The development your client hasn’t read yet

Clients pay for judgment. They notice speed. The call that lands the morning a judgment comes down — before it’s in the legal press, before the client’s competitor has seen it — is worth more than the hour it took.

But monitoring in a firm is everyone’s job and nobody’s. Each practice group watches its own sources. The associate who kept the list has since made partner, or left. And a decision touching three groups reaches one of them, because the person who spotted it only thought to tell their own team.

You set the areas your firm practises — litigation, competition, public procurement, tax, employment, administrative, corporate — and the jurisdictions you work in. Each group can narrow it further to their own.

Behind that: judgments from the Court of Justice and the General Court, the Portuguese superior and appellate courts, and the German federal courts, carrying the text of the decision where the court publishes it and a summary either way. EU legislation as adopted. Diário da República and the Bundesgesetzblatt. Competition decisions from DG Competition and the Autoridade da Concorrência. Public procurement notices. And cases pending before the Court of Justice, so a reference that will matter to a client next year is visible this year.

Every group gets its own view, and the firm gets one briefing.

The client alert stops being a Friday afternoon job — the summary is your first draft, with the source attached.

Knowledge stays with the firm. Notes on a judgment sit on the judgment, so the next person who opens it finds what a colleague already worked out, whether or not that colleague still works there.

And you see references heading to Luxembourg before they’re decided, which is when advising on them is worth something.