In C-133/24 (CD Tondela), the Court held that no-poach agreements are presumptively restrictions by object under Article 101(1) TFEU — but referred the specific classification to the Portuguese national court, which must determine whether the roster-stability objective displaces that label and whether Article 101(3) TFEU conditions are met. That referral matters: the pandemic context was not categorically rejected, and sporting-specificity arguments — including roster stability during a disrupted season — remain open as potentially legitimate objectives before the national court.

For in-house counsel: if your company concluded any cross-competitor employee coordination arrangement during 2020–2022 — in any sector, not just sports — and that arrangement has never been formally reviewed or unwound, treat today's ruling as a prompt to do so. The ECJ has now established that no-poach arrangements carry a strong presumption of by-object restriction; the national court determination will narrow (or confirm) that presumption for the specific facts. The ruling lands the same week as active EU competition enforcement against pharma no-poach arrangements; the Commission is watching this space.

Baker McKenzie has announced a phased global rollout of the Legora AI platform across all six of its practice groups. The signal isn't the software choice — it's the deployment structure. A global firm committing to uniform AI adoption rather than per-partner opt-in changes the client conversation about value. For in-house teams paying hourly rates for AI-assisted drafting and research, the question is no longer whether your external counsel uses AI, but whether the efficiency gain is reflected anywhere in your fees. If you don't have a clause addressing AI tool use and billing transparency in your panel engagement terms, add one at next renewal. The negotiating window is now.

Anthropic has released twelve Claude plugins for legal practice areas — M&A due diligence, contract review, regulatory compliance, litigation support — alongside more than twenty connectors to popular legal tech platforms. This lands the same week as Baker McKenzie's Legora rollout and Carta's acquisition of Avantia to build an "AI-powered law firm" for private capital: three separate actors — foundation model provider, global law firm, ERP vendor — converging on the same legal workflow from three different directions in the same news cycle.

The connection worth holding: under today's analysis of the AI Act's high-risk classification for vendors selling to EU public bodies, AI tools deployed in legal decision-support for public sector clients face mandatory conformity assessments. That obligation will reach these platforms faster than their developers are currently signalling to procurement clients. Document your risk classification rationale for every AI legal tool you adopt — before someone at the contracting authority asks for it.

Servatius von Tatzenberg's piece today on the bilateral package identifies a timing problem that most compliance calendars have missed: the dynamic alignment mechanism for automatic adoption of relevant EU law changes can produce binding domestic obligations before the referendum formally anchors the bilateral framework. The treaty text does not neatly resolve which acts fall within scope. For compliance officers treating the referendum as the threshold event for programme updates, the analysis suggests the horizon should be moved forward. Read it alongside our earlier piece on the twenty-day Annex 2 gap — the administrative machinery is already running ahead of the political calendar.

The ECJ's ruling in C-797/23 (Meta Platforms Ireland) confirms that Member States may build enforceable compensation and negotiation mechanisms around DSM Directive Article 15 — validating Italy's AGCOM model of disclosure duties, negotiation obligations, and regulatory supervision. Article 15 is a minimum-harmonisation provision: the ruling does not require all Member States to replicate that architecture, but confirms its compatibility with the framework. Von Firn has the full analysis today. The Swiss angle is bounded but real: Swiss-domiciled publishers with EU content distribution operate outside the DSM framework, but the ruling creates commercial negotiating leverage at the contract level regardless. If you advise media clients with EU reach, the licensing amendment conversation just became easier to start.

Von Firn's analysis of C-747/22, published today, finds that a residency-linked condition for social assistance access constitutes indirect discrimination against lawfully resident third-country nationals — the Single Permit Directive framework does not allow Member States to use immigration status as a benefits proxy. For multinationals with EU subsidiaries employing mixed workforces, this is a payroll and benefits audit trigger. Any policy that gates eligibility on permit category or country of origin should be reviewed before an INPS-type inspection does the reviewing for you.

Von Firn's piece today maps the gap between individual criminal exposure under Article 322ter StGB and organisational liability under Article 102 StGB — a gap that matters because individual liability for the gift-giver does not automatically produce corporate liability for the company. Swissinfo reports today that Switzerland is handling more international bribery cases but structural enforcement gaps remain. The two pieces read together: case volume is rising while the corporate-level accountability mechanism remains structurally underused. If your compliance programme treats gifts to foreign officials as a GwG/AML issue rather than a StGB issue with its own separate corporate liability chain, it is incomplete.

Von Firn's analysis of the BGEID's practical implications, published today, surfaces a fact that deserves its own calendar entry: the state E-ID is designed for interoperability with the EU Digital Identity framework, and the acceptance obligation — including liveness verification and consent architecture — may arrive faster than most onboarding compliance teams are modelling. Banks and fintechs have been tracking this. Insurance and non-bank financial intermediaries largely have not. If your KYC programme was last reviewed before the implementing ordinances were published, the next review cycle needs a BGEID readiness section.

Industry groups are pressing for cobalt to be explicitly included in Switzerland's forthcoming responsible business legislation. The Federal Council's NUFG consultation, open since 2 April, draws heavily on the EU CSDDD framework — but the CSDDD's phase-in timeline and the anticipated NUFG schedule are not aligned. A Swiss-headquartered group with EU subsidiary obligations under CSDDD and a domestic NUFG cobalt obligation would face two overlapping but non-identical supply chain audit requirements with different effective dates and different evidentiary standards. If your supply chain compliance mapping covers only one of these frameworks, the gap is live now.

The Sudan ordinance (SR 946.231.18) was updated on May 1, adding to a run of concurrent list changes since April: Iran Anhänge 12 and 14 (April 14), Russia/Ukraine (April 7), Taliban (May 1), and ISIL/Al-Qaeda (April). None are individually surprising — these are mostly synchronisation updates following UN and EU listing actions. But the cadence means that any compliance function screening on a monthly cycle is structurally running one to four weeks behind on at least one list at any given time. We flagged the underlying structural problem after the 19th Russia package: Swiss list movements are frequent, irregular, and not announced with the same visibility as EU actions. Trigger-based screening is the only approach that holds.

The UK Government introduced the Litigation Funding Agreements (Enforceability) Bill in the House of Lords in March 2026, but the bill has not yet been enacted — the enforceability gap persists pending passage. For Swiss and EU counsel involved in UK competition follow-on proceedings — a non-trivial population given the Russia sanctions-related asset claims and the pharmaceutical enforcement wave — the funding structure of any UK proceedings now requires a separate enforceability opinion. A funded claim where the funding agreement is unenforceable is, functionally, an unfunded claim at the moment of maximum pressure.

The SRA's proposed 29% funding increase to £111.5 million reflects SRA reports of potential conduct up 58% since 2023/24 and resulting investigations up over 40%. For Swiss and EU in-house teams using UK external counsel, the operational consequence is less visible but real: a regulator underfunded relative to its caseload becomes slower and less predictable on disciplinary matters, which degrades the quality of informal guidance and extends the timeline of proceedings you may have an interest in monitoring. A different version of the same resourcing tension is playing out in Bern — our piece on the BankG revision and FINMA's supervisory capacity covers the Swiss side of that picture.

Von Firn's piece today on the conflict-of-laws trap for tech counsel maps a problem that sits at the intersection of US cloud subpoenas, EU data sovereignty obligations, and the Swiss FADP: a Swiss-domiciled entity hosting data under a contract governed by foreign law may face compelled disclosure obligations that Swiss law neither anticipates nor provides a defence against. The specific trap is not theoretical — it has materialised in US CLOUD Act proceedings and in GDPR cross-border transfer disputes. If your data hosting contracts were last reviewed before the FADP came into force in September 2023, the governing-law clause is the place to start.