Called to the Balearic Bar in 1990 · Palma de Mallorca
Practising in Mallorca since 1990. A deliberately small practice: the lawyer who studies your case is the one who argues it, start to finish, with nobody in between.
Practice areas
A focused practice serves you better than one that claims to cover everything. These are the fields I work in before the courts of Palma.
01
For when the other side is the state: a penalty, enforcement proceedings, loss caused by the operation of a public service, or a decision that never comes. Administrative appeals and judicial review before the courts of Palma and the High Court of the Balearic Islands.
What this covers02
Defence of the person under investigation or charged, and private prosecution where you are the one who suffered the offence. Representation from the first interview — often where the rest of the case is decided — through to trial and appeal.
What this covers03
Inheritance and succession, tenancies, contracts, claims and owners' communities — with a twist that catches almost everyone out: in the Balearic Islands, estates are not governed by the Spanish Civil Code but by the islands' own civil law.
What this coversThe first thing worth knowing
A perfectly defensible case is almost always lost on the calendar, not on the merits.
A fine, a council decision or an administrative penalty opens appeal deadlines of one or two months — in some cases only days. Once the deadline passes, the decision becomes final and the merits are no longer open to argument. The best case in the world will not help you.
This catches foreign residents and property owners in Mallorca especially often, because Spanish administrative notifications look like routine correspondence and are not. If you have just received something from a Spanish public authority, do not wait to see what happens.
Reported case
In 2019 the Spanish Supreme Court upheld a cassation appeal I brought in a public-employment matter. I mention it because it can be checked: the judgment is published and has been reviewed, so you need not take my word for it.
La Administración al Día INAP
Spanish Supreme Court
Career progression forms part of “working conditions”
The Court upholds the appeal and extends career progression to interim and temporary staff of the Balearic Government.
Appeal upheld
In March 2019 the Administrative Chamber of the Spanish Supreme Court upheld the cassation appeal I brought for four public employees of the Balearic Autonomous Community who had been excluded from the horizontal career-progression scheme because they were interim and temporary staff.
Cited because it is a public, published judgment. Every case is different and turns on its own documents and circumstances: a favourable outcome in one case guarantees nothing in another.
How I work
Before taking a case on, three things are worth establishing: whether it can go anywhere, what deadlines are running, and what it will cost.
You book by telephone and we meet at the office. I read the documents — worth bringing them — and tell you frankly whether the case has legs. If my view is that it does not, I will say so — I would rather lose the instruction than have you spend money on an appeal that is bound to fail.
In writing, setting out the scope of the work and the fees. A fixed fee wherever the nature of the case allows one; where it does not, I explain why beforehand rather than afterwards.
A point worth being plain about: this practice has limited capacity, deliberately so. I can only carry a small number of matters at once if I am to handle them the way I think they should be handled. That means I choose my cases, and that I sometimes decline perfectly good ones simply because I could not give them the time they need.
If I take yours on, it is because I believe it can go somewhere and because I have room for it. If I cannot, I will say so at the first consultation and point you elsewhere, rather than accept it and give it half my attention.
You hear about every filing and every decision as it happens, in plain language. Litigation is slow by nature; that is no reason for you to be kept in the dark.
The practice
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