FINMA logged six routine sanction-list amendments between late April and early May: Sudan (SR 946.231.18, WBF ordinance annex, SESAM updated 29 April); Taliban (SECO consolidated list update — individual ordinance reference at seco.admin.ch/sanktionen); ISIL/Al-Qaeda (SECO consolidated list update — individual ordinance reference at seco.admin.ch/sanktionen); Russia (SR 946.231.176.72, Annex 8 of the 4 March 2022 ordinance); Iran (Annexes 12 and 14 of the December 2025 ordinance — SR at fedlex.admin.ch); and Ukraine (SR 946.231.176.72, 4 March 2022 ordinance). Individually unremarkable; collectively a reminder that screening workflows need to pull SECO annexes on a rolling basis, not quarterly. The Venezuela screening gap we covered on 19 May is the pattern, not the exception — and the Iran update lands on top of the December 2025 total revision that reset the Swiss Iran regime before the JCPOA framework. If your compliance team is still running a single consolidated-list check, this week is reason enough to review the workflow.

Baker McKenzie is putting Legora — a Scandinavian-built multi-agent legal AI platform — in front of every practice group globally. The significance for in-house counsel is structural, not incremental: when your primary external counsel runs a uniform AI stack, you start seeing differences in how advice is structured and how quickly first drafts arrive. Legora routes tasks across specialised models rather than running a single chatbot. The question your legal ops team should be asking is whether your internal tooling can consume that output cleanly, or whether you are still copy-pasting from email attachments. Vendor standardisation at the Big Law level tends to create informal expectations about what in-house teams should accept as "normal" delivery formats.

Twelve practice-area plugins covering M&A due diligence through regulatory compliance, plus connectors to mainstream document management platforms. The connectors matter more than the plugins: once an AI layer pipes natively into HighQ, NetDocs, or iManage, the switching cost for firms leaving those stacks climbs sharply. In-house teams currently negotiating enterprise agreements with external counsel should start asking which AI stack their firms are committing to — and what data processing agreement and data residency commitments accompany it. The FADP and GDPR angles on cross-border LLM processing are live questions today, not future ones. This sits alongside the Baker McKenzie / Legora announcement as a single signal: legal AI infrastructure is consolidating fast, and firms that do not pick a lane this year will find the lane chosen for them.

Carta — the ERP platform for private capital fund administration — has absorbed UK ALSP Avantia and relabelled the result "Carta Law," pitched as an AI-powered law firm for fund formation, LP agreements, and cap table maintenance. Carta already holds the cap table data; it now wants the legal work that flows from it. The vertical integration logic is tight. For in-house counsel at PE-backed companies, the more immediate question is whether having your fund's law firm on the same platform as your fund administrator creates a conflict structure you are comfortable with. Law society rules on this vary by jurisdiction, and the "it is just software" framing does not dissolve the underlying interest question.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is under pressure from two directions simultaneously: misconduct reports jumped by more than half in a year, and it is now proposing a £111.5m budget — a 29% increase — to keep pace, funded by higher fees on solicitors. The SRA has taken sustained criticism for its oversight of failing firms. The response pattern — grow rather than restructure — is worth watching. For clients of English solicitors, the data point is directional: the self-regulatory model is under strain, and the SRA's credibility as an oversight body is a live question in the legal market.

The UK Supreme Court's 2023 PACCAR ruling invalidated most litigation funding agreements structured as percentage-of-recovery deals. Parliament committed to a legislative fix. It has not delivered one. Funders describe themselves as "deeply disappointed," which is a polite way of saying they have been holding contracts of uncertain enforceability for nearly three years while the government found other priorities. For in-house counsel managing or defending group actions with third-party funding on the claimant side, this is not abstract: if your case has a funder whose agreement was written pre-PACCAR or drafted to comply with PACCAR, the enforceability question is still open and the case economics may shift mid-litigation. Get a current English law opinion on the funding structure before the next procedural milestone.

The Law Society and Bar Council are pressing the UK government to convert a Council of Europe signature into a ratification. The Convention on the Profession of Lawyer obligates states to protect lawyers from pressure and interference in the exercise of their function. Switzerland is not a party. GRECO's periodic reviews of Swiss lawyer independence — touched on in today's piece by Servatius von Tatzenberg on GRECO's Swiss compliance file — do not yet systematically flag this gap, but the convention's ratification map is a useful comparator for any jurisdiction assessing how seriously it takes formal bar independence. The connection to the PACCAR story is not obvious on the surface; both, however, reflect the same signal: the UK's legal infrastructure, once a default reference point, is becoming a variable rather than a constant.

Case C-155/25: Italy's use of successive fixed-term contracts for administrative, technical and auxiliary (ATA) staff of Italian public educational establishments violates the EU Fixed-Term Work Directive, and Italy has not put effective penalties in place for abuse. The ruling requires Italy to act. For Swiss multinationals with Italian subsidiaries, the practical check is straightforward: if your Italian entity has renewed FTCs for administrative or technical roles more than twice in a three-year window without a documented objective justification, your HR counsel should review that exposure before Q3. Italian labour inspectorates have been active, and a CJEU ruling of this clarity tends to sharpen enforcement appetites.

Case C-286/25 (BRANDL): Hungary extinguished usufruct rights over agricultural land in 2013, a violation of the free movement of capital established by the 2019 CJEU judgment. The 2026 ruling concerns what Hungary owes in redress: the court found Hungary's compensation formula — calculating payment at one-twentieth of the land's market value multiplied by the years of usufruct — does not capture the income the usufructuary lost during that period and therefore fails to provide adequate redress under EU law. The principle has reach beyond Hungarian agriculture: any member state that has used a similarly structured formula after forced extinguishments of property rights is exposed to the same challenge. PE and family office clients with real-asset exposure in Hungary, Romania, or similar jurisdictions where land reform legislation touched foreign-held rights should ask whether the payment they received reflected actual economic loss or merely administrative closure.

Case C-797/23 (Meta Platforms Ireland): member states may grant press publishers an enforceable right to fair compensation from platforms that use their publications. Meta argued Italy's implementing legislation — specifically the rules adopted by Italian communications regulator AGCOM — exceeded the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. The court disagreed. German and French implementing legislation is now on firmer footing. Switzerland has not transposed the directive, and the ruling will increase pressure from Swiss publishers' associations on the Federal Council to address that gap. For media companies' in-house teams with EU operations, the question shifts from principle to enforcement: what does "fair compensation" look like in your jurisdiction's implementation, and has your platform agreement been reviewed against it?

Case C-133/24 (CD Tondela): Portuguese football clubs agreed during Covid not to recruit each other's players. The CJEU held that such an arrangement must be presumed a restriction of competition by object — but the presumption is rebuttable. The court explicitly recognised that ensuring the regularity of sporting competitions is a legitimate public interest that may, in principle, justify the agreement, and returned the final classification to the Portuguese national court for assessment in light of the full economic and legal context. What the ruling closes off is the argument that crisis conditions or informality eliminate the presumption entirely. For in-house counsel, the practical check is the same regardless: "gentlemen's agreements" about not hiring from competitors, made in response to exceptional circumstances, carry full competition law exposure unless a specific justification survives national-court scrutiny. If your company made any informal workforce-sharing or non-solicitation arrangements with sector peers between March 2020 and the end of pandemic-era restrictions, and those arrangements were never formally reviewed by competition counsel, that review is overdue.

A coalition is pushing for cobalt to be included in the NUFG (Sorgfaltspflichten-Gesetz), Switzerland's due diligence law currently in consultation. Cobalt is predominantly mined in the DRC under documented artisanal mining conditions. The CSDDD already covers cobalt for EU-facing supply chains — our 18 May analysis shows how Swiss exporters are contractually bound before the Swiss law takes effect. The KIG corporate reporting obligations covered in today's piece by Casimir von Firn operate as a parallel disclosure track. If cobalt enters the NUFG scope, the supply chain mapping exercise your procurement and legal teams have been treating as a future problem becomes an immediate one.

Switzerland's revised CO2 law has been rejected by voters, repeating the outcome of the 2021 referendum. The Federal Council will need to bring back a third version, and the political space for aviation levies and fossil heating phase-outs remains genuinely contested. For in-house ESG counsel: the regulatory floor remains the existing CO2 Act, the FINMA climate guidance issued through the supervisory communications covered in this week's pieces, and the Federal Council's 2030 climate strategy — none of which are affected by the ballot result. The KIG reporting obligations covered in today's piece by Casimir von Firn are on a separate legislative track entirely and are not contingent on the CO2 law's fate. The ballot result does, however, reduce near-term prospects for carbon levy instruments that would have affected transport and energy cost modelling.