Responsible Business

Responsibility through leadership. Being one of the thought leaders in the legal industry comes with the responsibility to look ahead. We must dare to challenge the established ways of working in the legal community. For us, this means actively addressing legal issues that have an impact on society. We also want to make a difference by contributing to a more proactive legal industry that can help improve business practices, diversity, and leadership.

We strive towards this goal by not only meeting the requirements set by the society but also through an unwavering commitment to giving back in the form of pro bono work in areas in which we have market-leading expertise. We also engage in national committee work to best be able to actively share our knowledge and views to help develop the business world and society. In addition, we provide a substantial amount of training opportunities for students and consider this a platform for educating future business lawyers that can later serve the business community from in-house positions.

We place our people, pro bono work, and the environment at the heart of our corporate responsibility programme.

We are committed to conducting business and providing legal advice in accordance with the highest legal and ethical standards.     

Laws apply to lawyers as well. As a Finnish law firm, we must abide by the ethical rules and Code of Conduct of the Finnish Bar Association, and we are bound by the laws and regulations that apply in the Finnish legal sector. To us, however, engaging in responsible business means more than simply following these specific norms.

We see corporate responsibility as a broad concept that spans an entire spectrum from ethics and rules to people and the environment. Our core task is to maintain our integrity and to loyally defend the legal interests of our clients, which calls for us to work within the established framework of law while ensuring that we uphold a well-functioning legal system and the rule of law.

An integral part of our corporate responsibility programme is our conflict-of-interest process that ensures that the interests of our individual lawyers or firm will not contradict with or adversely affect the interests of our clients or the duties carried out by our lawyers.

We know our clients. Law requires that we identify our clients. This means that we collect sufficient data as required by the Finnish Act on Preventing Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (444/2017). We have a special Know Your Client (KYC) process in place that helps us minimise the occurrence of risky or illegal business transactions. During our KYC process, we compare data submitted to us on companies, beneficial owners, and directors against sanction and PEP lists. We are obliged to report all suspicious transactions to the Money Laundering Clearing House of Finland.

Your personal data is safe with us. We do our best to ensure that your personal data is processed lawfully and transparently, and to ensure that your personal data is safe, accurate and up to date. We process personal data in accordance with all laws that apply to the protection of personal data, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (i.e. the GDPR) (“Data Protection Laws”). We process personal data e.g. for the purposes of identifying our client, screening for conflicts of interest, handling assignments, managing client relationships, and marketing.

In accordance with the Data Protection Laws, the data subjects whose personal data we process are entitled to obtain information on any personal data we process that pertains to them and to exercise their rights based on the GDPR as further described in our Privacy Notice. If you have any questions regarding the processing of your personal data, please feel free to contact our GDPR team.

Security matters. We are the first Finnish law firm to receive an ISO 27001:2013 certification. This widely recognised international information security standard, which is also the highest security-related accreditation a law firm can achieve, was granted to us in recognition of the fact that we abide by the best practices and apply the best policies and procedures for information security management when handling client assignments and client data.

We are also the first law firm in Finland to deploy a cloud environment for our work product management as we moved from an on-premises operating environment to the cloud in 2020. This transition has brought with it powerful advantages, including robust security, greater scalability, and business continuity through the adaptation of technology.