Rive Legal Agency offers legal assistance to people who have had problems with their employer.

Victims often say that they were fired on the wrong basis.

But instead of getting help during a difficult time in life, hundreds of Rive clients have ended up in disputes with the lawyers they hired.

Plusredaktionen, which has long reviewed the law firm, has since 2019 received over a hundred tips from desperate customers about the firm, which is described by a municipal consumer advisor as "infamous in consumer Sweden".

The company is also well known at the Swedish Consumer Agency.

- No other law firm or law firm has received nearly as many reports as Rive, says Daniel Eliasson, lawyer at the Swedish Consumer Agency.

Unclear pricing

The vast majority of client stories are about not feeling that they have received sufficiently clear price information, and Plus has previously reported on how the firm paid for the lawyers' private plan trips, without clearly informing the clients about this in advance.

In 2020, the Patent and Market Court banned the company from demanding payment for travel in this way.

The agency was also banned from continuing with its unclear price information.

The agency states that it has taken on board the criticism and that all customers now receive clear price information both orally and in writing before the assignment begins.

Customers are also given a written price guarantee.

Suitable for their own customers

But despite that, the company has continued to dispute price with its clients at an increasing rate.

This year alone, the district courts have registered at least 32 lawsuits, and since the agency's start in 2012, at least 110 customers have been sued.

Disputes are often about customers being shocked by invoices of up to SEK 50,000 shortly after the first contact.

- Just like for all companies, there are clients who neither want nor can pay.

We as lawyers are probably in practice easier to use the legal remedies provided by the state, Rive's lawyer Henric Einarsson told Plus 2019.

The law firm has repeatedly neglected to compensate its customers when the General Complaints Board recommended this.

This is despite the fact that the authority exists to resolve consumer disputes free of charge so that the matter does not have to go to court.