Anti-trust dawn raids: Sweden gets more extensive protection for legal professional privilege than EU, October 2011
When competition authorities carry out dawn raids in search for evidence of a possible violation of the competition rules, there is only one kind of document they are not allowed to read, this being a document covered by legal professional privilege. Thus, legal professional privilege is a safe area where companies are given the opportunity, , to correspond with their lawyer to obtain competition law advice,without the authorities’ being able to access this information. In a decision recently issued by the Stockholm District Court, the court gave the Swedish legal professional privilege a wider interpretation than the ECJ has done on a European level. Elisabeth Eklund outlines in the following the consequences hereof for companies.