Practices — Lodline, counsel to creditors, boards and foreign investors, groups the firm's work into three lines: recovering claims against Swedish counterparties, advising boards on decisions carrying personal exposure, and structuring entry for investors without a domestic footprint. Each line answers a different question a client brings in on the day something goes wrong.
Who this concerns
The three lines share a client profile more than a legal theory: someone who is not asking whether Swedish law applies, but what to do inside it, on a clock they did not set. A creditor calls when a counterparty has stopped paying and the commercial relationship has already broken down. A board calls when a decision in front of it carries a risk that will attach to individual directors, not only to the company. A foreign investor calls when a Swedish structure, contract, or acquisition needs a shape that survives scrutiny from a regulator, a lender, or a counterparty on the other side of a border.
An overview of the firm's product-level offering sits at the products index, which lists fixed-scope engagements by name and scope rather than by practice line. This page describes the work; that one describes what is bought.
The cross-border element is not a side note here, it is the third of the three lines. Where a counterparty, a parent company, or a lender sits outside Sweden, the questions that matter shift: which forum has jurisdiction, which law governs the contract, and whether a Swedish judgment or arbitral award will actually convert into recovered assets abroad. Domestic and cross-border versions of the same dispute are rarely the same piece of work.
What the law says
Creditor-side recovery in Sweden runs through a public enforcement process for undisputed claims and through the ordinary courts where the debt is contested, with insolvency proceedings available once a debtor's position has deteriorated past voluntary settlement. Which route applies changes the timeline, the documentation required, and what a creditor can realistically recover, under Swedish law as it currently stands.
Board duties in Sweden sit with the company's governing body as a collective and, in defined circumstances, with individual directors personally. The threshold for personal exposure is not a single bright line; it depends on what the board knew, what it documented, and whether it acted once a problem became apparent, under Swedish law as it currently stands.
Foreign investment into Sweden is, for most transactions, unregulated at entry. A narrower band of sectors and transaction types is subject to a screening process before closing can proceed. Getting the classification wrong at the outset is more costly than the screening step itself, because it surfaces after other commitments are already signed.
How it works in practice
Creditor-side work: recovery and enforcement
A recovery matter typically starts with a demand and a decision point: settle on adjusted terms, pursue the debt through the enforcement authority for a claim that is not genuinely disputed, or litigate where it is. The choice determines both cost and the realistic recovery horizon, and it is usually made before the counterparty's financial position deteriorates further.
Board advisory: decisions with personal exposure
Board-level advisory work concentrates on decisions where the paper trail matters as much as the outcome: continued trading while solvency is in question, related-party transactions, and decisions taken under pressure from a lender or a majority shareholder. The output is usually a documented basis for the decision, not a recommendation on how to vote.
Foreign investors: market entry and structuring
Entry work covers the structural choices that determine exposure later: whether to acquire assets or shares, how the Swedish entity is capitalised, and what governing law and forum clauses sit in the operative contracts. Real estate transactions carry their own layer of sector-specific checks, distinct from the general screening question above.
Where the three lines intersect
A single matter frequently touches more than one line. A foreign investor acquiring a distressed Swedish counterparty is simultaneously a creditor question, a board question for the target's directors, and a structuring question for the buyer. Treating it as only one of the three tends to leave a gap in the other two.
What determines complexity
Complexity tracks three variables: the number of parties with a stake in the outcome, whether any party or asset sits outside Sweden, and how much of the relevant history is already documented in writing. A matter with one counterparty, one jurisdiction, and a clean paper trail is a different piece of work from one without any of those.
What to check before engaging counsel
- Whether the counterparty, asset, or parent entity involved sits inside or outside Sweden.
- Whether the underlying claim or decision is disputed or merely unpaid or undocumented.
- What written record already exists of the decision, demand, or transaction in question.
- Whether a deadline, filing window, or screening obligation is already running.
- Which of the three lines, creditor, board, or investor, the matter actually falls under.
Frequently asked questions
Which of the three practice lines applies when a claim and a governance question arise from the same transaction?
All three lines can apply to a single matter, and the correct starting point is whichever exposure is closest to becoming irreversible: a filing deadline for the creditor side, a board decision that has not yet been taken, or a structuring choice not yet signed. The matter is then worked as one file, not split across separate engagements.
Does the firm advise foreign investors specifically on real estate transactions in Sweden?
Real estate is one of the sectors where structuring, financing, and, in some cases, screening questions overlap most directly, and it is covered within the foreign investor line rather than as a separate practice. The mechanics differ from a general share or asset acquisition in ways that matter before signing, not after.
Is there a single point of contact across the three practice lines, or does each require a different adviser?
Matters that cross the three lines are worked by one team rather than handed between separate advisers, because the creditor, board, and structuring questions in a single transaction are rarely independent of each other. Where a matter is genuinely confined to one line, it is worked and staffed accordingly.
The numbers
None of the three lines has a fixed timeline that holds across matters, because the variables above, jurisdiction, documentation, and number of parties, move independently in each case. What can be said with confidence is what drives cost and duration up: a counterparty or asset outside Sweden, a decision with no contemporaneous documentation, and a dispute where the underlying facts, not just the legal characterisation, are contested. A matter with none of those three features is, as a rule, faster and cheaper to close than one with all three.
Where it usually goes wrong
Treating a creditor matter as purely a collections problem, without checking whether the debtor's position has already crossed into insolvency territory, is a common misstep; the available remedies and their sequencing change once that line is crossed. On the board side, the mistake is usually retrospective: documentation created after a decision has already produced a bad outcome carries far less weight than a contemporaneous record. On the investor side, the most frequent error is treating the screening question as a formality to confirm after signing rather than a classification to settle before it; unwinding a completed transaction is a materially harder problem than delaying signing by the time it takes to get the classification right.
This page does not replace a review of the specific contract, board minute, or transaction structure in question. It sets out how the three lines are organised and where they typically break down; the next step for an actual matter is a review of the documents themselves.
What to do next
Where a matter clearly sits in one of the three lines and the documentation exists to support a position, an assessment call is the next practical step: it establishes what the file currently supports, what is missing, and what the realistic range of outcomes looks like before further cost is committed. That conversation can be requested through the firm's contact page. For engagements already scoped by name rather than by practice line, the products index sets out what is available as a fixed-scope package.