King Felipe VI, who took part in the ceremony to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Uría Menéndez, at the Coliseum Theatre in Madrid, wanted to send a message to the “younger” attendees at the meeting. “It is obvious that you are the future”, he told them, acknowledging that “all of us at this stage of our lives have heard it a lot” and encouraging them to reflect deeply “on what it really means outside the cliché, to be fully aware of this condition and to to be fully aware of this condition and to know how to make intelligent use of it”.
The Minister of the Presidency, Relations with the Courts and Democratic Memory, Félix Bolaños; the Mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida; the President of the Professor Uría Foundation, Javier Solana and the senior partner and chairman of Uría Menéndez Luis de Carlos received His Majesty the King on his arrival.
The King stressed that they are not only the future of Uría Menéndez but also of Spain, whose recent history, he emphasised, “is a success story”. In this sense, he defended that “it is necessary that what we have achieved together – what our elders achieved with so much effort and brilliance – is consolidated, deepened and made even more successful in our time”.
The King also had words of praise for Uría Menéndez. “You are an engine for the economic growth of our country, but the most important thing is that you also represent a school of great lawyers, a source of legal knowledge and an example of an institution committed to our society,” he stressed.
Aurelio Menéndez, founder of the firm together with Rodrigo Uría, was Felipe VI’s tutor during his years as a Law student at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. This led to a relationship of loyalty between the firm and the Crown and the Monarch’s gratitude to the firm.