Wiersholm wins award at the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Europe Awards 2022

Wiersholm is delighted to announce that it has won an award at the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Europe Awards 2022 for the category "Innovation in overcoming barriers to finance" for the firm's work on Norway's first-of-a-kind full-scale carbon capture and storage chain (CCS) project.

The annual FT Innovative Lawyer Awards Europe celebrate law firms, clients, in-house legal teams and legal service providers who are passionate about driving innovation in the legal sector. The awards ceremony, held in London on 13 October, featured interviews and panel discussions featuring law firm leaders and legal practitioners from across Europe. This year’s awards received 428 submissions and nominations were received from 96 law firms and 34 in-house legal teams.

For Wiersholm’s award, we were given the highest score by the judging panel across the three categories of “Originality”, “Leadership” and “Innovation”, with “Leadership” receiving particularly strong recognition for our role in the CCS project.

The “Innovation in overcoming barriers to finance” award recognises the Wiersholm team, led by Sondre Dyrland, for its work assisting the Norwegian government (Ministry of Petroleum and Energy) and the Northern Lights joint venture (between Equinor, Shell and Total) on different elements of the renowned carbon capture and storage project “Longship”: “We are absolutely delighted and honoured to receive this award and see it as recognition of the innovative legal work it has required to realise this ground breaking project,” Dyrland commented upon receiving the FT Innovative Lawyers in person at the ceremony.

Longship is a full-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) project that will involve the capture of CO₂ from industrial sources, as well as transport and safe storage of CO₂, to be undertaken by Northern Lights. Phase one of the project will be operational in 2024 with a storage capacity of 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂ per year. For phase two of the development, the ambition is to expand capacity with another 3.5 million tonnes to meet the increasing market demand for these services in the coming years.

Sondre Dyrland and his team supported the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy in developing the concept and contractual framework for the world’s first complete value chain for commercial CCS, the Longship project, which was labelled by previous prime minister Erna Solberg as Norway’s largest ever industrial climate project. As legal advisors to the Northern Lights joint venture, the Wiersholm team has assisted in developing new contractual concepts, mechanisms and solutions for the commercial storage of CO₂.

Morten Goller, Managing Partner commented: “I am delighted that we have been recognised at such a prestigious awards event, that celebrates the best that the legal sector has to offer in terms of people and projects that are innovating in support of their clients. Innovation is at the heart of our culture at Wiersholm and this recognition is a reflection of our commitment to deliver innovative solutions to our clients. We are very proud of this achievement. Congratulations to Sondre, his team and all the teams involved!”

Wiersholm was the only Norwegian law firm to be shortlisted for FT Innovative Lawyers Europe Awards 2022.

Read more about the awards and the winners in The Financial Times. A brief summary of our award and the scoring behind it can be found in the FT Innovative Lawyers Europe Special Report.