I walked into his office. There was a red folder on the desk. I had no idea whose it was.

February 2021. My father had passed. We had just buried him.

I walked into his home office. The glass desk, the silver picture frames, the photographs in their usual spots. And on top of the desk, a stack of those classic manila folders with a window. One of them, I remember specifically, was red. I had no idea whose case it was. No idea what was inside. No idea whether the matter was closed, half-resolved, or still pending payment.

I sat down. A practicing attorney, with no idea where to begin.

My father was a business advisor. He had officially retired a year earlier but kept working for his lifelong clients. He was brilliant at his craft and proudly, almost stubbornly, anti-technology. He laughed at computers. At home he had a running joke he repeated a thousand times: "everything goes in my PDA". His PDA stood for Pen-and-paper, Done Analog. Each client got a folder. Each folder had handwritten notes — the matter, the fee, the current status. Everything else, he kept in his head.

When he was gone, his head was gone with him.

What came next is something I rarely tell. Calls from clients asking "how's my case going?" — not even knowing my father had died. Professional complaints over matters that weren't attended on time. Personal debts surfacing one by one. Blank pages. Folders without context. Me, trying to be a son, an attorney, an executor, a translator and a mediator, all at once.

That is the actual inheritance most people leave: not a will read in fifteen minutes at a notary. This. A red folder with no name on it.

The turning point

From there, my professional life changed. Before becoming a lawyer I had been an entrepreneur: I built an insurance brokerage, ran a tax and accounting firm, and managed an online academy that prepared candidates for the Spanish public-service exams (Justice Administration and Postal Service). I studied Law later in life, while already running businesses — starting at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and finishing at Universidad Internacional Isabel I, where I also completed the Master's degree required to practise. In 2020 I opened my own firm.

After my father, I specialised in inheritance, succession, preventive estate planning, and what actually happens to a family the day after — and the six months that follow. I started writing and publishing: books, articles for Legal Today (Aranzadi LA LEY) and a Substack newsletter for ordinary people. But no book and no law firm could fix what I had seen on the glass desk that morning.

And one day, sitting at my own desk, I realised something uncomfortable: I was going to leave a much bigger mess than my father did.

My father at least had paper folders. I have brokerage accounts at four different brokers because I rotate based on fees and tax efficiency. Crypto across several exchanges. Funds. Websites. Domains. Digital subscriptions. My wife doesn't know where I do what. When I sat down to make the list, dozens of accesses came up that she wouldn't even know where to start looking for.

When my father died, she was pregnant with twins. My daughters never met their grandfather. And I thought: what story would I be leaving them the day they had to make sense of my part of all this?

How Leggado was born

I started talking about it with people. Investors, self-employed professionals, crypto folks, advisors. They all said the same thing: that an attorney specialised in inheritance who also understood the digital side — building something like this — made obvious sense. It was missing.

That's how Leggado.Digital was born.

It is not a password manager. It does not replace a notary. It does not sell your data. It does one specific thing no other tool does well: it connects what you have — accounts, assets, documents, instructions, messages — with whom you want them to reach, for the moment when you can no longer explain it yourself.

I am the first user. My wife knows where to look for each thing. Every now and then I ask her: "if something happens to me tomorrow, where would you look for this?". We do it for our own peace of mind, not out of fear. And so that the girls, if they ever need it, find more than a red folder.

In short, in case you came here to fact-check

Books I have written

I have written mainly about two things: how to run a better law firm, and how to plan your patrimony and your estate without leaving everything for the last day. All published in Spanish.

I also publish regularly on Legal Today (Aranzadi LA LEY) since 2020, and shorter notes on my Substack newsletter leggado.substack.com.

Recognition

In November 2023, Leggado.Digital won the first prize at the 4th Legal Entrepreneurship Lab of Fundación Mutualidad, with €10,000 in seed capital, as part of the foundation's incubation programme for legal startups. The recognition confirmed what I had felt for two years: this was something missing.

What I also do

Beyond the law firm leggado.es (online and with offices in Seville and Marbella) and Leggado.Digital, I run a sister project for the insurance sector: Upbrok, a platform that helps insurance brokers and agents detect uncovered risks across their existing portfolio.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
If you want to write to me, I read it personally: angel@leggado.es.