French lawyer in Barcelona

Me Jérôme Pujol appears on Liste E of the Barcelona Bar: the register of European lawyers established in Spain under their home-country title, opened by Directive 98/5/EC of 16 February 1998. It is a permanent registration with the local bar, and not the occasional provision of services that a lawyer may deliver from their own country.

What that registration covers, put simply: the firm advises on French law, European Union law and international law, from Barcelona. It does not handle Spanish domestic law — that is inherent in practising under a home-country title. The point is useful to you: it saves you opening a file with us for a question that calls for a Spanish lawyer.

For that part, the firm works with Toda & Nel-lo Abogados, a Spanish law firm with offices in Barcelona and Madrid. The division is clear: French, European and international law on our side, Spanish domestic law on theirs, and a single contact for you.

Your contact in Catalonia therefore remains a French lawyer, also admitted to the Bars of Paris and of the Pyrénées-Orientales, bound by the same professional rules and the same professional secrecy as the one who handles your files in France — and by the same fee agreement, signed before the work begins.

The firm knows the ground: it was present at the Mobile World Congress Barcelona in 2021, meeting the young technology companies that exhibit there.

A French business does not need a firm specialising in Spain. It needs its lawyer to know what to do on the day a contract, a debt or a subsidiary crosses the border — and to have someone on the ground when local law comes into play.

Four situations recur.

• A contract signed with no governing law or jurisdiction clause. Absent a choice, the Rome I Regulation (EC no. 593/2008) designates the applicable law, and the Brussels I recast Regulation (EU no. 1215/2012) the court having jurisdiction. Two clauses written in advance avoid months of proceedings on the sole question of who judges: that is the first thing we look at in your contracts.
• The termination of a Spanish commercial agent. Directive 86/653/EEC is transposed on both sides — articles L. 134-1 et seq. of the French Commercial Code in France, Ley 12/1992 in Spain — and gives the agent an end-of-contract indemnity. The base is European and shared: that is what allows us to anticipate, and our Spanish partner to take over on what its own law adds.
• An invoice a Spanish customer is not paying. Since 2015, a decision given in one member state is enforced in another without exequatur, the former enforcement order, and the European order for payment opens a route with no hearing. The right one still has to be chosen before costs are incurred — that is the work we do to get your debts paid.
• A partner or a subsidiary in difficulty. Regulation (EU) 2015/848attaches the proceedings to the debtor's centre of main interests, which is not always where its registered office is filed.

Forming an SL — a sociedad limitada, the Spanish private limited company — opening a branch, going through an agent: the question of how to set up almost always comes first in the conversation.

Our part is played upstream, and on the French and European side: weighing up subsidiary against branch against distributor, writing the contracts between the parent company and the Spanish entity, organising ownership at group level, settling the ownership of trade marks and software, and measuring what setting up costs in tax terms — a subject governed by the France-Spain tax treaty of 10 October 1995.

Incorporating the Spanish company itself — articles of association, notary, commercial register, local filing obligations — is a matter of Spanish law. It is carried out by our partner firm, and we stay in the file: you do not have two lawyers to tell the same story to.

What we do not handle at all: advice to individual expatriates — property, family, succession. That is the work of other firms, long established in Barcelona.

A file that touches Spain is rarely handled from one place alone. The transaction is often put together in Paris, where the group, the bank or the investor sits; it is performed in Catalonia. Between the two, it is the same file and the same contact from start to finish — not a correspondent to whom the matter has to be explained a second time.

Our clients are by no means all based near the border. A business in Lyon, Bordeaux or Marseille opening a supplier account in Catalonia has exactly the same need. So meetings are held by video call just as readily as at the Paris office or at the Pyrénées-Orientales office, and documents are signed electronically.

The Barcelona office covers the same areas as the other two — it is a third office, not a separate speciality. Three of them simply arise differently as soon as a border is involved.

Contracts first, since that is where the applicable law and the court having jurisdiction are written down. Debt recovery next, whose tools are European rather than national. And finally your trade marks and designs: the EU trade mark (Regulation (EU) 2017/1001) and the Community design are filed, opposed and cancelled before the EUIPO, whose seat is in Alicante. A French business protecting its trade mark at European level therefore already has a file in Spain, often without knowing it.

The address of the office, on Avinguda Diagonal, appears in the “Contact details” box on this page together with the firm's telephone number and email address — the same for all three offices: there is only one number to remember.

Discussions are held in French, Spanish or English. A first meeting takes place on site or by video call, and is booked online. It serves to pin down your situation and to tell you the scope, the timescale and the amount before any commitment. If your request concerns Spanish domestic law or proceedings before a Spanish court, say so at that first conversation: we will tell you straight away what we handle ourselves and what goes to our Spanish partner.