“Clients value that the team is “knowledgeable, with high business acumen, providing a pragmatic approach and actionable advice”.
Publicly procured contracts are a central and significant part of the Swedish economy and often involve important and extensive assignments financed by public funds. A public contract often requires significant investment and risk-taking by companies supplying the public sector.
Procurement law and other public law rules governing public purchasers, as well as the size and importance of the public market, mean that public procurement imposes specific requirements not only on buyers, but above all on sellers. We are experts in managing commercial contracts in a procurement law context. We provide clear and useful legal and strategic advice and dedicated representation and assist in all aspects of public procurement from tendering and contract award, to renegotiation and to any dispute over the public contract.
We prefer to work with companies that are leaders in their field or with government agencies and companies in individual major projects or processes. In addition to ongoing advice to our core clients, we offer the following legal-strategic services and advice.
Companies that derive a significant part of their revenue from public contracts and therefore consider public procurement as a business-critical part of their operations should have a strategic and consistent approach to public procurement and tendering. Our experience is that it is important to get involved early in the tender process, or even before the tender is announced, in order to be an effective advisor on the way to a new public deal and to identify both problems and solutions early on.
Our role is to work closely with our clients' bidding teams, in-house counsel and management to provide legal quality assurance, risk minimization, strategic advice and negotiation support while taking into account commercial and procurement law perspectives. Not all tender projects justify our services, but as the service is scalable, it can be adapted to the different needs of our clients and the needs of the individual procurement depending on the complexity and risk profile.
In large procurement projects, we work closely with contracting authorities and entities on a case-by-case basis at various stages of the procurement process to select the form of procurement, assess and formulate requirements and criteria, and ensure the legality of the procurement procedure. Our task is often to minimize the risk of appeal or to ensure that an appeal is not successful.
The procurement phase is only the first phase of public procurement. The implementation of the public contract often presents the parties with new conditions or ambiguities in the procurement documents that need to be addressed in order to implement the public contract in an appropriate, sustainable and profitable way.
The possibilities and limitations of procurement law regarding contract modifications are a central part of public procurement and often fraught with a high degree of ambiguity and uncertainty. We assist our clients in negotiating with the counterparty to assess and explain the conditions to adapt the contract in a sustainable and as risk-free way as possible or to ensure the termination of the public contract. We negotiate and develop new contractual terms and conditions that are quality assured under contract and procurement law. We also manage and coordinate communication strategies towards the market and policy makers to achieve the necessary change in public contracts.
Disputes are not always avoidable and when litigation is necessary, we assist our clients to ensure the best possible outcome. A court process requires focus and dedication and requires the representative to stay one step ahead of the other party. Dispute resolution on a public contract requires specific expertise to ensure that the contract's procurement law context is given the necessary impact and importance in the process. We assist in all kinds of litigation and dispute issues from risk management and assessment of process conditions to acting as counsel in disputes about the application or termination of the public contract, as well as in purely procurement law cases on the review of procurements, the validity of contracts, damages proceedings and cases on procurement damages.
