Legal Village

No time to run?

Posted 3/04/2007 by Christoph von Teichman

Lawyers all over Germany are currently electing their delegates to the Satzungsversammlung, a kind of legislative assembly with wide powers to regulate how we go about our business.

In my district, Hamburg, I can cast my vote for as many as nine candidates (the number of delegates depends on the number of lawyers registered in each district). Looking at the slate of a dozen or so candidates, I notice that there is only a single person among them - just one - from a large international firm; everyone else on that list is either a solo practitioner or a member of a small local firm. (I suspect the situation is not much different in other large cities in Germany - and certainly not in the more rural areas.) These are the people who will, to some extent, shape the future of our profession in this country during the next four years.

Don't get me wrong - I have the highest respect for those professional colleagues who are working in a very different environment from my own. But not only is their environment different; naturally, their interests are as well.

Who is going to represent the interests of the large international firms in the assembly if these firms do not encourage their members to stand as candidates? Who is going to speak up for open markets and freedom of services if we don't?

I think there is a danger that we hurt our long-term interests if we do not do more to engage with the self-regulating bodies of our profession. Lawyers from large firms sometimes tend to shrug these off as if what they do were irrelevant to our work, but it is not; we ignore it at our peril. And we have no right to complain about them if we do not participate in their activities.

Nor is this an issue specific to Germany, I believe. When was the last time the president of the American Bar Association came from a firm with offices outside the US? Or from a firm within the top range of the AmLaw 100?

"And why didn't you run?" I hear you ask. Well, you know…  there's always reasons (or excuses) on an individual level, so please spare me that discussion. What we in large firms really should do, I believe, is think about this issue from an institutional perspective, then act on it.