Morais Leitão + Legau
Find out how Legau helped law firm Morais Leitão improve its legal drafting process
Legau
Morais Leitão
Learn how Morais Leitão is using Legau to improve attorney capabilities and streamline processes, all while ensuring data security and confidentiality.
Morais Leitão is a leading Portuguese law firm, widely recognized for its legal expertise, innovation, and strong international outlook. With over 80 years of shared history and a team of approximately 270 lawyers, the firm delivers high-quality legal services across all areas of business law, leveraging advanced technology to ensure a seamless and efficient client experience.
As part of its ongoing commitment to innovation and operational excellence, Morais Leitão actively explores technologies that support lawyers in delivering high-quality legal work more efficiently, while maintaining the highest standards of confidentiality, professional autonomy, and trust.
Legau worked closely 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 practice areas: Litigation and Arbitration and the Criminal, Regulatory Offences and Compliance.
Morais Leitão
Firm for Tomorrow.
The Litigation and Arbitration and Criminal, Regulatory Offences and Compliance practice areas handle complex, high-stakes, time-sensitive matters with intensive and highly specific drafting requirements.
As a result, teams faced the challenge of balancing speed, consistency, and legal precision in both drafting and research. Lawyers needed to produce sophisticated legal documents under tight deadlines, often involving dense information and nuanced legal reasoning. Ensuring alignment with internal standards and maintaining consistent quality across teams was also critical.
The objective was not simply to accelerate drafting and research, but to increase confidence in work product and improve how lawyers allocate their time, reducing friction and repetitive drafting tasks while preserving full professional judgment, accountability, and control.
Any solution also needed to fit naturally into existing workflows, be intuitive to adopt, and meet the firm’s strict security and confidentiality requirements.
Challenge
Morais Leitão adopted Legau through a structured pilot designed to test the platform in real legal drafting scenarios and across different user profiles.
The Litigation and Arbitration and Criminal, Regulatory Offences and Compliance practice areas focused their usage on legal drafting and legal research workflows. Practical use cases included: preparation of court filings, requesting additional legal grounds for pleadings, research case law and doctrine, summaries and analysis of pleadings, case law and evidentiary materials, drafting of legal correspondence, drafting of emails and creation of email templates, preparation of compliance policies, translation of legal documents, and more.
Implementation required no disruption to existing processes. Lawyers used Legau directly within Microsoft Word and Outlook, alongside their usual tools, without changing established routines or operational structures.
Adopting Legau
The Results
The Litigation and Arbitration and Criminal, Regulatory Offences and Compliance practice areas reported high satisfaction with Legau. Based on user feedback, Legau achieved an average satisfaction score of 8 out of 10, reflecting strong acceptance among participating lawyers.
Users emphasized the platform’s practical value in supporting daily legal drafting and research tasks, as well as its seamless integration into familiar Microsoft environments. Legau was seen as a drafting support tool that increases efficiency while augmenting legal reasoning, without compromising professional judgment or autonomy.
Adoption intent reinforced this positive perception:
- 90% of participants indicated they would like to maintain access to Legau
- 100% indicated that other lawyers in their department should have access to the platform.
User Satisfaction
Users reported a clear positive impact on their daily legal work when using Legau. The platform supported faster execution of legal drafting and research activities, augmented the lawyers ability to analyze, structure and repurpose legal information, and reduced the time spent on preparatory and repetitive legal tasks, enabling lawyers to dedicate more time to substantive legal analysis and decision-making.
The average time gained reported by the users in these two practice areas was 22.9%, and 43% of the users reported gaining back at least 30% of their time.
While specific financial details remain confidential, the improvements in time management and operational efficiency have contributed to a positive financial impact. These advancements indicate potential for increased revenue per attorney and an improved realization rate, strengthening the firm’s overall financial performance.
Efficiency and Productivity Gains
The pilots we ran showed that Legau can generate significant efficiency gains in the execution of specific legal tasks. This is a key enabler of our strategy: reducing the time our lawyers spend on repetitive work or information-identification tasks, and redirecting that effort toward higher-value legal problem solving, so we keep our focus where it matters most: the quality of the service we deliver to clients.
Carlos Coelho
Partner and Director of Innovation and Knowledge at Morais Leitão