Repsol legal department saves 3 hours per lawyer weekly with Harvey AI generative platform

Repsol's in-house legal department, serving a multinational energy company with operations across dozens of countries, faced a growing burden of high-volume, low-complexity legal work. Attorneys spent substantial portions of their working day on document analysis, contract comparison, regulatory review, and translation tasks — work that required legal expertise to initiate and validate but offered little strategic value once completed. This created a structural imbalance: skilled lawyers were spending time on routine processing rather than substantive legal judgment, limiting the department's capacity to support the company's broader digital transformation and global operations.

Repsol formed a strategic alliance with Harvey, a US-based legal AI startup, to deploy its generative AI platform within the legal department — making Repsol the first in-house legal team in Spain and one of the first in continental Europe to do so. Built on large language models, Harvey was integrated into daily attorney workflows to assist with document analysis, contract and regulatory comparison, clause improvement suggestions, legal language translation, query responses, and document summarization. The deployment was framed as part of Repsol's broader digitalization strategy, with innovation and AI positioned as foundational pillars for transforming the legal function's global reach, versatility, and efficiency.

During the implementation phase, Harvey was estimated to save each attorney up to three hours per week of repetitive, low-value legal work — time that can be redirected toward substantive legal analysis and higher-complexity matters. Key outcomes include:

• ~3 hours/lawyer/week recovered from routine document and contract processing tasks
• Faster turnaround on high-volume documentation handling and regulatory reviews
• Improved output quality through AI-assisted clause suggestions and legal language translation
• Repsol became a regional benchmark as the first in-house legal team in Spain to adopt Harvey, and among the first in continental Europe

• Human oversight is non-negotiable: Repsol's legal team retains full responsibility for reviewing and validating Harvey's outputs before applying results — AI assists, it does not decide.
• Embed AI in transformation strategy, not as a standalone tool: Repsol treated Harvey as part of a broader legal department digitalization roadmap, not an isolated pilot.
• Target repetitive volume work first: The strongest productivity gains came from offloading low-complexity, high-frequency tasks rather than attempting to automate legal judgment.
• Early mover advantage is real: Being a first adopter in a regional market creates institutional knowledge and positions the department as a legal tech leader internally and externally.