How the dust settles – Germany’s profession is forever changed but singular still

More than a decade after international law firms reshaped the market, Germany’s singular economy and culture is still refusing to simply conform to foreign notions. Legal Business reports.

Over the last 15 years, the German legal profession has obtained the dubious honour of being one of the most fractious major markets in the world. Today, both domestic and international law firms are still trying to come to terms with the inimitable characteristics of the economy and legal market. For many, the correct strategy is still a mystery.

The principal challenges centre on breadth of service, geographic coverage and the traditional point of tension: leverage. Germans still love to have just one or two associates to every partner.

In addition, big firms have multiple offices throughout Germany to account for the de-centralised nature of the national economy. It requires commitment and tight management, a concept that German lawyers have been resistant to in comparison to UK and US advisers.

Further still, Germany’s huge number of prominent Mittelstand – the private, often family-founded companies that remain the backbone of Europe’s largest economy – typically have small or non-existent legal departments. Unlike bluechip clients in many countries, they often want a broader, more generalist service than the corporate finance machines forged in London or New York.

Still, the country has come a huge distance in 25 years. The reunification of Germany in 1990 following the fall of the Berlin Wall, came at a time when the legal market was in the midst of de-regulation. Until that point, firms were prevented from having offices in more than one city. But just as the Germans shook off the regulatory shackles, they faced the globalisation phenomenon. Big UK and US firms moved in through mergers or by luring high-profile talent and the German legal market faced yet more tumultuous change. It has not created the most benign of atmospheres and still firms are dealing with the fallout.

Markus Hartung is the former managing partner of Linklaters in Germany and is now director of the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession, which provides consultancy services to law firms. He says that firms in Germany are still trying to catch up with other established legal markets: ‘We had to accept that as a consequence of the regulation of German law firms until 1989, it prohibited us from growing and going international. We were very much behind. Now the discussion is around whether to adopt alternative business structures (ABSs) and we find the same argument. If we do not allow ABSs and alternative financing and measures for law firms, then other jurisdictions will eat our lunch.’

Hartung says that ABSs are unlikely to be adopted in the near future, because firms are still battling on a number of fronts, not least the issue of optimum size and geographic spread.

Take Anglo-German heavyweight Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. The global firm has three offices in China and two offices in the US, but is present in six cities in Germany.

Even so, the German practice is considerably slimmer than it was in 2000 after the merger between top-tier German practice Bruckhaus Westrick Heller Löber and Freshfields. Then it had 180 partners but now, according to Hamburg-based regional managing partner for Germany and Austria Klaus-Stefan Hohenstatt, it has just 135 partners in the two jurisdictions. Growth has remained off the menu for most major Anglo-German mergers. Firms such as Clifford Chance (CC) and Linklaters have cut their numbers substantially and closed offices such as those in Berlin and Cologne. Anglo-German relations have often been tense.

Geographic conundrum

Much of the friction lies in the singular nature of Germany’s economy. It has no dominant commercial and financial centre in the same way that London and Paris are for the UK and France respectively. Frankfurt is the recognised financial hub, but other than Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Börse, there are no other DAX 30 members headquartered in the city (see DAX 30 headquarters box, page 90).

Many are located in more provincial cities and towns. Volkswagen, for instance, is headquartered in Wolfsburg, a city that sits between Berlin and Hanover, and has just over 123,000 residents.

As yet, no elite firm in Germany has successfully operated with less than three offices. Freshfields has six offices, one for each city where it is present, while Germany’s largest firm, CMS Hasche Sigle, is present in nine cities.

This takes some dedication, but one could argue that it is still not enough.

Native practice Luther has 11 German offices and managing partner Hans-Georg Hahn says that the value of many provincial offices should not be underestimated. He is located in Hanover, a city with just over half a million residents and few major law firms. Yet it retains an international business environment. ‘The city is not the centre of the world. It’s only a small office, but here we worked for clients in 24 jurisdictions last year,’ he remarks.

Hanover may be far from being Germany’s primary legal centre, but neither are firms able to simply base themselves in the geographically central city of Frankfurt, for instance.

Leading German independent Noerr has a longstanding presence in Munich, and Berlin partner Alexander Ritvay says that the firm has witnessed a major onslaught of international firms moving into the city in the 2000s as well as leading German firms such as Hengeler Mueller and Gleiss Lutz. Munich is home to a number of DAX 30 corporates such as Allianz, Siemens, BMW and Linde, as well as a series of prominent private equity houses. ‘There is still a pretty strong decentralised or federal element here and it makes sense to be on the ground in different locations, unless you focus on, say, capital markets, for which Frankfurt is the main place of action,’ Ritvay argues.

Düsseldorf is another city that has attracted major legal players, but increasingly at the expense of its rival neighbour Cologne. Linklaters ditched its Cologne branch and launched an office further up the Rhine in Düsseldorf in 2007. The firm audaciously hired eminent Düsseldorf partners Ralph Wollburg and Achim Kirchfeld from Freshfields and relocated a team of 12 partners from Cologne.

From a business perspective, Düsseldorf has clearly taken the lead. Christoph Küppers, Hogan Lovells’ regional managing partner for continental Europe, is a Cologne resident but undertakes a four-hour round trip to Hogan Lovells’ Düsseldorf arm by car on most days – he arranges conference calls while in the car to optimise his working day. He says that while his heart remains in Cologne, his professional mind is very much located in Düsseldorf.

‘Cologne is a multicultural and inspiring environment where you feel very fortunate to be living there but there has been a decline in advisory business there, which started with the accounting firms growing their operations in Düsseldorf rather than in Cologne. Düsseldorf has transformed itself from a coal and steel industrial location complementary to the Rhine-Ruhr area factories into a significant advisory and business centre in its own right,’ he explains.

Despite this, Freshfields retains a sizeable Cologne office. Hohenstatt admits that there is no compelling reason on paper to maintain a Cologne branch, but the firm’s office survives due to its impressive results. ‘We have six offices in Germany. I wouldn’t say that it is an absolute must to have so many offices in order to be successful here, but at the same time with the depth of client relationships in Germany and with the decentralised structure of Germany’s economy, it would be a mistake to reduce the number of offices as a matter of principle. Being just in Frankfurt is not enough. In order to serve bluechip clients, Düsseldorf is absolutely key, and Berlin is the ideal place for our regulatory business. Our Munich, Hamburg and Cologne offices are – apart from their attractive client structure – hugely important places for recruitment,’ he remarks.

Even so, Berlin, for many, has not lived up to expectations. On the reunification of Germany in 1990, Berlin once again became its capital and there was much conjecture as to its future significance as a commercial and legal centre. Despite being Germany’s largest city by some distance with nearly 3.5 million residents, it is not home to major corporate and financial activity. None of the DAX 30 are based there.

CC chose to close its Berlin office in 2004 and Hogan Lovells is ambivalent about whether to re-establish a presence there following the exodus this year of its Berlin team to launch Morrison & Foerster (MoFo)’s first office in Germany. While that team is understood to have been profitable, Küppers says that Berlin represented less than 10% of German revenues.

Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF), which launched new offices in Berlin and Frankfurt earlier this year after ending its alliance with Gleiss Lutz in 2011, is still convinced by the importance of the German capital. Patrick Mitchell, HSF’s joint global head of corporate, comments: ‘Frankfurt is clearly the most important market for lawyers but at the same time it is the most competitive one. Berlin is a very attractive market for talent, as well as regulated industry and government affairs work.’ Berlin is of course home to the German parliament, the Bundestag, but it also has a thriving start-up and emerging company sector with close links to Silicon Valley and other key growth company centres.

It explains MoFo’s interest. The US technology-focused firm’s only European offices until the launch of Berlin, were London and Brussels. In contrast it has put considerably more time and resources into building out its Asia presence. MoFo chair Larren Nashelsky says that the firm deliberately bided its time: ‘There was a real frenzy going into Germany in the past. We watched it closely and thought long and hard, but the market was too frothy and there were deals being done that didn’t make sense to us. This opportunity is indicative of a firm that has a strategy and knows what it wants and is able to move quickly when an opportunity presents itself.’

Following the launch of the Berlin office, he is not so sure that firms still need to have multiple German offices to be credible. He says: ‘I sense that is changing in Germany. It was that way and clearly there are still practices that are dominant in certain cities in Germany, but I get the sense that is slowly changing due to sheer business economics and at a more macro level, the world is getting smaller.’

Christoph Wagner, who is the biggest name to join MoFo in Berlin, is not convinced that location plays such a significant role as it used to. ‘If you look from New York or London and you want to invest into a particular region, you want the best team to do the job. It is not necessarily a team where the target is based. It is certainly not the case for high-profile work,’ he says. By way of illustration, Wagner highlighted his previous representation of News Corp on its acquisition of Munich-based Premiere.

The Legal 500 recommended firms

Firm	Total recommendations 2014
CMS	32
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer	31
White & Case	30
Hogan Lovells International	29
Clifford Chance	28
Gleiss Lutz	26
Noerr	26
Hengeler Mueller	25
Baker & McKenzie	24
Linklaters	23
Allen & Overy	22
Taylor Wessing	22
Latham & Watkins	21
DLA Piper	18
Luther	18
Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek	17
Norton Rose Fulbright	17
Jones Day	16
Bird & Bird	15
McDermott Will & Emery	15

Firm	Firm Top-tier recommendations 2014
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer	22
Linklaters	9
Hengeler Mueller	9
Clifford Chance	9
CMS	7
Gleiss Lutz	5
Noerr	4
Hogan Lovells International	4
Arnecke Siebold	2
Flick Gocke Schaumburg	2
Heymann & Partner	2
K&L Gates	2
King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin	2
Bird & Bird	2
Allen & Overy	2
Dr Günter Dörr & Partner	2
Feigen · Graf	2
Sullivan & Cromwell	2

Following the Mittelstand

Even with DAX 30 companies spread across Germany, this does not take into account the much-celebrated Mittelstand segment of the economy, a sector that often operates from even more provincial locations.

Though often referred to as small-to-medium sized companies, many are considerably larger with revenues of billions of euros. Companies such as Bosch – the private industrial conglomerate – are credited with making Germany’s economy such a powerful force in the world. Bosch is headquartered in Stuttgart, where the family-owned Porsche is also located.

Hahn says Luther’s largest Mittelstand client has a turnover of over €6bn and that the value of these businesses should not be underestimated: ‘Many Mittelstand companies have balance sheets that exceed €1bn and their businesses are international. It shows the strength of the German economy as an export world champion.’

The Mittelstand represent such an attractive segment for the legal market because, while they may be substantial and often international businesses, they typically have small or non-existent in-house legal departments.

This flourishing segment of the economy has been vital to native German firms that may not be the first port-of-call for the major publicly listed brands. Christian Pothe, the managing director of Buse Heberer Fromm, a firm with six German offices, says that Mittelstand companies like to have their legal advisers on the doorstep. ‘I believe that about 80% of our turnover comes from Mittelstand companies. They need a sounding board to discuss matters even if they are not legally related. This is often connected to the companies being family-owned and under a different structure,’ he remarks.

Mathias Schröder, a Munich partner at Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek, the 12th largest firm in Germany by revenues according to legal publisher Juve, says that the Mittelstand is the ‘backbone’ of its business. As a result, the firm has seven offices throughout Germany, including Chemnitz, a city of under 250,000 residents in former East Germany.

These sentiments are not just held by domestic firms. Major international firms are also aware that there is life beyond the DAX 30. Freshfields’ Hohenstatt says: ‘This is a very interesting playing field because they don’t have huge internal law departments. They like to have trusted legal advisers and value long-term relationships with law firms.’

German M&A – three-year view by value

Rank	House	Value (€m)	Deal count
1	Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer	102,628	211
2	Hengeler Mueller	85,102	125
3	Linklaters	57,012	112
4	Sullivan & Cromwell	51,700	20
5	Clifford Chance	51,455	149
6	Shearman & Sterling	50,817	31
7	Allen & Overy	48,192	90
8	Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton	48,069	25
9	Simpson Thacher & Bartlett	33,952	13
10	Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz	33,578	2
11	Wiley Rein	33,578	2
12	Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson	31,869	8
13	CMS	31,600	215
14	Hogan Lovells	27,921	76
15	White & Case	26,914	77
16	Latham & Watkins	25,541	80
17	Baker & McKenzie	24,931	82
18	P+P Pöllath + Partners	22,088	100
19	Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy	19,576	26
20	Noerr	19,247	104
Source: mergermarket

Native growth

The success of the Mittelstand in driving the German economy forward after the global financial crisis has enabled native firms to adopt a relatively bullish strategy. Leading German practice Noerr achieved revenue growth in Germany of 6.8% in 2012 with a total turnover of €135m. Global revenues have grown by 50% since 2007. ‘We are gaining market share,’ Ritvay claims, also suggesting that even big publicly-listed German corporates are starting to instruct domestic firms on a more regular basis.

He admits that bluechip German clients were attracted by the arrival of international firms in 2000 and thereafter, but argues that this love affair is starting to lose its passion, or at least its exclusivity. ‘There are big DAX 30 companies for which we are now on their international panel and doing international transactions. Five or six years ago, they would have always turned to an international law firm,’ he says.

Hartung observes that local independent firms have made advances thanks to the huge restructuring initiatives that the big international firms have conducted in Germany. ‘If you go back ten or 13 years and look at the big mergers involving Clifford Chance, Freshfields and Linklaters; they started with a large German full-service oriented practice and have later refocused themselves,’ he explains. ‘The second and third-tier firms are now growing because of the clients and business that was left behind.’

Cologne-based Oppenhoff & Partner, which split from Linklaters in 2008, reflects this trend. Michael Oppenhoff, the senior partner, says that international firms have narrowed their sights on transactional work and either terminated other practice areas or made them mere support functions. ‘This is quite contrary to what we were used to in the Cologne office where we have always had a broad offering in all major areas,’ he explains. Oppenhoff adds that with many German clients not having large in-house legal departments, they prefer to work with a firm that can handle all their legal requirements.

This is, of course, an interesting divergence from the UK, where in-house legal departments have grown dramatically over the last 15 years and consequently started to undertake large amounts of work which was once sent to law firms.

Luther’s Hahn says: ‘Nearly one third of our clients are asking for services from three, four, five or six service lines. It shows a need for our kind of service offering.’

Hartung expects these second and third tier firms to continue their growth over the next two or three years, but warns that they will eventually be compelled to think seriously about their internal structures and processes, because ‘price pressure will not go away’.

German M&A – three-year view by deal count

Rank	House	Value (€m)	Deal count
1	CMS	31,600	215
2	Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer	102,628	211
3	Clifford Chance	51,455	149
4	Hengeler Mueller	85,102	125
5	Linklaters	57,012	112
6	Noerr	19,247	104
7	P+P Pöllath + Partners	22,088	100
8	Allen & Overy	48,192	90
9	Baker & McKenzie	24,931	82
10	Latham & Watkins	25,541	80
11	DLA Piper	4,656	80
12	White & Case	26,914	77
13	Hogan Lovells	27,921	76
14	Luther	2,035	70
15	Jones Day	10,832	65
16	SJ Berwin	2,911	54
17	Gleiss Lutz	13,888	50
18	Taylor Wessing	5,949	43
19	Norton Rose Fulbright	9,231	40
20	Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom	11,932	39
Source: mergermarket

Unique characteristics

Pressures have been commonplace over the last 25 years. After the de-regulation of the legal market in 1989, German firms worked hard to nationalise and internationalise in the 1990s and 2000s, but there have been many reverses.

Despite being a mature and major element of Germany’s globally-potent economy, the legal profession is still out of step with the larger and more internationally-minded US and UK markets.

More than a decade since Anglo-Saxon firms swept into the market and arguably became the dominant force in corporate law, there remains huge resistance to the shifts in the profession seen in London and New York.

Many firms, including pre-eminent domestic practice Hengeler Mueller, still operate a low ratio of associates to each partner. For many it remains one to one, because German clients prefer partner attention and aren’t used to their mandates being delegated to huge armies of associates that rack up hours of billable time. ‘There are fewer associates per partner in the German tradition and the clients like this,’ comments Marcus Baum, a partner at Stuttgart practice Kuhn Carl Norden Baum.

Mergers with international firms have also proven fraught, partly due to cultural distance but also because of the abiding gulf in profitability expectations. Küppers says that Lovells’ merger with German firm Boesebeck Droste in 2000 did not create hostility because the two firms were not poles apart when it came to leverage and profitability. ‘The profitability for Lovells Germany was often about the same as that for Lovells London,’ he remarks.

But this experience was largely an exception; even Freshfields and Bruckhaus, by far the most potent and even handed of the Anglo-German mergers, was not easy to bed down in the early years – a legacy that contributed to the large-scale partnership restructuring the firm undertook in 2006. CC, Linklaters and legacy Norton Rose all had considerably more upheaval in their German arms. Even New York’s Shearman & Sterling – which had huge, market-shaking success in securing high-end corporate work in the late 1990s and early 2000s, saw its practice later caught in discord. Attempting to deal with this, Shearman in April announced a wholesale shake-up of its practice with the closure of its Düsseldorf and Cologne offices to consolidate its German business in Frankfurt. At the time, senior partner Creighton Condon commented: ‘This concentration in Frankfurt will enable us to respond to a significantly altered market in Germany.’ The move has been picked up on as a sign of weakness by peers and a number of firms took the opportunity to recruit senior Shearman partners – including Latham & Watkins, which recruited three partners to launch in Düsseldorf. Shearman itself has been bullish, arguing that the move has given it a chance to relaunch its practice.

Whichever view proves correct, Shearman’s struggles are a reminder of how difficult to manage even successful practices can be given German lawyers’ cultural resistance to the more corporatised business model common in foreign firms.

But Ritvay concludes that despite the awkward environment that was created by the arrival of the international firms and their expectations over strategy and structure, they have still made a huge impression on the market. ‘The UK firms that were really successful in Germany were those that merged with leading German firms. It brought the German practice a lot of resource and resolve, even rigour, and management skills that were unknown in Germany. It meant that there was intense competition and many independent German firms fell behind and there are only a handful of them now in the top segment on a national and international level.’

Germany M&A Trend
Period	Value (€m)	No. of deals
1 Nov 2010-31 Oct 2011	55,665	676
1 Nov 2011-31 Oct 2012	51,416	671
1 Nov 2012-31 Oct 2013	74,370	658
Total German M&A
Period	Value (€m)	No. of deals
1 Nov 2010-31 Oct 2013	181,451	2,005
Source: mergermarket

Big global players

While major international firms have turned their eyes and focus to other markets, including key emerging economies, they have remained acutely aware of Germany’s position as a global economic leader and big exporter. It remains the largest market outside the UK for most leading City firms and while the much touted Asian region has proved hard to operate in profitably, the diversified German economy has proved a more than respectable performer for legal advisers since the banking crisis of 2008.

Hohenstatt says that German clients account for a significant share of Freshfields’ global client base: ‘Nearly a third of our biggest clients are German industrials, banks and service firms. The number of lawyers we have here mirrors the importance of the clients in the region.’

Linklaters too has been working hard on developing its bluechip client base in Germany. This year, it also represented Vodafone on its €7.7bn takeover of Kabel Deutschland.

It is this kind of activity that continues to attract firms to Germany, despite the current fashion for building and investing in emerging markets such as Asia and Latin America, and resource-rich jurisdictions like Australia, South Africa and Canada.

HSF has grown enormously in the Asia-Pacific region, but still feels compelled to develop its standing in Germany, a desire that led to the high-profile end of its alliance with Gleiss Lutz in 2011, as the German firm was not ready to move to a merger. Mitchell comments: ‘Germany is absolutely a key legal services market that we had to be in under our own name. The firm had its eye on the significant prize of being top of the tree in Asia-Pacific, the second biggest market for legal services, and the Herbert Smith merger with Freehills facilitated this. But Germany remains Europe’s strongest and biggest economy. It is an attractive destination for Asian investors and we have had a generation of investments in Asia from Germany. The trade winds continue to blow very strongly between Germany and Asia-Pacific.’

Gleiss Lutz managing partner Rainer Loges comments on his firm’s commitment to independence: ‘Ten or twelve years ago, many predicted that independent firms would not remain at the top of the market. But they do. We benefited from the alliance with Herbert Smith and Stibbe in a certain way, but when you are working with other international firms it is easier to operate as a fully independent firm.’

Ritvay still expects many more foreign firms to enter the market. He says that Noerr receives numerous merger offers every year, but prefers to stay autonomous. Wagner also indicates that he and his team obtained five serious offers from other firms, before deciding to join MoFo.

National Coverage: Germany’s Top Ten Firms by Turnover

Rank	Firm	Turnover	Offices in Germany
1	Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer	€334m	Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Munich
2	CMS Hasche Sigle	€328.2m	Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Munich, Stuttgart
3	Hengeler Mueller	€214m	Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich.
4	Clifford Chance	€189m	Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich
5	Linklaters	€162.5m	Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich
6	Gleiss Lutz	€158.1m	Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart
7	Hogan Lovells	€149.5m	Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich
8	Noerr	€135.3m	Berlin, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich
9	White & Case	€119m	Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich
10	Allen & Overy	€118m	Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Mannheim, Munich
Source: Juve

Keeping lean

The days of the giant mergers that occurred circa 2000 look unlikely to return. Major City firms have either secured large German practices or have shifted their focus elsewhere. As the dust has settled, Germany’s largest and most successful firms such as Hengeler Mueller, Gleiss Lutz and Noerr have become more confident of a lasting place in the market and remain avowedly independent.

International firms are still striving to find the right operating model in Germany. For firms like CC, Freshfields and Linklaters, the reshaping of their German operations is something that they will not wish to repeat.

Carl-Peter Feick, Linklaters’ German senior partner, says that the firm is sticking with its current strategy. ‘We reviewed our strategy many years ago. After the merger [with Oppenhoff & Rädler in 2000], we were a much larger firm at the time, but we wanted to move upmarket and that has not been easy and meant that we had to take tough and difficult decisions. We had to let some partners go and not make up everyone that we wanted to,’ he explains. ‘In the last three to five years, a number of firms grew much faster than we did. There were firms that were prepared to pick up a whole range of matters and we resisted that temptation.’

Hengeler Mueller is also content with its emphasis on transactions, though it is happy to have developed a much more substantive dispute resolution practice since the global financial crisis. ‘We have remained calm and concentrated on our strengths. We are ahead of the market on quality of advice, on new structures and combining structures, which many other firms are unable to do because of the narrow scope of each individual lawyer,’ Hengeler’s co-managing partner Matthias Hentzen asserts. ‘Compliance and litigation has increased substantially and transactions have become more work intensive. In the boom times, there was very little time spent on transactions. It was like cutting bread. Nowadays the purchaser puts much more effort into preparations, analysis and optimisation. People have also become more alert to the opportunities in litigation. People are not afraid of being in a dispute situation. German litigation is still not as work-intensive as in the US with full-trial discovery, but it has become quite normal.’

The realisation of dispute resolution becoming a key growth sector led New York’s Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, a conservative firm when it comes to lateral hires, to recruit litigation partner Richard Kreindler from Shearman in 2013.

Freshfields though, is standing by its traditional broad sector and practice area approach. Hohenstatt says that the firm is pursuing a more refined ‘premium full-service’ strategy targeted at bluechip clients. The firm has all but jettisoned the standalone work that departments such as tax and employment previously handled, and these departments are much more aligned with the firm’s more focused domestic and international strategy. Hohenstatt also says that Freshfields is feeling the positive effects of the upturn in dispute resolution: ‘The dispute resolution practice has covered a lot of the revenues that couldn’t be made by the transactional business since the financial crisis. Internal investigations is where we have made a lot of ground. And then there is the restructuring field where we have been involved in some of the biggest cases.’

Hohenstatt is sanguine about the challenges that the firm has faced over the last 13 years, but says that the pain has been necessary to achieve profitability targets: ‘We are not back to the revenue levels of 2006 and 2007, but we are also a bit smaller.’

For German lawyers, a kind of equilibrium has been achieved, after the convulsions of the early 2000s and post-Lehman turmoil. Yet the German market has become an increasingly competitive and dynamic jurisdiction. The dust hasn’t quite settled yet. LB

Big Country: The DAX 30’s Dispersed Headquarters

Company	Headquarters
Adidas	Herzogenaurach
Allianz	Munich
BASF	Ludwigshafen
Bayer	Leverkusen
Beiersdorf	Hamburg
BMW	Munich
Commerzbank	Frankfurt
Continental	Hanover
Daimler	Stuttgart
Deutsche Bank	Frankfurt
Deutsche Börse	Frankfurt
Deutsche Post	Bonn
Deutsche Telekom	Bonn
E.ON	Düsseldorf
Fresenius	Bad Homburg vor der Höhe
Fresenius Medical Care	Bad Homburg vor der Höhe
HeidelbergCement	Heidelberg
Henkel	Düsseldorf
Infineon Technologies	Neubiberg
K+S	Kassel
Lanxess	Leverkusen
Lufthansa	Cologne
Linde	Munich
Merck	Darmstadt
Munich Re	Munich
RWE	Essen
SAP	Walldorf
Siemens	Munich
ThyssenKrupp	Duisburg and Essen
Volkswagen Group	Wolfsburg