This week, the 2012 German Jurists Forum (Deutscher Juristentag) took place in München. The German Jurists Forum is a bi-annual conference organized by the Association of German Jurists. The Association’s history goes back more than 150 years – the München German Jurists Forum was the 69th Forum of its kind. The Forum brings together lawyers in private practice, in-house lawyers, civil servants, judges and academics to discuss legal reform projects and legal policy. It has time and time again proved rather influential. Its deliberations receive wide coverage in the legal and non-legal press alike. This year, the topics, to name only some, ranged from consumer protection (civil law/contract law section) to cyber crime (criminal law section), and from privacy and data protection in the internet age (IT law section) to corporate governance (business law section). Read More
Month: September 2012
The Hague Convention, Default Judgments and Deemed Service
In a series of judgments on July 3 and July 17, 2012, the Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) has ruled on the compatibility of deemed service under German law with the Hague Service Convention. The Court held that only the first court document in a dispute must be served pursuant to the Hague Service Convention. Any subsequent service of court documents can be, in accordance with the provisions of domestic German law, by post. Then, Sec. 184 German Civil Code (ZPO) applies, according to which “two weeks after it has been mailed, the document shall be deemed served.” In the cases before the Federal Supreme Court, default judgments were served by post, and the time period for filing protest (Einspruch) was determined on the basis of deemed service. Read More
The Porsche/Volkswagen Saga – News From Braunschweig, Stuttgart and New York
We have posted here on the securities litigation triggered by Porsche’s attempt to take over Volkswagen and covered some of its different angles. Things appeared to look not too bad for Porsche in the first court hearing in the German litigation in June 2012. Over the summer, news then were less favorable to Porsche: Read More
“Class Actions or Mass Actions – The Experience of Litigators and Financial Institutions” at the IBA Conference, Dublin, October 4, 2012
At this year’s Annual IBA Conference in Dublin, the Banking Law Committee and the Litigation Committee will be presenting a joint session on “Class Actions or Mass Actions – The experience of Litigators and Financial Institutions”. I will be speaking about the German approach to collective actions – readers of the blog will be familiar with KapMuG –
which will be put into perspective and compared to the approaches taken in other jurisdictions. See you in Dublin!