Afiens turns 10

Blowing out its first ten candles in the Spanish market is Afiens. We are talking about an alternative legal services firm (ALSP) that was founded in 2012 by Lorena Salamanca “with money and savings from her family”, as the CEO tells Iberian Lawyer. “With my husband, who is currently the marketing director, we thought it would have been a good bet, we were very optimistic, although quite afraid, about a model that had been flourishing in the Anglo-Saxon world for more than two decades”, she adds.

This is how Afiens’ journey began.

The vision, Salamanca explains, was to become the benchmark firm in legal process outsourcing (LPO), offering services to both law firms and in-house legal departments. “Our purpose was to enter the market with a disruptive and innovative model, which would differentiate us from traditional law firms in the modus operandi, in the services provided and in the way we would deliver them – explains the CEO – . Furthermore, from the very beginning we considered we were a company, with a very rigorous business model and a well-established roadmap. One of our foundations was financial solidity, in other words, we wanted to be mindful of the company’s costs and maintain a good profitability”.   

ALSPs are not competitors of law firms, Salamanca stresses. On the contrary, in her view, they are referrals. “We are clearly allies. We facilitate and streamline our clients’ projects, and, thanks to our technology, we can offer both speed and quality, delivering turnkey projects to the law firms that trust us and, therefore, provide value in a part of the chain that used to be a problem for them because of their cost structure.  Moreover, law firms offer highly specialised advisory services; we, conversely, provide standardised services. Clients rely on us for needs that require a certain amount of time, but do not have a high added value. We reduce the time and this also results in cost savings”, she adds.

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