Mannheimer Swartling’s goal is to be the go-to law firm in the premium business law segment of our market. This requires us to constantly adapt our service to anticipate and meet our clients’ evolving needs. Our highly skilled people in Sweden and overseas are the reason we accomplish this and remain a leader in all fields of business law.

With clients located all over the world, operating in many different industries, our advice covers virtually every area of business law. Though our operations are spread over a global market, our clients always meet a close-knit team. Our unique profit-sharing business model ensures that skills and experience are freely shared and circulated between our people and on to each client.

The service we provide our clients is both broad and specific. Broad because we handle all areas of business law and we advise businesses of all kinds, across all industries and sectors. Specific because our lawyers are highly specialised and genuine class leaders in their respective fields. This combination means we can swiftly mobilise a team of experts with the capacity to handle every aspect of even the most difficult sector-specific issues.

Our clients face ever more complex challenges and opportunities and naturally demand that we have the ability to foresee and adapt to changing circumstances ourselves. This requires us to be more than just a legal adviser – but also a strategic partner with a deep understanding of each client’s business and the evolving environment in which it operates.

To meet our clients’ growing need for sophisticated advice in an increasingly complex world, we have strengthened our practice with the addition of a Senior Geopolitical Advisor and a Chief Sustainability Officer. Their expertise in geopolitics, sustainability, and strategic analysis complements our legal services. By integrating these perspectives into our advice, we can help our clients identify risks and opportunities at an early stage.

Key figures

  • 90 partners
  • 650 employees of which 480 are lawyers
  • 60% women and 40% men
  • 6 offices on 3 continents

Annual Publication 2025

Would you like to know more about us?

Mannheimer Swartling Annual Publication 2025 (link opens external website) includes information about the firm as well as interesting cases and events occurring during the year.

History of the firm

Mannheimer

Love Mannheimer and Tage Zetterlöf founded Mannheimer & Zetterlöf in 1943 in Gothenburg. The aim was to create a modern firm that could retain and mould its associates into successful partners. The firm established its first overseas office in 1971 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. An office was opened in Skåne, in the south of Sweden, in 1973 and foreign operations were expanded by opening offices in New York in 1983 and Frankfurt in 1989.

Swartling

In 1875, Ossian Wallin, a court of appeal clerk, founded a law firm which vice district court judge Erik Martin later joined as partner in 1884. The firm’s name changed over the years as partners came and went. By the 1950s, the firm went by the name Wetter & Swartling, and had become one of the larger business law firms in Stockholm. In 1951, the firm moved into Ivar Kreuger’s former offices in the famed Tändstickspalatset (“Matchstick Palace”), where it remained until 1996.

Wetter & Swartling parted ways in 1974 when father and son formed Wetter & Wetter and the remaining partners formed Carl Swartling Advokatbyrå. The firm opened overseas offices in New York in 1988 and Moscow in 1989.

The merger

Contact between Mannheimer & Zetterlöf and Carl Swartling Advokatbyrå was initially made back in 1977. The firms continued to develop a close working relationship, including joint training days, until 1990, when they formally merged.