Usually, changes in the appellate courts' business allocation plans hardly attract any attention.

Especially when the new Senate appointments fall in the middle of the summer vacation.

But the internal change of Jürgen Kühnen, who was still the presiding judge of the first civil senate at the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court until the end of July, caused a stir in the German antitrust scene.

Rupprecht Podszun, law professor at Heinrich Heine University and there director of the Institute for Antitrust Law, calls it the end of an era.

On his blog, which was well read by lawyers and economists, Podszun wrote a few days ago: "One of the most prominent cartel judges in the world, you can put it that way, so stop."

However, Kühnen does not completely turn his back on the judiciary in North Rhine-Westphalia.

From this week on, he took over the chairmanship of the third civil senate, at his own request, as the court says.

There, the 61-year-old lawyer has to deal with cases of voluntary jurisdiction, i.e. disputes about the estate and the land register.

With him, the antitrust law loses a formative and, from the point of view of some business lawyers, relentlessly direct voice.

In his 15 years as chairman, Kühnen never held back with his assessment, even when it went against federal authorities or grandees of politics.

Politics defied

The then Federal Minister of Economics Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) felt this in 2016.

Its ministerial approval for a merger of Edeka and Kaiser's Tengelmann slowed down the "Kühnen Senate".

Gabriel should not have made a decision about the grant because he had secret talks in the crucial phase of the procedure and failed to involve all those involved in the procedure, which is essential for a transparent, objective and fair procedure.

The bold last big case, the Facebook case, is currently up for a preliminary ruling at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. At the hearing in March 2021, Kühnen doubted that the Federal Cartel Office could give the internet company guidelines for collecting data. According to the chairman, the cartel office is not a data protection authority. His successor Jürgen Breiler then has to deal with this question at the interface between competition and data protection law and the legal implementation of the Luxembourg decision.