Don’t go to the offices of Garrigues, the largest firm in Spain, looking for tales of woe from the recession. In October, Garrigues, which has just over 2,000 attorneys worldwide, announced that for its last financial year, the firm’s revenues grew 12.6 percent, to €334.3 million ($496 million). Considering that Garrigues’s financial year runs from September to August, so that its latest financials include the darkest days of the economic crisis, it’s quite a performance.
Garrigues’s results are even more remarkable when you consider that the Spanish economy has suffered one of the steepest slumps of any major European country. Unemployment is 17.9 percent, among the highest in the European Union, while Spain’s GDP fell 4.1 percent in the third quarter of 2009.
