On a day like today, 9 February, rēgula was born. Two years ago.
We started the project with a team of eight lawyers and one trainee, all but one of them dedicated to competition law in its various forms. A single member of the team, with the opportunistic support of a few hours from the others, provided advice on sectoral regulation (mainly environmental matters) to some clients who required that complementary service.
Two years later, the firm has doubled in size. Today, rēgula is a team of 17 people: four equity partners, one counsel, nine lawyers, one trainee and two administrative staff. Growth has been concentrated mainly in the area of regulation (or public law), where we now have a team of five lawyers and a broad and deep service offering.
Our second year has included several decisive milestones. Three of them deserve special mention on a day like today, when looking back is inevitable.
- Carlos Melón has joined the three original partners. Carlos is an exceptional lawyer for many reasons, which his clients know well. But he is also an exceptional human being. His arrival, together with that of his team, has made us more capable, advancing the execution of our vision: to be Spain’s leading specialist law firm in competition, regulation and litigation. It has also made us a better team on a human level. Anyone wishing to learn a little more about Carlos can listen to the interview he was recently given on Más Derecho, available here.
- The last 12 months have also brought us the pleasure of welcoming Javier Vias to the team. Javier and I have known each other for 27 years, since the first time I walked through the door at Serrano, 25. Martínez Lage & Asociados had its offices there at the time. Javier was already a senior associate and I was the lowest-ranking member of an all-star team. Javier then spent more than 20 years in the legal department of Cepsa (now Moeve), always as head of competition law and, in his later years, also as head of the regulation and sustainability areas. Javier and I have now come full circle with his joining rēgula in 2025. He too makes us a stronger team technically and a better one humanly.
- November 2025 brought a pleasant surprise: the Legal 500 Iberia Rising Law Firm of the Year award. One always wonders whether these awards are pre-cooked. In this case, the truth is comforting, because it caught us completely off guard. I think it shows in the video and photos from the event, where our faces say it all. All the partners have now ordered tuxedos for future ceremonies, now that we have stopped being a ‘startup’ and have become part of the ‘establishment’.
Public communications by organisations tend to magnify successes and exclude mistakes, even small missteps. With few exceptions, no one communicates the loss of an important asset or the failure of a project (I recently wrote about this on our blog, regarding the CNMC’s concealment of its failures before the courts, available here). Like in many other things, we want to place ourselves in the minority. We believe it is positive to talk about what has not gone entirely well, without dwelling on it.
In this regard, two things come to mind today that I would have liked to avoid. The first is the loss of one of our senior associates, Pedro Láinez. Pedro is a great lawyer and a great person, who decided to try his luck at a large firm at the beginning of 2025. We felt his departure deeply. In any event, there is a positive side to this setback: we have not had any other situation like this in 24 months of existence, during which, as was to be expected, other large firms have circled around our talent. Among the things that could have gone better, there is also a project in which we invested a great deal of time but failed to get off the ground: expanding our service offering to include economic advice in regulatory matters. At the end of 2025, we realised that integrating economists into a project whose centre of gravity is legal is not as natural as I had thought. This second failure taught us the importance of making negative decisions, those that involve discarding rather than incorporating.
I am writing today about our second year of life, but the truth is that today is actually the first day of our third year. So it also makes sense to look ahead and think about our objectives for 2026, which we would like to see achieved in twelve months’ time.
- The first is to complete our move into our new offices. In mid-2025, we decided to leave behind our startup ‘garage’ on Rodríguez San Pedro, where we rented two small but (in the kindly light of hindsight) endearing spaces. At the end of the year, we moved into our new offices at Velázquez, 28, where we are still in the process of settling in. Over the last couple of months, we have combined drafting pleadings with visits from plumbers, and meetings at the CNMC with the purchase of lithographs (to fill the high walls of a 19th century apartment in one of Madrid’s most elegant areas). We hope to be fully settled in our new home in the spring, which we are very much looking forward to opening to our clients and friends.
- Our second objective for 2026 is to continue expanding our capacity in the area of regulation. Despite the fact that Carlos’s thousands of LinkedIn followers already recognise us as a specialist public law firm, we want formally to balance the weight of both areas and (although we value it highly) shed the ‘competition boutique’ label with which we were born. Although from the outside it may not yet be perceived this way, the truth is that those of us who make up rēgula see ourselves as a collective specialised in market regulation in the broad sense, including competition law. Our shared inclination towards litigation (a concept that includes administrative and corporate investigations) is the other leitmotif that unites us.
- Our third objective is to consolidate our reputation as a specialist and sophisticated firm. Building on the trajectory of these first two years, we want to continue receiving mandates from corporations and institutions in our areas of specialisation, as well as referrals from national and international law firms. We attach particular importance to the trust placed in us by some of the leading law firms in Madrid, Brussels and London when recommending us to their clients. We have realised that, as a niche firm, we are particularly well positioned to deal competently with situations involving conflicts of interest or lack of specialisation at other firms, limiting our work to the specific matter and leaving the long-term client relationship in the hands of the lead firm.
I realise that I have written something (quite a bit) longer than I had planned when I sat down at the keyboard on this train journey between León and Madrid. Even so, I cannot end without devoting a few final words to what really matters: gratitude.
First, gratitude to the entire rēgula team, those 16 people I referred to earlier who accompany me in this blessed project every day. Gratitude also to all our clients, from the large Ibex corporations that have decided to place their trust in our firm, to the small and medium-sized family businesses that also form part of our client base; behind all these organisations are people to whom we owe a great deal, for having had the courage to trust us during this take-off phase. They need no mention; they know who they are. And finally, gratitude for their patience and understanding to those closest to us, our families, at a stage of the project which, due to its demands, has required more hours than one would sometimes like to spend away from them.
Seguimos.