Circular Subscriptions

Contents

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This paper takes the form of an internal memorandum from in-house counsel and examines the lawyer's role at the stage that precedes a conflict – when the law is not yet being applied but shaped. Taking as its starting point a concrete matter in which a customer spent three months and close to 60 contacts trying to cancel a mobile subscription, it analyses how a company's seemingly neutral procedures can, taken together, form a systematic pattern of obstructed cancellation. The aim is not only to map the legal risk, but to show how in-house counsel moves between legal analysis, business strategy and a broader responsibility to society.

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The analysis is structured in two stages. First, a legal and commercial risk assessment, in which six categories of potentially problematic conduct – from the steering of communications and artificial power-of-attorney and contractual requirements to incorrect billing, creditor's delay and unfounded debt-collection claims – are tested against contract law, consumer law and marketing law, and in which the consequences are traced all the way from the district court to precedent, regulatory supervision, publicity and legislation. This is followed by a theoretical reflection which, drawing on Glavå and Petrusson on the lawyer's role and Martinson on Nordic legal pragmatism, places the analysis in a broader methodological context.

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The contribution of the text lies in a simple but uncomfortable observation. When the legislature has closed the transparent route to steering cancellations – no fee may be charged and number porting must be free of charge – the friction does not disappear, but is shifted from a visible price to a hidden administrative burden that is harder for both the consumer and the supervisory authority to get at. The cancellation matter thereby becomes a concrete example of the shifted transaction costs Martinson describes, and the question of in-house counsel's responsibility is brought to a head: not how the company can get away with it, but how it positions itself in a way that is lawful, legitimate and sustainable in the long term. The work thus positions in-house counsel at stage 1 as the company's moral and ethical compass rather than as its defender.