I read an article years ago from a lawyer (might have been a judge) complaining that, thanks to US TV and movies, people in Sweden know more about how the US justice system works than the Swedish system. Far too many people just fall back on their US TV knowledge of how they think courts work and that they keep having to explain to the people that, no that's not how things works in Sweden.
IANAL but have taken some intro level course (that usually starts with don't think anything from American shows applies).
1: It's rooted in civil law so the written laws(and their precursor political discussions) are first considered, laws are thus fairly broadly written with specifications where needed. So precedents are mostly only used to disambiguate gray areas in terms of applicability or conflicts between laws. (but precedents rulings are in turn are meant to rely on the precursor political discussions before courts can take their own authority on any subject).
2: Intent is given significance, so 2 parties can enter into fairly "sloppily written" contracts that will be legally binding as long as the intent of the contract is clear, they're signed and doesn't violate any laws (there is law specifically targets obviously unfair contracts, but also other laws that regulate specific areas).
3: Criminal prosecution at the primary level is in front of 3 judges, one professional head judge with law degree that knows laws and 2 "laymen" to represent people in general (usually politically appointed to reflect the people via elections), no juries as the role those serve is handled by the laymen judges.
This means evidence such as hearsay or illegally obtained evidence is given the same consideration as real evidence. Resulting many times that the court can sentence an accused that everybody "knows" is guilty, and other times resulting in mind bogglingly insane verdicts.
Another big difference: No plea deals. Which is something very strange about the American justice system.
As for the mind-boggling verdicts those seem to more often stem from the politically appointed judges from the media reporting.
The plea deals part is interesting since it's been more frequently bought up to become legal in relation to combating the rising organized crime (but the perverse incentive problem seems to have kept those discussions from going further so far).
One serious question is how much precedent research is grounded in possible reality? The "unexpeced-precedent-that-throws-off-the-opposition" and "old-or-savant-legal-expert-who-knows-them-all" tropes in media seems to hinge on them being important, and reading legal rulings on business cases (like those historic ones regarding Nintendo and Sega copy protections or EFF ones) does seem to put some weight on them?
