Leif Silbersky is dead – became Sweden’s most famous lawyer

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He was quick in thought and sharp in tongue.

Leif Silbersky created the modern lawyer role – and became the most well-known himself.

For over 60 years he stood up in the courtroom – fearless and always ready to defend the little man.

And murderers, robbers and criminals of all kinds.

Now he is dead, 86 years old.

Leif Silbersky became without a doubt the most famous Swedish lawyer of all time.

Possibly with competition from the then star lawyer Henning Sjöström, with whom he himself began his career, as a newly minted lawyer.

In time, everyone wanted him on their side in the courtroom; such as the Hagaman in Umeå, the double murderer Anders Eklund, the Gällivare murderer Toni Alldén, the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and one of the defendants for the discotheque fire in Gothenburg.

He was involved in the Trustor scandal and the Fermenta affair.

Leif Silbersky became the lawyer on everyone’s lips.

The Scanian, the bushy eyebrows, the brown squinting eyes and the unfailing sharpness of his head and voice made him a legend in Legal Sweden.

To one of the very greatest, yes, perhaps the greatest of them all.

Went out to the media

It all started with the neurosedyn scandal in the early 1960s, just when Leif Silbersky had obtained his bachelor’s degree in law in Stockholm.

Astra’s sleeping pills, which were taken by many pregnant women, led to severely deformed children – and Leif Silbersky and Henning Sjöström pushed for their right to compensation.

And they didn’t just do it in the courtroom – they did it in newspapers and on television and it was something completely new.

They called a press conference and showed the malformed children – a tactic that could not be defended against.

But not everyone liked what they were doing.

How were their stomachs?

The Bar Association refused to give him the bar title in 1967 – he had appeared too much in the media.

As proof of this, the association cited a picture from a weekly newspaper, with Leif Silbersky in a white tuxedo at a boxing gala, where his client, the then well-known boxer Bosse Högberg, was to be boxed.

But the Bar Association had to crawl to the cross – Leif Silbersky appealed their refusal to the Supreme Court, which of course ruled in his favor.

“Convinced everyone”

Leif Silbersky helped shape a new kind of lawyer’s role, which also made him a role model for those who came after.

– He and Henning Sjöström created the modern lawyer who fought for his clients in a completely different way. They were unique for their time and probably had to face quite a lot of resistance, says the lawyer Johan Eriksson Today’s Law.

– He was in many ways an absolutely outstanding lawyer. He had a power of persuasion that outshone everything else. He persuaded the court, the prosecutors and the witnesses to agree with him, says lawyer Per E Samuelsson in the same article.

Leif Silbersky maintained his good relationship with the press throughout his life.

He was always available for interviews and took every opportunity to make his voice heard, if it benefited his client.

He liked to be seen himself as well and appeared in entertainment shows, in TV series and movies.

Leif Silbersky was the hard-boiled lawyer – but with a tender and humble inside, which made him very popular both as a lawyer and as a person.

I saw him many times in the courtroom, but in 1992 I also interviewed him for a different reason – in connection with his book “Och tiend den stod stilla”, where he and his wife Rita spoke openly about their joint fight against cancer.

Suffered from cancer

Two years earlier, his wife Rita had suffered from breast cancer.

When she began to feel strong again came the next killing blow:

Her husband had cancer.

He had suffered from the worst form of cancer in the lymph nodes, non-Hodgkin’s disease.

He received the message on the phone an hour before he was to stand in the Court of Appeal and defend a client.

Alone in a toilet, the rock-hard star lawyer Leif Silbersky sat crying in despair.

The chemotherapy treatments were tough.

– I woke up one morning and had no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no nose hair – I was completely unprepared for that, said Leif Silbersky.

Wanted to take his life

It was just a matter of putting on the wig – and together with his wife Rita, he kept the show up.

Went to dinners and the theater and worked on as usual, with several big falls.

But, at his worst, he contemplated suicide.

Several times.

– The job helped me. Without the job, I wouldn’t have managed, I wouldn’t be sitting here today, he said afterwards.

The job and the family – that’s what kept him up.

And he and Rita got through it all – together. Stronger than before.

But the rock-hard star lawyer was no longer so rock-hard.

– Before I was never moved, but now I will be. You go through hell – and come out a better person.

The big mistake

The book “Och tiend den stod stilla” was written by Leif Silbersky together with his good friend, the author Olov Svedelid.

Together they also wrote a long series of trial novels about the Jewish lawyer Samuel Rosenbaum. There were 22 books. The last one, “Revenge is never fair”, came in 2006, two years before

Olov Svedelid died.

Leif Silbersky himself continued to work until he was 83 years old – a favor he was extremely grateful for.

His greatest strength as a custody lawyer was – according to himself – his interrogation and pleading technique. There he was almost invincible.

One of the cases that touched him very much was when he defended Anders Eklund, who murdered ten-year-old Engla in Stjärnsund in Dalarna in 2008.

In his closing argument, Leif Silbersky made a mistake that would haunt him afterward.

– I quoted Stig Dagerman’s “To kill a child”. But his story takes into account a car accident while what I was defending was the apparent murder of a little girl. That error has haunted me, said Leif Silbersky in a large interview in Aftonbladet in 2023.

Leif Silbersky is mourned most closely by Rita, his wife of 62 years, children Eva and Thomas and his six grandchildren.