assembly operations touching Spain – Motherson’s plants in Pamplona and El Prat de Llobregat, Bajaj Auto’s KTM/Pierer Bajaj continental structure, Tata Motors’ Spanish distribution arm. The professional mobility framework creates intra-company transferee structuring work that has not existed before.
The Investment Protection Agreement is the FTA’s missing piece and is still under negotiation. It will, when concluded, generate a wave of investor-state disputes routed through the anticipated Investment Court System. India terminated its bilateral investment treaties in 2017. European investors in India have operated in a legal vacuum since. When that vacuum is filled, the first round of cases will go to firms that have built institutional credibility on both sides of the corridor before the claims arise. That credibility cannot be assembled in the weeks after a claim is filed.
The independent firms with the deepest relationships in India are closest to capturing what the FTA makes possible. The question is whether they see the corridor they have built as a foundation for strategic repositioning, or as a sufficient end in itself. The mandate data suggests the latter. The FTA suggests they do not have long to reconsider.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prachi Shrivastava is the Founding Advisor at Lawfinity Solutions, a legal market intelligence and positioning consultancy focused on cross-border positioning for international firms, with a current focus on the India corridor. This piece draws on Lawfinity Solutions research into publicly documented legal mandates in the India-Spain-LatAm corridor. The mandate dataset covers SEBI exchange filings, CENDOJ judicial records, Indian Kanoon court archives, and law firm tombstone registries.
*The views and opinions expressed by authors are theirs and do not necessarily reflect those of their organizations, employers, or Daily Jus, Jus Mundi, or Jus Connect.
