How Repsol Uses Harvey to Save 4–6 Hours Per Lawyer Per Week

When Pablo Blanco Perez became General Counsel at Repsol in 2023, he set an ambitious agenda: not just to run a competent legal department, but to build one capable of leading rather than following the digital transformation reshaping professional services. Repsol operates across the full energy value chain—exploration, production, and renewables—serving 24 million customers in more than 20 countries with 25,000 employees. Its legal division, spread across 12 countries with over 200 professionals, was the target of a company-wide initiative called the Protea Project.

Before AI, the department operated the way most large in-house teams do: lawyers handling a high volume of routine tasks, including contract review and analysis, that absorbed time better spent on strategy. A single contractual clause review could take 30–60 minutes. Analyzing large volumes of past agreements for negotiation patterns was a project, not a workflow. The department was capable, but bandwidth was the ceiling.

In late 2023, Repsol conducted a rigorous blind evaluation comparing Harvey, Microsoft Copilot, and Lexia, its own internal AI prototype. Harvey consistently outperformed the alternatives on complex legal tasks. A pilot launched in January 2024 with 50 lawyers across 12 jurisdictions, and after just eight weeks, the results were decisive: Harvey was faster, more accurate, and better suited for the specialized demands of in-house legal work. By April 2024, Repsol signed for a full rollout.

Two years into deployment, Harvey is embedded in daily legal workflows—open on one screen while Word is open on the other, as one lawyer described. The compliance team reduced clause review time from 30–60 minutes to a few minutes—a reduction exceeding 90%. Harvey Vault allows the team to extract insights from entire libraries of contracts and regulatory rulings in minutes rather than days. During one litigation matter, Harvey modeled the probable court decision—and the prediction proved accurate when Repsol won the case.

Perhaps more telling than the efficiency gains is what lawyers do with recovered time. The department has shifted from reactive support to strategic partnership. Lawyers are exploring new legal domains, contributing to firmwide knowledge management, and approaching complex problems with broader perspective. Other Repsol functions—Tax and Labor—have since adopted Harvey on the strength of Legal’s results. The Protea Project has become a template for what AI-enabled professional practice can look like at scale.