A dispute relating to the construction of a highway bridge gave the Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) the opportunity to clarify the relationship between the independent evidentiary proceedings (selbständiges Beweisverfahren; Sec. 485 Code of Civil Procedure, ZPO) and an expert determination agreement (Schiedsgutachtervereinbarung). Read More
Category: Litigation
German Bar Association – Civil Litigation Committee
The German Bar Association (Deutscher Anwaltverein – DAV) comprises 252 local bar associations and more than 61,000 individual lawyers. It represents the interests of the German legal profession at the national, European and international level. I am honoured to have been appointed to its Civil Litigation Committee (Zivilverfahrensausschuss).
The Month in Retrospect: What Else Happened in August 2021
Coping with the Diesel Caseload
The Volkswagen wave of Diesel cases may be ebbing off in the lower courts, but Diesel-related claims against other manufacturers continue to be filed. In the Stuttgart district court (Landgericht), the number of new civil cases is up by 60%, driven primarily by Diesel claims against Daimler. And increasingly, cases end up in the Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof). This had let the court to temporarily create an additional senate, i.e. a bench of five judges. a measure that is taken extremely rarely. It helps distributing the burden more equally across the bench, but does not add capacity, as the number of judges appointed to the Federal Supreme Court does not change. Read More
News from Brussels on Lugano and The Hague
In July, the European Commission moved forward on some pending matters regarding international civil procedure. These concerned, on the one hand, the past in the form of the United Kingdom’s application to accede to the Lugano Convention post-Brexit, which was still formally to be resolved, and, on the other hand, the future, namely the European Union’s accession to the 2019 Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil or Commercial Matters (Judgments Convention). Read More