Twenty Years Ahead of the Curve – and Now the World Is Catching Up
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Almost twenty years ago, I made a decision that many of my colleagues considered bold, even risky. I left a stable career at a well-known law firm and gave up my attorney’s title to become Co-Founder of a new kind of legal services company: Fondia. That decision meant I could no longer belong to the Finnish Bar Association. At the same time, it opened up the possibility to build a modern, growth-oriented and genuinely different legal business.
The freedom to build modern legal services
Today, Fondia is the first publicly listed law company in the Nordics and the Baltics, employing nearly 200 professionals and best known for its Legal Department as a Service (LDaaS) concept. The strategic choice we made early on, to stay outside the Bar Association, proved to be the right one. As a traditional law firm, we could never have gone public, since law firms can only be owned by attorneys themselves.
Operating outside the Bar Association has given us the freedom to learn from other industries, design services that truly meet our clients’ needs, attract external funding, and build a board of directors that brings independent expertise to support our growth.
Freedom to operate is a competitive advantage
When ownership is not restricted to attorneys, a company can take onboard strategic investors, for example, for the purposes of Legal Tech solutions and the use of AI. When board members don’t have to be attorneys, the strategic discussion becomes broader and richer. And just as an airline’s CEO doesn’t have to be a pilot, a law company’s CEO doesn’t have to be an attorney.
Some people ask whether customers are somehow less protected when working with law companies that operate outside the Bar Association. The short answer is: they are not.
Professional ethics and standards are at the heart of Fondia’s operations. The rights and obligations between a legal services company and its clients are clearly defined in engagement agreements, just like in any other professional services industry. In addition, we comply with the Bar rules and code of conduct in our daily operations. In Fondia’s 20-year history, there has not been a single case where a client’s interests were compromised because we are not members of the Bar Association.
The same transformation now reaches Sweden – twenty years later
In recent months, I’ve followed with great interest how this modern way of thinking has now reached Sweden. In August 2025, private equity firm Axcel announced the creation of a new legal services platform, AGRD Partners, by acquiring majority stakes in six Swedish law firms.
As part of the arrangement, the attorneys at these firms will resign from the Bar Association, allowing the new structure to open up for external investors. Axcel’s goal is to build a platform that combines legal expertise, technology and external business leadership. Much like Fondia in Finland, AGRD Partners is set to become one of Sweden’s largest legal service providers.
The era of law companies is only beginning
I warmly welcome AGRD Partners to our industry. This development says a lot about how our entire field is evolving. Where legal services were once a closed and traditional world, they are now opening up to capital, technology and multidisciplinary leadership. That is exactly the kind of thinking Fondia set out to promote twenty years ago.
Giving up the attorney’s title was difficult at the time, but it was the price of gaining the freedom to think differently and build a new kind of business for the legal world. Now, as I look around and see similar transformations taking place in Sweden and beyond, it feels clear that the era of law companies has only just begun.