Litigation & Arbitration

Our lawyers are experienced litigators and represent clients before all German courts. You are also in good hands regarding  cross-border legal disputes, if necessary in cooperation with a partner law firm from our networks, inbound and outbound. Arbitration proceedings, whether national or international, ad-hoc or institutional, differ considerably from legal proceedings before a state court. Leave nothing to chance and trust our experience.

National litigation

The successful procedural enforcement if claims as well as the defence against claims in court is one of our core competences. Success in complex issues requires an individual strategy tailored to the case, which we will develop together with you.

Cross-border litigation

We cooperate with excellent mid-sized law firms in all major jurisdictions in Europe, the USA, Canada and across the world. Together with our experienced local partners, we assist domestic companies in legal disputes abroad, not only in common law jurisdictions, and can thus help to avoid cultural misconceptions and misunderstandings among all parties involved at an early stage. Likewise, we can provide valuable service to foreign companies that have to either enforce or defend claims in German courts.

Arbitration

Arbitration clauses are more and more common in complex or larger national projects, e.g. in the plant construction sector and in M&A transactions, as well as in the medical sector (practice acquisitions etc.). In international projects arbitration clauses are the usual standard anyway. Arbitration proceedings have a number of special characteristics compared to state court proceedings. In many aspects, they are more flexible than national procedural rules. However, this flexibility requires that many issues are considered and regulated at an early stage, because the major institutional sets of international arbitration rules provide much less details compared to national procedural codes.

These differences have to be addressed in particular if there are links to a common law jurisdiction, as common law and civil law jurisdictions provide for substantially different concepts as to the conduct of civil litigation in general and as to the available instruments in particular, e.g. the organization of taking of evidence and the availability of pre-trial discovery. We are familiar with the most common international arbitration rules and their particularities.