The Federal Supreme Court confirmed in 2C_28/2025 that cantonal minimum wages are constitutionally sound, and Zürich's CHF 23.90 floor stands. Servatius von Tatzenberg's piece today makes the point that matters most for in-house counsel: the judgment rests on Canton Zürich's Gemeindeordnung and its communal autonomy framework — it hands every Zürich municipality the legislative instrument to set a local floor. Municipalities in Basel-Stadt, Bern, or elsewhere would need equivalent cantonal authorization before they could proceed on the same basis. Geneva operates a cantonal minimum wage (Art. 39A LC-GE) — a different instrument from the municipal ordinance the Bundesgericht addressed here. If you manage collective agreements or employment contracts across cantonal lines, the floor you are benchmarking against is determined canton by canton, and the constitutional headroom for local variation differs by cantonal law.

The Federal Council put commercial real estate back into the Lex Koller frame with a consultation that closes 15 July. The share-deal route — acquiring a company that owns Swiss commercial property rather than buying the property directly — is the mechanism under scrutiny. Today's piece from Casimir von Firn walks through what is in scope and, critically, what is not. Foreign investors who have used the share-deal route as a matter of course should audit their existing structures before the consultation outcome signals where enforcement attention will go next.

The Court of Justice's judgments in the joined E.ON/RWE cases (C-171/24 P to C-179/24 P, June 2025) confirmed that the three operations in the energy asset swap do not constitute a single concentration. Casimir von Firn's analysis today explains the rule the Court established: economic interdependence between steps is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a single concentration. There is an additional requirement — the steps must together confer control over the same undertaking. Because E.ON and RWE each gained control of different targets through the asset swap, the Commission was correct to review the operations as separate filings. The short version for deal counsel: structuring a transaction in interdependent tranches does not by itself produce a single filing obligation. What controls is whether the steps lead to a common change of control over the same entity. That test affects thresholds, timing, and the pre-signing conversations you have with competition counsel — ideally before the term sheet is signed, not after.

Advocate General Ćapeta concluded in her non-binding opinion of 19 March 2026 in C-354/24 (Elisa Eesti) that member states can require telecoms operators to remove high-risk network equipment on national security grounds without triggering compensation obligations — on the specific facts of that case, where the operator retained use of the equipment until specified phase-out dates, negating a deprivation-of-property finding. The AG explicitly left open that a national court finding the removal burden to be disproportionate on different facts could reach a different result. The final judgment has not yet been issued. Servatius von Tatzenberg's piece today draws the Swiss extrapolation — Switzerland is not an EU member, but Swiss network security law tracks the same logic, and the Fernmeldegesetz gives the regulator comparable authority. If you advise telecoms clients on infrastructure contracts or capex planning, the AG's opinion closes the state-compensation argument on these facts; the proportionality fact-pattern remains the live question until the Court rules.

FINMA's Circular 2026/1 moves nature-related financial risk from voluntary disclosure into the supervised risk framework in phases. Categories 1 and 2 — the largest banks, insurance companies, and securities firms — have been in scope since 1 January 2026. Categories 3–5 enter scope on 1 January 2027, leaving mid-sized institutions roughly six months to bring internal risk models to examination standard. Full nature and climate risk implementation across all categories is required by 1 January 2028. Today's piece by Servatius von Tatzenberg identifies which internal risk model updates need to happen first.

The connection to Pillar Two (below) is worth flagging to your CFO directly: the same team being asked to recompute top-up taxes before 14 July is now also being asked to model physical and transition risk for an external examiner. Sequencing those two demands is a resource planning problem, not just a legal one.

The consultation on the Cartel Act implementing ordinances is reported to close 17 September — verify the deadline directly against the WEKO consultation page before relying on it, as the source could not be independently confirmed at the time this entry was prepared. The merger mechanics provisions are the ones most likely to affect day-to-day transaction work. Today's piece from Casimir von Firn identifies the three provisions that would change how Swiss merger notifications are structured.

Three consultations open simultaneously through the summer — Lex Koller on 15 July, Pillar Two on 14 July, Cartel Act on 17 September — is not an accident. The Federal administration is clearing its legislative queue before the autumn parliamentary session. Someone on your team needs to own each of those calendar entries by end of day.

Servatius von Tatzenberg explains today what changed in the revised Pillar Two implementing ordinance and which multinationals need to rerun their top-up calculations before the 14 July comment deadline. The Swiss implementation has several deviations from the OECD model rules that do not show up in a surface reading of the text — those are the substantive risk. The headline numbers tend to look right until you stress-test the edge cases. Fourteen July is not far away.

Another update to the Sudan sanctions list, effective 4 June 2026 at 23:00 — eleven days ago. The FINMA news was published on 5 June, but the legally operative date for gap analysis is 4 June. The Swiss Sudan list has historically trailed the EU list by up to twenty days, which makes the refresh cycle of your screening system a live compliance question. The practical issue is not whether you are compliant today, but whether you can document that your system captured the 4 June change within a defensible window. If you run weekly batch updates, check the gap.

Hunton Andrews Kurth has closed its China office, continuing a trend that is now structural rather than cyclical. Hong Kong's largest foreign firms are simultaneously downsizing. For Swiss companies with China operations, the international law firm coverage available five years ago is thinning at both ends — less in Shanghai, less in Hong Kong. Local Chinese counsel picks up the work, but jurisdictional knowledge gaps in cross-border disputes and regulatory matters do not disappear because the engagement letter changes hands.

Pinsent Masons is forming a joint venture with a Chinese commercial law firm in Qianhai — Shenzhen's free trade zone — at the same moment Hunton is leaving. Qianhai has specific rules on foreign law firm participation that make JV structures viable there in ways they are not elsewhere on the mainland, so this is not simply contrarianism. Whether it proves prescient depends entirely on how geopolitics develops over the next two years. The divergence between Hunton's exit and Pinsent's entry is itself the operative fact: there is no consensus market reading on China legal risk, which means your own board position paper needs to be explicit rather than borrowed from external counsel.

Reed Smith's Saudi office opening extends a run of international firms establishing Gulf presences. The red tape, talent costs, and local partnership requirements are real friction; nonetheless the direction is one-way. For Swiss companies with GCC operations, the pool of internationally qualified counsel available in Riyadh has roughly doubled over three years. That is, on net, good for your external legal budget.

Hogan Lovells and Cadwalader completed their merger on 1 June 2026 — fourteen days ago — creating Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, a firm of approximately 3,100 lawyers with roughly USD 3.6–3.9 billion in annual revenue. This is the largest law firm merger on record. The two firms had also participated in the Global Legal Tech Alliance announcement of April 2026, but that development is superseded: the firms now share clients, partners, and institutional knowledge as a single entity. For in-house counsel with either firm on panel, the operational questions are conflicts, rate structure, and practice-group coverage under the combined entity. If you have not already had that conversation with your relationship partner at either firm, have it this week.