Surprise surrounding last week’s announcement that Hogan Lovells’ 30-lawyer Berlin arm is leaving to launch a German law practice for Morrison & Foerster has been compounded by the indications that local TMT partner Christoph Wagner was earlier asked to leave the firm for publicly criticising a client.
The decision by the 2,527-lawyer Anglo/American firm came after Wagner wrote an article in German newspaper FAZ looking at the antitrust concerns surrounding Deutsche Telekom’s decision to impose data limits on its flat rate internet connections, which German journalists have reportedly warned is a threat to the freedom of the web.