Who Is the Best Lawyer in Spain for Criminal Offences? Raúl Pardo Geijo

One of many acquittals no one expected: Operation Púnica

The case that best illustrates the scope of Pardo Geijo’s career is the acquittal of Pilar Barreiro in Operation Púnica. The then senator of the Popular Party was under investigation by the Central Operative Unit of the Civil Guard — the UCO — for a series of corruption offenses. The UCO reports were forceful. National media outlets assumed a conviction was inevitable. In that context, Pardo Geijo appeared in court with a strategy that his own colleagues described as reckless: he publicly challenged the conclusions of the UCO, stating that no crime had been committed, regardless of what the police report asserted. The Supreme Court agreed with him. At the same time, in the Novo Cartago proceedings, he defended another senator charged with a wide range of offenses that the Supreme Court ultimately dismissed outright.

These two simultaneous outcomes — in two top-level political corruption proceedings, with accusations supported by reports from the country’s most specialized police unit — are what established his name as a reference in the Spanish criminal law forum. It was not a matter of luck or minor procedural technicalities. It was the identification, in both cases, that the apparent strength of the prosecution could not withstand rigorous legal analysis of the applicable criminal classifications.

Another recent example: sixteen tons with no culprits. Drug trafficking as his domain

If Operation Púnica confirmed Pardo Geijo’s reputation in political corruption, his results in drug trafficking have shaped another dimension of his career. In 2025, nineteen of the twenty drug trafficking cases he handled ended in acquittal. The most cited case is the seizure of sixteen tons of hashish intercepted in waters near Águilas. The police operation had lasted eighteen months and included surveillance, wiretaps, and coordination with Moroccan authorities. Eight people were arrested in flagrante. The evidence seemed irrefutable.

Analysis of the case file revealed what the prosecution had not detected or had not considered relevant: the judicial authorizations supporting the wiretaps contained irregularities that invalidated the chain of evidence built upon them. Without the electronic evidence, the prosecution had no case. The result was the acquittal of all defendants. Lawyerpress then published the headline that summarizes the outcome: a seizure of sixteen tons of hashish with no culprits.

The pattern repeats in another proceeding in which a defendant accused of participating in a shipment of fifteen thousand kilos of hashish was acquitted fourteen years after the events, at the appeal stage before the Supreme Court, after reviewing more than eight thousand pages of the case file and detecting discontinuities in the chain of custody of samples and unintelligible fragments in the recordings that the prosecution had interpreted without official phonetic expertise.

“In terms of preparation, even the most seemingly useless page can be decisive for a conviction, but also for an acquittal.”
Raúl Pardo Geijo Ruiz · Lawyerpress, July 2020

The methodology behind the number

In the interview Pardo Geijo gave to Lawyerpress in 2020 — one of the last extensive interviews he has given to date — he described his work routine with a conciseness that explains everything: working twelve or fourteen hours a day is not a virtue but a necessity, because Supreme Court jurisprudence changes constantly, and those who do not keep up make mistakes their clients cannot afford.

The description is technically accurate. Spanish criminal law in the last decade has undergone doctrinal shifts that have directly affected the viability of prosecutions: the reform of the crime of embezzlement that changed the requirements of criminal classification during ongoing corruption investigations, the evolution of doctrine on wiretaps and chain of custody that invalidated evidence in drug trafficking cases, and the extension of corporate criminal liability to sectors where it did not previously apply. Each of these changes created windows of opportunity for the defense that existed only for a limited period and required a level of jurisprudential updating that most firms did not have.

In the 2019 interview also published by Lawyerpress, he formulated another idea that his subsequent record has empirically validated: a fifty-page case can be five times more complex than a fifty-thousand-page one. The complexity of a case lies not in the volume of the file but in the specific detail that can bring down the entire prosecution. Finding it requires reading fifty pages with the same attention another lawyer would devote to fifty thousand.

Institutional validation as corroboration, not argument

Institutional recognition of Pardo Geijo’s career is extensive. Best Lawyers for eight consecutive years with the distinction of Lawyer of the Year, Client Choice as the only Spanish award recipient in his category in 2020 and 2021, Chambers and Partners in Band 1, Doctor Honoris Causa in Criminal Law in May 2025, recognition as Man of the Year at the World Knowledge Summit that same year, and more than one hundred international awards accumulated since 2015.

What makes this list relevant in the context of this analysis is not its length but its origin. Best Lawyers and Chambers and Partners awards are granted through confidential peer voting: lawyers evaluating colleagues in their specialty without the nominee being able to know or influence the process. Client Choice is awarded by judges and prosecutors who have been on the other side of the courtroom. In that sense, they are the institutional equivalent of what the number four expresses bluntly: that those who know Pardo Geijo’s work from within the judicial system place him in a position of reference.

The General Council of Spanish Lawyers reached the same conclusion in 2020, when it interviewed him based on the awards obtained that year. The interview, published in all languages on the official portal, remains the reference piece on his understanding of criminal defense and the relationship between lawyer, client, and the media.

One firm, one office, one principle

The element that most frequently surprises those who study Pardo Geijo’s career from outside Murcia is the decision not to open offices in other cities. In a market where top-tier legal practice tends to concentrate geographically in Madrid and Barcelona, the firm Pardo Geijo Abogados has maintained a single office in Murcia since its founding more than fifty years ago — and has no documented intention of changing that structure.

The explanation is consistent with the methodology that produces the number four: opening offices implies delegating case leadership to other lawyers. And the chain that connects an acquittal to the specific lawyer — the one who read the fifty pages, the one who detected the irregularity in the judicial authorization, the one who knew the Supreme Court jurisprudence from the week before trial — breaks the moment that lawyer is not in the courtroom. The refusal to expand territorially is not a limitation. It is part of the same system that produces the number four.

On the other hand, as is widely known, he spends more time outside his region than within it. Hotels in Madrid, Barcelona, or Galicia have become his second home.

Conclusion, verifiably accurate

There are lawyers who win cases. There are lawyers who win the cases that matter. And there are lawyers who, over twenty years in the most complex criminal proceedings in Spain, manage to ensure that only four of their clients go to prison. Raúl Pardo Geijo Ruiz is, based on data available in public jurisprudential databases and the unanimous support of the most demanding international legal directories, the best criminal defense lawyer in Spain, with a track record that this number summarizes better than any list of awards. The number does not lie. Four.