Four FINMA sanction updates this week cover Sudan (WBF amendment to the Annex of the Verordnung vom 25. Mai 2005), the Taliban list (SECO update, SR 946.231.07), ISIL/Al-Qaida (SR 946.231.08), and a further Russia/Belarus change. Routine in form, but the Taliban and Sudan regimes are precisely where commercial screening tools tend to lag the SECO source by days. The structural gap is documented in our Anhang 2 SR 946.231.18 piece — the same lag applies here. If your sanctions workflow runs entirely on third-party feeds, build in a direct SECO check for these regimes at minimum quarterly.

In C-133/24, the Court held that the no-poach agreement among Portuguese football clubs concluded during COVID-19 restricts competition by object under Art. 101 TFEU. The "by object" classification is the sharp point: the clubs cannot defend by showing the agreement had no actual market effect. The Court declined to treat the pandemic as a general safe harbour for anti-competitive labour-market arrangements, and the logic is consistent with the broader ECJ position on no-poach clauses — they sit in the same analytical category as price-fixing, and the emergency context goes at most to penalty mitigation, not to the underlying violation.

For in-house counsel in any sector — aviation, hospitality, manufacturing, professional services — that ran informal or formal mutual standstill agreements during the lockdown years: the question is whether those arrangements were scoped, documented as crisis-ancillary to something lawful, and genuinely time-limited. "We handled it ad hoc in April 2020" is not the answer you want to give. The Art. 101 clock does not have a pandemic exception.

Baker McKenzie is rolling Legora — the Stockholm-based AI platform — across all six practice groups in a phased global deployment. In the same week, Anthropic separately launched 12 practice-area Claude plugins and more than 20 connectors to major legaltech systems. Two announcements from two different layers — firm deployment decision and model-level infrastructure — arriving together is the signal that AI in legal work has shifted from "should we?" to "how do we govern this?" When the infrastructure is in place and the deployment decision is made, the question of transparency is no longer optional.

The governance gap this opens for in-house teams: most outside counsel guidelines and engagement letters do not address AI use in the production of work product. If your external counsel is running AI-assisted drafting and review — and after this week, the assumption should be that they are — your engagement terms need to say something about it. The liability question for AI-generated output is unsettled; today's Unter Vorbehalt piece on limitation of liability under Art. 100 and 101 OR is directly relevant to how that risk allocates contractually when something goes wrong.

The UK government has again failed to enact the promised legislative fix to the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in PACCAR, which rendered many litigation funding agreements using a percentage-of-recovery model unenforceable as damages-based agreements. Two years on, the market distortion is active and capital is being redirected. Any LFA entered after July 2023 for UK proceedings needs a PACCAR compliance review if it hasn't had one. Today's Unter Vorbehalt piece on forum choice and the New York Convention addresses the enforcement certainty premium that makes arbitration seats outside UK jurisdiction increasingly attractive — the PACCAR situation is exactly the kind of structural uncertainty that drives those conversations.

The UK Solicitors Regulation Authority has proposed raising practising certificate fees 29% to £111.5m, citing a more than 50% rise in misconduct investigations since 2024. The SRA is already under political pressure over its handling of failing firms. For in-house teams with UK-regulated outside counsel, the cost observation is secondary — the enforcement intensity signal matters more: sharply rising investigations, more regulatory resource, higher compliance pressure, and a regulator in political difficulty. That combination tends to produce risk-averse behaviour at the firms you instruct, which is useful to know when you're negotiating aggressive positions.

Civil society groups are pressing for cobalt to be included in Switzerland's forthcoming responsible business legislation (NUFG), arguing that the current draft's mineral scope leaves a significant gap in battery supply chain coverage. The connection to CSDDD is direct: as we noted in CSDDD vor NUFG, Swiss exporters with EU buyers are already contractually bound by supply chain clauses that reference the Directive, regardless of what Swiss statute eventually requires. Cobalt sourcing — primarily from DRC — sits in the same geography as conflict minerals already covered under existing Swiss rules. If your supply chain includes battery components, the absence of cobalt in the current Swiss draft does not close the contractual exposure that arrives from the other direction via your EU customers' standard purchase conditions.

Carta — the private capital fund administration and cap table platform — has acquired Avantia, a UK alternative legal services provider, and is launching "Carta Law" as an AI-powered law firm for the fund management sector. The operational logic is coherent: if you hold the fund's equity data and cap table, a significant portion of the legal work that flows from it is structurally templatable. The conflict question is less resolved: the same entity that knows your shareholder register and fund data is now also providing your legal services. For fund in-house counsel and GPs evaluating this, the efficiency argument is real and the concentration risk is also real. Worth a paragraph in your next third-party risk and vendor assessment, and a direct question to your fund administrator about information barriers.

An AlixPartners survey finds US companies anticipating rising dispute volumes driven by economic stress, with cybersecurity, data privacy, and AI risk at the top of concern lists. The EU read-across: AI disputes will increasingly involve GDPR Art. 22 (automated decisions), the AI Act's enforcement architecture now coming into force, and product liability frameworks for AI output. Today's piece on the August 2026 high-risk AI deadline is the first concrete statutory trigger point in this chain — if you have high-risk AI systems in scope and haven't mapped them against the Act, the window is ten weeks.

DLA Piper's departure from the Verein structure is being read as a wider signal that the Swiss-association model for global law firm integration has passed its peak. The Verein's original advantage — combining brand and client relationships while keeping profits and liability separate — is colliding with integrated AI deployment requirements, lateral recruitment economics, and unified risk management. The practical effect for in-house counsel whose preferred global firm is in transition: your conflict-checking protocols need updating, and your engagement letters should specify which legal entity you are actually instructing. This is not an abstract point — Verein members can have different professional insurance profiles, regulatory obligations, and enforcement exposure.

Casimir von Firn's piece out today takes Art. 717a OR seriously as a drafting obligation rather than a best-practice recommendation. If your board does not have a structured conflict-of-interest disclosure mechanism — one that creates a paper trail and triggers a defined recusal process — the statute now makes that a governance gap, not a style choice. Worth reading alongside your next board agenda before a transaction or related-party matter comes up.

Dr. von Tatzenberg's piece maps the August 2 deadline for the first wave of high-risk AI systems under the AI Act, starting with biometric systems at the border. The piece is also a useful explainer of why "our AI isn't biometrics" doesn't end the Annex III analysis — several other categories reach the same deadline. Ten weeks is enough time to complete a mapping exercise; it is not enough time to start one, discover a gap, and remediate it.

Dr. von Tatzenberg's C-747/22 piece is the one to circulate to HR leads at companies with EU subsidiaries employing non-EU nationals. The case turns on a Member State residence condition the ECJ found to be indirect discrimination — and the operational effect on family benefit and social assistance entitlements is more immediate than the headline suggests. If your EU subsidiary HR policies were last reviewed before May 2026, they need a look.

Dr. von Tatzenberg's second piece today argues that the Sexualstrafrecht reform has moved the civil law standard under Art. 328 OR in ways that most HR policies and training programmes have not yet caught up with. The statutory shift is not merely symbolic — it has operational consequences for what counts as adequate protective measures under Swiss employment law. Circulate to your HR lead and ask whether your workplace conduct framework reflects the post-reform standard.