We anticipate, we decide,
we defend.

One life insurance policy, three debtors and a single mortgage. When the insurance of one of the borrowers pays off everyone's debt

Four members of the same family bought a home for their grandfather and financed it entirely with a mortgage loan on which three of them were debtors. Only one of the three, the nephew, took out a life insurance policy linked to the loan, for a sum far exceeding his share of the debt. When he died, the insurance paid off seventy per cent of the loan, and his mother and heir sought to have that repayment allocated solely to her son's share and to have the others compensate her for the excess. The “Audiencia Provincial” of Barcelona, the provincial appeal court, has found in favour of the clients of this firm of lawyers in Barcelona and has held that the repayment benefits all the debtors. It joins other judgments of the Barcelona appeal court along the same lines, on an issue on which the provincial appeal courts have not followed a uniform approach.

Nine million paid into court before the appeal judgment: provisional enforcement of an order to buy quotas

Winning a judgment and actually collecting on it are two different things; several years usually separate the one from the other. This matter shows how that distance was shortened. In December 2025 judgment was given ordering a European industrial group to pay almost seven million euros to our client. The defendant appealed. Even so, provisional enforcement of the judgment was obtained, over the objection of the judgment debtor, which argued —relying on technically sound reasoning and on case law of the “Sala Primera”, the Civil Chamber of the Spanish Supreme Court— that what was being enforced was an order to make a declaration of intent, a case excluded from provisional enforcement by the Spanish Civil Procedure Act, the “Ley de Enjuiciamiento Civil”. In September 2026, with the appeal still awaiting decision, the judgment debtor paid more than nine million euros into court.

What went unsaid in the first lawsuit can no longer be pleaded in the second. Res judicata and preclusion against the reopening of an owners' association resolution

A company that owned a flat sought to argue for a second time, nine years on, whether the by-law prohibition on tourist use in its building applied to it. It tried with new packaging, challenging what had been said at a later general meeting and relying on an administrative-court judgment it had obtained in the meantime. The court upheld the plea of res judicata raised by this Barcelona law firm in defence of the owners' association, ordered the dismissal of the proceedings at the pre-trial hearing itself and awarded costs against the claimant. The lawsuit ended without a trial.

Chronicle of an executorship for the realisation of an estate: bequeathing what you do not own

There are wills that are carried out by signing a public deed of acceptance of the estate and dividing up what there is. And there are others that, in order to be carried out at all, first require the deceased's corporate structure to be dismantled and the assets he had left to third parties without owning them to be taken out of it. This is the second kind. The firm acted as universal executor for the realisation of the estate —the “albacea universal de realización de herencia”— and completed the task in little more than eleven months, well within the time limit the testator had set. But the work that made that result possible did not begin with the death of the deceased, but years earlier, on the day he was helped to draw up his will.

Three court levels for a revised rent to take effect from the agreed date: the judgment does not create the contract, it declares it

The court of first instance declared void the contract on which our claim was founded and ordered our client to pay the costs. The “Audiencia Provincial”, the provincial appeal court, set that decision aside, declared the contract valid and fixed the rent sought, but limited its effects to the date of its own judgment, three years after the agreed date. The “Tribunal Supremo”, Spain's Supreme Court, in a judgment of December 2025, quashed the appeal decision and upheld the claim in full, with a clarification of general scope for rent-review clauses: a judgment declaring that an agreement exists does not constitute it, it merely recognises it, and the agreement therefore takes effect from the date fixed by the parties.

Adoptio imitatur naturam: the Barcelona appeal court allows the adoption of an adult son by the man who acted as his father from earliest childhood

The “Audiencia Provincial” of Barcelona, the provincial appeal court, allowed the appeal brought by this firm and constituted the adoption of an adult in favour of the man who had been his father since he was less than a year old. The court of first instance had refused it on the ground that the statutory requirement of uninterrupted cohabitation was not met.