By law, we mean business
Plesner's roots stretch back to 1918, and our firm - in its current form - was established at the beginning of the 00s through a series of mergers of leading Danish law firms. Our business is based on strong relationships. In 2018 we celebrated our 100th anniversary, and at the same time we celebrated 100 years of collaboration with one of our major Danish clients. This is the kind of relationship we go to work every day to earn.
Although we have deep roots and a long and solid history, we practice humility and never take our success for granted. At Plesner, the status quo does not exist.
Our approach is unconventional. Law is our field, but our business is about finding the optimal solution for each and every client. Our dedication is aimed at being the market leader in Denmark. This requires us to provide gifted advice based on honesty and integrity and with knowledge of ethical dilemmas and our clients' political and societal contexts.
For us, law is a means to a higher end, namely the client's business goals and the good of society. It's been that way since the beginning.
It is in Plesner's DNA to challenge the status quo. It has brought us to where we are today. We strive to maintain this position through continuous professionalisation, specialization and a strong "One Firm Mindset".
Above all, our company is built on trust. We earn your trust by caring about the way we work together and collaborate with our clients, partners and the community. In a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world, we want to promote the value of documentable facts and the personal responsibility for reason, honesty and truth. We do not challenge simply to change. We challenge to improve. Always. We do this because we want to show care and because our goal is to be exceptional together.
Read more about our values and how we work .
In addition to classic employment and labour law issues, we advise on employment law aspects relating to cross-border mergers and acquisitions, reorganisations, internal investigations, flexible employment relationships, collective redundancies, the terms of the executive boards, including incentive programmes, the conclusion and interpretation of collective agreements, and other industrial relations issues.
We advise international and Danish businesses, public authorities and institutions as well as CEOs. We often appear in court in cases concerning employment and labour law matters.
In order to always be able to provide the best possible solution to the client, our team provides advice in close collaboration with our experts within, inter alia, data protection, tax law, M&A, TMT and insolvency.
Our clients point out in particular our ability to put ourselves in their place and find solutions that create value for them. We aim at offering tailor-made, value-creating solutions that include both commercial, employment policy and human aspects. We provide both the solution to a problem and implement the solution in collaboration with the clients.
Our experience covers largely all sectors, and we also have extensive experience in advising clients in the public sector and semi-public sector - and in litigating before all relevant courts and instances.
We continue to expand our skills. Outsourcing, including outsourcing of facility management and IT services, is an example of an area in which we have provided advice to several clients and have built up valuable experience.
We advise listed groups, state-owned companies and small and medium-sized enterprises within a range of industries and across national borders. In addition to our ongoing corporate law advisory services, we also provide advice on M&A, restructurings, projects and legal proceedings etc in close collaboration with Plesner's other specialist departments.
A wealth of international, listed and state-owned clients come to us for solutions to large complex issues, and our Corporate Law team have thus gained experience from various high-profile cases (see Highlights).
We have an experienced and close-knit team with a dedicated team culture, which clients often highlight as being unique and characteristic of the team's integrated and solution-oriented advisory services. The team's most important criterion of success is that our corporate law advisory services create value for the client while also providing the client with a rewarding experience.
We always focus on creating a fine and result-oriented climate of cooperation, both in terms of clients and opposing parties. We attach great importance to classic virtues such as friendliness, courtesy and service-mindedness, reflected, for example, in our high degree of availability and uncompromising efficiency.
Unlike many of our competitors, our Corporate Law team have a long-standing and continuous relationship with a wide range of businesses in various industries such as energy and utilities, insurance and pension companies, automotive, industrial production, telecommunications and infrastructure, transport and public service, financial businesses, health care, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, foundations and associations, private equity as well as listed and state-owned companies in general.
We work closely with all relevant public authorities. In this way, we are always on top of new legislation and practice, and we are often able to ensure smooth case handling for the types of cases requiring authority involvement.
The assistance of our special Corporate Task Force (CTF) is available to our clients. The task force solves standard corporate law cases based on a fixed-price concept.
Thanks to the vast experience of our CTF, a client will be able to save both time and money without compromising on standards. CTF lends assistance with business formation, capital increases/reductions, winding-up and implementation of amendments to articles of association. The fee is calculated at a fixed price depending on the type of case.
CTF offers a Corporate Secretary subscription for a range of corporate law services at a fixed annual amount, including preparation for and holding of the annual general meeting, coordination with the auditor regarding the annual report for the Danish Business Authority, drawing up and filing of documents etc.
Our skills in the area are wide-ranging; from litigation in specialist areas such as accountants' professional liability, banking and finance, competition law, construction law, employment law, environmental law, insurance law, IP law, product liability, tax law and technology & outsourcing to legal actions in the rather more conventional area of contract law, including all types of mergers and acquisitions.
Our success in the area, and the resulting fundament of our business, is based on the philosophy that highly specialised litigators and dedicated commitment are required to conduct and win cases for our clients. And our overall objective is simply to win the case. It is what we do best and it is what we can do. And it is also how our clients would characterise us.
Plesner's entire set-up, with dispute resolution at the centre of our litigation, has been structured to give the most possible focus and dedication to the handling of cases.
We have acquired unique knowledge sharing and knowhow about all aspects of litigation and we are proud to say that we have extensive experience in litigation in all courts in Denmark and in all fields and have detailed knowledge of all procedural rules governing such cases.
We are known for being extremely focused on ensuring the right process through coordination and expectation-matching with all parties, guaranteeing a flexible project and transaction process and therefore a high completion rate. Accessibility is one of our hallmarks, and you will always witness our dedication and passion.
We invest time and interest in our clients and partners, acquiring detailed knowledge of the business of our clients as well as general market conditions. A natural link exists between capital markets and real property transactions, and, in collaboration with our partners and clients, we create new forms of ownership and cooperation that are enhanced by this link.
The cooperation between capital and competences plays a key role in both transaction and development cases. Very often, the ability to create interaction is what makes the difference between a completed transaction or development case, or the opposite.
We are specialists in ensuring operational and balanced complexities of agreements. Expectation-matching must support the commercial market in which the parties’ agreements are to be used in a project or transaction process.
Our clients often use us as the unifying adviser who coordinates and communicates the knowledge of all advisers, and paves the way for overall solutions for our clients.
In all cooperative relations, we ask for feedback proactively so that we can adjust our advisory services on an ongoing basis to meet the specific needs of our clients, and we thus develop in tandem with our clients and other partners.
We have worked intensively to extend our understanding of the completion of project development cases and to include all aspects of project development – everything from preparation of master plans and plans for utilities, through models of cooperation on share capital, mezzanine capital and senior loans, to forward funding and forward purchase models.
To us, both the negotiation and performance of the construction contract form an integral part of our advisory services as well as the subsequent sale of the developed property, be that to a long-term investor or as a sale of project homes.
Thanks to our targeted focus, we now have a deeper understanding than anyone else in the legal profession of how best and most efficiently to plan and complete development projects, and not least of how the agreements of the parties must be drafted to underpin expedient and commercially viable project development.
In the area of property transactions, we have specialised in serving national and international private equity funds in relation to the requirements applicable to corporate structure, tax structure, reporting, legal and commercial advice on the Danish market and not least – for foreign players – an introduction to the Danish property market.
We have in-depth knowledge of private equity fund structures and regularly advise both private equity funds and joint venture partners on fund structures and forms of remuneration.
Knowledge of the financing of private equity funds forms an integral part of our advisory services on funding in connection with transactions, and our advisory services range from business case discussions to ensuring that all matters in relation to the transaction have been covered.
Advising Danish institutional investors calls for detailed and embedded knowledge of regulatory requirements, irrespective of whether the institutional investor is engaged in fixed asset investments or project investments. We apply our knowledge and provide package solutions that work in practice.
In addition, we provide advisory services on the indirect investments that institutional investors make in Danish assets through, for instance, alternative financing products (derivatives, bonds, etc.) in the form of joint ventures or traditional loan financing.
Our focus on development and innovation has brought us unique and structured knowledge of the law of business leases, including market rent levels, drafting of agreements, possible types of agreements (concession, sale and lease back, etc) and project development leases. As part of this, we have built up our own database, which we use for both advisory services and litigation.
In particularly, we are advisers to major property and shopping centre owners and, in that connection, we complete complex cases involving market rent increases, which are essential in maintaining the value of the asset for the property owners.
The value of a property is not higher than the lease on the property. We tailor a lease to the project at hand, the purpose being to ensure that “a deal’s a deal” – meaning that it will stand up before the courts – and to ensure the return and the agreed rent, now and in the future.
We are up to date with developments in terms of both legal practice and drafting of agreements. Plesner has, in collaboration with the Danish Property Federation, drafted Denmark’s most frequently used business lease.
