Commercial lawyers support companies in making important decisions.

Some lawyers are also politically active and sit in state parliaments or in the Bundestag.

Despite this importance, there was no strong voice for this market segment among the 165,000 licensed lawyers throughout Germany.

That changed this week: 31 law firms from all over Germany founded the Federal Association of Commercial Law Firms in Germany (BWD) - and thus created their own structure apart from the German Lawyers' Association (DAV).

Marcus Young

Editor in Business.

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"We want to be the contact for politicians, on two levels: as an organisation, we position our issues, but as experts we also support legal policy and the judiciary of the federal states on important issues with our experience as commercial lawyers," says Stefan Rizor, spokesman for the BWD.

Cover all office types

The first exchange between the law firms has been taking place since autumn 2021, led by the initiators Rizor and Thomas Wegerich, lawyer and publisher from Frankfurt.

"Back then, we made sure that we were able to map all the business models that exist in the law firm market in Germany and that we had them at the table," explains Wegerich, who acts as deputy spokesman for the BWD.

The nine-person board also includes three experienced lawyers.

Among them is Ines Zenke, partner of Becker Büttner Held, the incumbent President of the SPD Economic Forum.

According to the BWD, the founding law firms have 17,000 employees, including almost 4,900 lawyers, who together generate sales of more than 2.1 billion euros a year.

The statutes, which are exclusively available to Faz.net in advance, result in a wide range of partnerships.

With CMS Hasche Sigle, Luther, Taylor Wessing and Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek, four of the most staffed commercial law firms have joined the new association.

Well-known multidisciplinary units such as Warth & Klein Grant Thornton, Rödl and Ebner Stolz are also represented, as well as large law firms specializing in insurance and energy law as well as units with a regional focus.

Law firms do not feel represented

The motives for establishing another umbrella organization for lawyers in addition to the Federal Chamber of Lawyers, the DAV and the Federal Association of Corporate Lawyers are manifold.

So far, the DAV only allows individual memberships, but not the accession of entire law firms.

Accordingly, his offer is aimed at all lawyers in Germany.

The business lawyers segment, which accounts for between 15 and 20 percent of all licensed lawyers, has repeatedly advocated modernizing the job profile in the past.

For example in connection with the special electronic mailbox for lawyers.

It is mandatory for all lawyers to use it to communicate with the courts.

Large commercial law firms see this as a disadvantage because joint use is possible and this results in additional work.

Another topical issue in which the BWD wants to get involved is the high burden on civil justice caused by mass proceedings.

Here in particular, commercial law firms, which are often active on behalf of companies on the side of the defendant, see added value for the dialogue with politics and the judiciary through their experience.

“The difference to the other law firms is the form of the clients.

Commercial law firms primarily work for companies and entrepreneurs,” explains Rizor, who was the managing partner of Osborne Clarke in Germany for many years.

Agile project groups

A feature of the BWD should be the work in "Task Forces", which are in close contact with other bodies of well-known legal scholars and company lawyers.

In contrast to other associations, these project groups should even be dissolved in the future when the content-related debates have yielded results.

“We will work on individual topics that we have previously defined together with our member law firms as important for everyone.

For example: cyber security, digitization, third-party ownership, money laundering, diversity, new work, to name just a few examples,” says Wegerich.

These are issues for which no law firm has found the right solution on its own.

"These are the issues in which the BWD will bring about solutions for everyone."

The founding members emphasize that their initiative does not represent a confrontation with the DAV.

Several lawyers have already declared in messages on social networks that they will continue to be members of the regional bar associations.

Bastian Finkel and Joachim Grote from the largest German insurance law boutique BLD Bach Langheid Dallmayr from Cologne said on LinkedIn that they were happy that the DAV looked after professional interests.

“But we are also managing partners of a commercial law firm.

There we have to consider other and more far-reaching interests.

That is why we are happy to be a founding member of the Federal Association of Commercial Law Firms in Germany.”

The DAV, which is significantly larger with 60,000 members, announced just a few days ago that it would set up a special forum for greater exchange between commercial law firms.

The DAV wants to announce further details at an event in the coming week.