Dr Lukas Morscher > Lenz & Staehelin > Zurich, Switzerland > Lawyer Profile

Lenz & Staehelin impresses with the breadth of its practice. The team is well versed in advising Swiss and foreign companies on how to comply with data privacy and security regulatory obligations, and to develop practical cross-border data transfer solutions. Other areas of expertise are cross-border data privacy surveys, setting up new ventures, and designing, drafting, reviewing and updating general corporate group and HR policies. Professional and banking secrecy, privilege and related areas of confidentiality obligations area also handled. The key practitioners are employment specialist Rayan Houdrouge, TMT practitioner Guy Vermeil, outsourcing expert Lukas Morscher and Jürg Simon who also covers IP and competition law.

Lenz & Staehelin acts for start-ups, established technology companies, investors and financial institutions on all legal issues regarding fintech. Clients appreciate that the unit is ‘well connected in the industry and within authorities‘ as the team is regularly active in FINMA authorisation and non-action matters as well as regulatory and compliance issues. Typical types of fintech projects which the ‘outstanding‘ team advises on concern distributed ledger technology, crypto finance, digital assets, tokenisations, robo-advisors and crowd-funding, among others. Fedor Poskriakov is ‘very knowledgeable about fintech matters‘ and heads the team together with Marcel Tranchet and Lukas Morscher.

Lenz & Staehelin offers ‘seamless service of a very high quality‘ to its broad range of insurance and reinsurance clients, including established multinational life and non-life insurers and reinsurers as well as start-ups, intermediaries, financial institutions, capital providers and regulators. The team headed by co-heads Olivier Stahler and Lukas Morscher gives regulatory, transactional and commercial advice and represents clients in claims regarding, among others, coverage disputes. A speciality of the unit are re-domiciliations and restructurings of insurance market participants as well as advice regarding run-offs. Insurance policies law and portfolio transfers are other areas of strength.

The TMT practice of Lenz & Staehelin offers a wide range of transactional and regulatory advice, with clients including national and international telecommunication enterprises, broadcasters and regulated entities such as banks, insurance companies, securities dealers and audit firms. The firm has a particularly strong track record of advising on technology transactions and outsourcing arrangements, a specialism of practice heads Guy Vermeil and Lukas Morscher, with the the latter being cited as ‘one of the best IT lawyers on the market‘. The ‘outstanding team‘ is further adept at representing clients before regulatory authorities.

Lenz & Staehelin has a good reputation for its full-service offering and is noted in particular for its services in the areas of dispute resolution, corporate and M&A, and banking and finance with further areas of expertise in intellectual property, TMT and competition law. Key figures of note are banking and finance experts Marcel Tranchet and Patrick Hünerwadel, capital markets-focused Patrick Schleiffer, corporate M&A specialist Lukas Morscher and litigation and arbitration specialist Harold Frey. Other key contacts are Tanja Luginbühl for insolvency and restructuring matters, Heini Rüdisühli for private client matters, Jürg Simon for intellectual property advice and Marcel Meinhardt for competition law expertise.