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“A leader in the Swedish market for competition work” – Global Competition Review

COMPETITION LAW

COMPETITION LAW

Competition rules are central for a functioning economy. Competition is also what characterizes everyday business for most companies. We help our clients to achieve their business goals in compliance with Swedish and international competition rules. In addition to ongoing legal advice to our core clients, we provide the following legal services:

• Merger control
• Abuse of dominant position
• Cartel investigations and sector inquiries
• Antitrust litigation
• State aid
• Market access and deregulated markets
• Compliance and training

Merger control
Our extensive and continuous work in merger control matters enables us to provide highly specialised services and efficient working methods in deciding if a transaction must be notified and in guiding a merger, a joint venture or an acquisition through the relevant competition authorities around the world.

In these projects we often take full responsibility for the merger control process while retaining assistance from well-reputed foreign law firms for filings in jurisdictions other than Sweden or the European Union.

Abuse of dominant position
Whether we are advising a dominant company, a challenger or a customer, our clients can rely on us to have the relevant experience in applying the often complicated economics inherent in dominance cases. In larger dominance cases, we often co-operate with specialised competition law economists.

Cartel investigations and sector inquiries
The competition authorities’ coordinated hunt for cartels has put most companies on notice that cartel activity is risky and can be costly. We provide our clients with an all-encompassing service which includes setting up compliance programs with associated training, dawn raid assistance, representation in cartel investigations and subsequent litigation as well as negotiation and coordination of leniency/immunity applications. Our team members have experience in representing companies in cartel cases in the European Commission, before the Swedish Competition authority as well as in the Stockholm District Court and the European Court of Justice.

Antitrust litigation
Antitrust litigation is an important and increasing part of our practice. We provide assistance in all types of competition law related disputes and sometimes also represent clients in antitrust arbitration matters. Several of our team members have worked in the Swedish court system and some team members have significant experience from antitrust litigation related to cartels, abuse of dominant position and damages.

State aid
Our state aid practice is mainly focused on representing companies wishing to challenge the legality of an aid scheme before the European Commission. We have recently brought a couple of such claims successfully. Moreover, we provide risk assessments to beneficiaries, owners, and financial sponsors regarding the risk of received aid having to be refunded, especially when the owning structure of companies that have benefited from aid schemes is about to change.

Market access and deregulations
We are privileged to represent both incumbents and challengers in most of the regulated markets, which gives us sector specific knowledge and enable us to develop a working method to combine competition law, general EU-law and sector specific legislation and enforcement to serve our client’s interests.  In several of these matters we work in parallel with both Swedish authorities and the European Commission.

Compliance and training
Most large companies and a growing number of medium sized companies have some form of program in place to ensure compliance with the competition rules. Our methodology when developing a compliance program together with a client is to ensure that the program is sector and company specific and that procedures are put in place to ensure that the program is maintained and adhered to in practice.

All our services are customized for each client and situation to achieve our business purpose – to provide customer value.