Legau + Morais Leitão
How Morais Leitão uses Legau to increase lawyers' capacity and simplify processes, while maintaining its standards of security and confidentiality.
Morais Leitão is a leading Portuguese law firm, recognised for its legal expertise, innovation and strong international outlook. With more than 80 years of shared history and around 270 lawyers, it provides legal services across all areas of business law.
As part of its ongoing work on innovation and operational excellence, the firm actively explores technologies that help lawyers deliver high-quality legal work, while maintaining the highest standards of confidentiality, professional autonomy and trust.
Legau worked with Morais Leitão lawyers across 10 practice areas, including Litigation, Corporate, Real Estate, Public Law and Tax. This case study focuses on the experience of two of those areas: Litigation and Arbitration, and Criminal, Administrative Offences and Compliance.
The challenge
The Litigation and Arbitration, and Criminal, Administrative Offences and Compliance practices handle complex, time-sensitive matters with intensive and highly specific drafting requirements.
The teams faced the challenge of combining speed, consistency and legal precision, in both drafting and research. They had to produce sophisticated documents on short deadlines, with dense information and demanding legal reasoning, while ensuring alignment with internal standards and consistent quality across teams.
The goal was not only to speed up drafting and research, but to increase confidence in the work produced. The solution had to fit naturally into existing workflows, be intuitive and meet the firm's strict security and confidentiality requirements.
Adoption
Morais Leitão adopted Legau through a structured pilot, designed to test the platform in real legal drafting scenarios and with different user profiles.
The rollout did not require any change to processes. Lawyers used Legau directly in Microsoft Word and Outlook, alongside their usual tools, without changing routines or operational structures.
- Preparing court filings
- Strengthening the reasoning in pleadings
- Researching case law and legal scholarship
- Summarising and analysing filings and evidence
- Drafting legal correspondence
- Emails and email templates
- Preparing compliance policies
- Translating legal documents
Satisfaction
Both practice areas reported high satisfaction. Based on user ratings, Legau scored an average of 8 out of 10.
Users highlighted its practical value in day-to-day drafting and research support, and its natural integration into the Microsoft environment. Legau was seen as a drafting aid that increases efficiency and strengthens legal reasoning without compromising professional judgement or autonomy.
- 90% of participants wanted to keep access to Legau
- 100% felt that other lawyers in the department should have access
Results
Users reported a clear positive impact on their daily work. The platform supported faster execution of drafting and research tasks, strengthened the ability to analyse, structure and reuse legal information, and reduced the time spent on preparatory and repetitive tasks.
The average time saved reported in these two areas was 22.9%, and 43% of users reported saving at least 30% of their time.
“The pilots we ran showed that Legau can generate significant efficiency gains in carrying out specific legal tasks. It is a central enabler of our strategy: reducing the time our lawyers spend on repetitive work or on finding information, and redirecting that effort to solving higher-value legal problems, keeping the focus where it matters: the quality of the service we provide to clients.”
Carlos Coelho
Partner and Director of Innovation and Knowledge, Morais Leitão
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