Of all the knock-on effects to flow from the corporate scandals in the US in the past year, an ethical renaissance in the Finnish legal market is certainly one of the lesser known.
The climate for debate on corporate social responsibility (CSR) had been hotting up anyway, with the release of the European Commission’s Green Paper on CSR last July. Then this summer came the anonymous publication on the web of the ‘Netbook’, which made allegations – since denied – of misdeeds at Finnish telecoms company Sonera. For Finnish lawyers, all of this sudden attention on professional standards boils down to one issue above all others – conflicts of interest.
