GGB, the independent firm launched by María González Gordon and Ricardo Gómez-Barreda
The new Madrid boutique draws on more than 12 years of shared experience and focuses on intellectual property, technology and digital business
by ilaria iaquinta
The turning point came with two almost identical enquiries from two radically different clients. One was from one of the world’s largest companies. The other was from a very small client. Both had done the same thing: they had put their legal problem to an artificial intelligence tool and then asked their lawyers to check whether the answer was correct and improve on it. “That was when we realised that everything we had been thinking and reading about in the market, this new way of delivering legal services, was about to become a reality”, María González Gordon tells Iberian Lawyer. That realisation was one of the main drivers behind the launch in May of González Gordon & Gómez-Barreda (GGB).
The Madrid boutique, which González Gordon has founded with Ricardo Gómez-Barreda de la Gándara, specialises in intellectual and industrial property, technology, digital business and entertainment law. Both lawyers know these areas well, having worked together for more than 12 years. They first crossed paths at Gómez-Acebo & Pombo before moving together to CMS Albiñana & Suárez de Lezo, where González Gordon headed the intellectual property, industrial property and digital business practice, served as global co-head of digital business, sat on the firm’s governing bodies and was co-managing partner between 2023 and 2025. GómezBarreda was counsel in the same practice. They are now embarking on the venture as co-founding partners of a firm whose management approach, González Gordon says, is rooted in generosity and solidarity, with both decisions and client relationships handled jointly. The move, she insists, is also the natural next step in a career that had already taken her through almost every type of law firm. “I had worked at a specialist industrial property boutique, a local full-service firm and an international firm. The only thing left was to try it for myself, with a team I could trust completely”, she explains.
THE REASONS
The first reason lies with the clients themselves. “Every client is now a digital client”, González Gordon says. Technology is no longer a separate sector, but a cross-cutting feature of every business. “Even a company that makes screws is now a digital business: transformed by digitalisation and run digitally”. Legal advice is therefore no longer confined to technology companies. It is relevant to any business that sells online, manages data, innovates, markets brands or content, incorporates artificial intelligence, develops platforms and applications or faces disputes involving intangible assets. Artificial intelligence, she adds, has also accelerated the democratisation of technology.
Small companies and even individual ventures can now develop products and tools that would once have required substantial development budgets. As a result, some legal demand is moving to an earlier stage in the life of a business, when the product is still being defined and decisions are being made about how the project should be implemented so that it can grow on a legally sound footing. At the same time, in-house legal teams are becoming larger and taking on more generalist work, but they do not always have specialists in these fields. “That is where we add value, because we have been doing this for 25 years”, she says.
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