José Luis Barceló Blanco-Steger is the director of a team of about 30 lawyers at ILUNION, a large Spanish social enterprise, part of ONCE Social Group. Most of those lawyers have some kind of disability. For many of them it’s blindness or low vision.
“When I talk about that, I say it’s an opportunity,” he said from his office in Madrid. “It gives us great advantages.”
Barceló is the general counsel for ILUNION, which owns and operates more than 70 other businesses. ILUNION’s mission is providing jobs for people with a variety of disabilities. It runs hotels, stores, laundry services and other kinds of enterprises. It employs about 45,000 people and reinvests all profits into inclusive employment, along with a dedication to sustainability.
Barceló’s team provides legal services for ILUNION and for all the businesses it owns, mainly in Spain but also in Portugal and Colombia.
Empowering legal teams through technology
These lawyers are used to solving problems using technology, he said. As technology has evolved, they have been early and eager adapters. Microsoft 365 Copilot has become a critical tool for Barceló and his team—speeding up the completion of critical but time-consuming tasks, such as compiling a dossier of references in a particular legal matter and quickly summarizing them.
“Beginning in 2007, we started a journey to leave paper for digital, thanks to the nature of the team,” he said. “We started very early to overcome the barriers of paper. So, we were very well prepared to make another deep transformation.”
Longtime users of Microsoft apps that help with accessibility, the legal team at ILUNION had already been using Microsoft Magnifier, Narrator and Immersive Reader. (Immersive Reader no longer exists as a standalone app, but its functions can be found in many Microsoft products, like Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, etc.) The company also uses some other accessibility solutions that help people with visual impairments.
All of the lawyers on the team have Copilot licenses, and for the past six months, they also have had the ability to make agents using Copilot.
Barceló leads a team-within-the-team that meets each week to work on creating new agents. The agents have changed the way he and his team work, he said.
“I like to say that every lawyer now has a shadow assistant sitting next to them, and that shadow mate is Copilot,” he said.
Using Copilot agents for legal innovation
The innovation group has the goal of building 15 more agents in the next six months. But they already have created several agents that are saving time and breaking barriers. He cited “Litigator” as one of the key ones.
He said that typically just taking the first steps in a case—getting a general idea of the issues involved, looking at the history of the case and pertinent references, could take 40 minutes to an hour.
“With the Litigator agent, in 40 seconds, you can be informed with the main concepts of the case,” he said. “So it’s fantastic. For blind people, it’s a tool to eliminate barriers. It’s a tool of inclusion.”
But Litigator is just one of the agents the company’s lawyers use.
“We use Copilot agents to automate document classification, for the extraction of information, analysis, traceability and the legal accuracy of our operations,” he said.
“There is an increase in regulations on the internet, so we use Copilot to summarize these criteria and to clarify the criteria. We also use Copilot to identify and analyze risk in our commercial operations and contracts.”
Other legal departments in Spain have taken notice, he said.
“We are leading here in Spain,” he said. “Many, many other legal departments are coming to Ilunion to see how we are using Copilot agents to create assistants that sit beside our lawyers and help them work.”
The agents are not a substitute for the lawyers themselves, but they are freeing their team to focus on more critical tasks.
“We can dedicate lawyers to an extra-value job now,” he said. “They can be more creative, have more ideas, be more strategic. This increases the importance of each lawyer because they can dedicate time to more important tasks.”
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Chris Welsch is a reporter and photographer based in France covering AI, Innovation and a variety of other topics for Microsoft Source EMEA. He’s recently written about AI-guided driverless cars. Welsch was a staff editor at the International New York Times in Paris and before that a senior reporter and photographer at the Minnesota Star Tribune. Follow him on LinkedIn.
