Jurisdiction: SwitzerlandBasis: Art. 321 SCCEffective: May 2026
◆ Our promise
Protected from your first message.
Swiss professional secrecy is not a marketing phrase. It is one of the strongest legal privileges in the world — criminally enforced, judicially protected, and carried on the shoulders of every Swiss lawyer who speaks with you. It applies whether we ultimately take on your matter or not.
§ 01 The legal basis
Every qualified Swiss attorney — and, by extension, every member of our team acting under their supervision — is bound by professional secrecy under:
Article 321 of the Swiss Criminal Code (SCC) — breach of professional secrecy is a criminal offence punishable by custodial sentence or fine;
Article 13 of the Federal Act on the Freedom of Movement for Lawyers (BGFA) — lawyers are bound to absolute secrecy over everything entrusted to them in the exercise of their profession, without time limit;
The rules of professional conduct of the Swiss Bar Association (SBA/SAV);
Swiss procedural law — privileged material may not be seized by authorities; a lawyer cannot be compelled to testify on matters covered by secrecy.
§ 02 What this means in practice
From first message
Protection begins the moment you contact us — not when you sign, not when you pay.
No time limit
Secrecy has no expiry date. It survives the end of the mandate, the end of our firm, and your own lifetime.
No testimony
We cannot be compelled by a Swiss court or authority to disclose what you told us in confidence.
§ 03 Who inside Valken is bound
Every person who works on your matter is personally bound by secrecy:
Admitted attorneys — by Art. 321 SCC and the BGFA;
Auxiliary staff (assistants, paralegals, IT, accounting) — by Art. 321 SCC as "auxiliary persons" of the attorney, and by individual confidentiality undertakings;
Consortium lawyers in our 14-city network — each bound by their own local professional-secrecy regime and by a contractual confidentiality agreement with us.
§ 04 How we handle your communications
We treat the transport of information with the same care as its content:
Encrypted messaging (Signal, ProtonMail, encrypted email, encrypted video) is offered as a default option for every inquiry;
Swiss-hosted infrastructure for documents, case files and archives;
Full-disk encryption on all firm devices, with hardware security keys and strict access control;
Need-to-know access internally — files are opened only by the lawyer in charge and those they explicitly bring in;
Destruction of draft material and uncontracted-inquiry data on fixed retention schedules.
Swiss professional secrecy is strong, not absolute. The narrow and well-defined exceptions we must respect are:
Your consent — you may release us from secrecy, in whole or in part, for a specific purpose;
Statutory exceptions — a small number of Swiss statutes carve out specific situations (for example certain reporting duties under anti-money-laundering law);
Lifting procedure — in exceptional cases, a lawyer may apply to the competent supervisory authority to be released from secrecy. This is rare, formal, and never casual.
If any limit might apply to your situation, we tell you. We do not hide the edge of our protection — we point to it.
§ 06 Confidentiality vs. data protection
Professional secrecy is a stronger and narrower regime than general data-protection law. For the separate question of how we process your personal data (retention, rights, transfers, cookies), please see our Privacy Policy. In our hands, both regimes apply — and where they differ, the stricter of the two prevails.
§ 07 Contact
For any concern about how your information is being handled, write directly to the partner in charge of your matter, or to privacy@valken.ch. Every concern is read by a senior lawyer in person.