If you have ever negotiated a settlement through lawyers by email, you may wonder what happens to those emails later. Can they end up in front of a judge? A recent ruling from the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM) answers that question, and the answer matters if you are ever involved in a dispute in Spain.
The case involved an employee who was dismissed from her job at Newman Security SL. She filed two claims: one for wrongful termination, and another for over 9,000 euros in unpaid overtime. Her lawyer and the company's lawyer negotiated by email and reached a deal: the company would pay 13,000 euros for the wrongful termination, and in exchange she would drop her overtime claim.
The company paid the agreed amount. But the employee never sent the document confirming she was giving up her overtime claim. So the company's lawyer went to court and used the email exchange, where both sides had agreed to the terms, as evidence that she had not held up her end of the deal.
Normally, this would be a problem. The Spanish Code of Ethics for Lawyers says an attorney cannot show a court, or even a client, private communications exchanged with another lawyer, unless both the other lawyer and the bar association agree to it. Lawyer-to-lawyer negotiations are meant to stay confidential.
The TSJM allowed the emails anyway. It relied on Constitutional Court doctrine that says these normally confidential exchanges can be used when a client's defense genuinely depends on them, even though they started out as private, protected conversations. The court called the email correspondence "useful, necessary, and relevant" evidence, and said the only real limit is that evidence cannot be used if it would violate someone's fundamental rights, such as the right to mount a defense.
So Madrid's court sided with using the emails as evidence for the defense. It did leave one thing open: the lawyer who submitted them could still face disciplinary consequences from the bar for breaking the confidentiality rule, even though the evidence itself was accepted in the case.
What this means for you
If you settle a dispute by email through lawyers in Spain, that correspondence is not automatically off limits in court later. If one side breaks the deal, those emails could resurface as evidence, even though the rules say they are supposed to stay private. It is worth keeping that in mind whenever you put an agreement in writing over email.
