If you ask our more than 40 lawyers about their first association with Frankfurt, the economic and social hub of the old Federal Republic, you get a wide variety of answers:
St. Paul's Church - an unsurprising association for a survey of lawyers; after all, St. Paul's Church was the venue of the National Assembly of 1848/49 and is therefore a symbol of the democratic movement. However, how difficult the self-image of a democratic constitutional state and the identification of its citizens with it can be has never been clearer after reunification than it is today and must worry us as lawyers.
The Institute for Social Research and the Frankfurt School - a surprising association only at first glance: both are closely linked not only with the names of Adorno and Horkheimer, but also with that of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas' approaches to discourse theory in turn form the basis for the teaching of Robert Alexy, who shaped the philosophy of law at Kiel University (CAU) for many years from 1986 onwards - and thus also a not inconsiderable number of our lawyers. According to Alexy (also in this respect a successor to Gustav Radbruch at the CAU), the concept of law necessarily contains elements of correctness and justice, which is why, contrary to the legal positivist view, not every properly established and socially effective norm can be law; there is no "anything goes" in law - even if some populists might wish for this.
The stock exchange - our M&A team's place of longing.
Eintracht - the soccer fans among us throw in; and even more so after Holstein Kiel was promoted to the 1st Bundesliga.
The book fair - think the bibliophile readers among us, even if we study specialist literature almost exclusively on the screen.
The opera - an association not only for the opera lovers among us, but naturally also because it is traditionally the venue for the presentation of the JUVE Awards. This year's awards ceremony will take place there on October 24, 2024 and BROCK MÜLLER ZIEGENBEIN is one of the five nominees in the category "Law Firm of the Year for Small and Medium-sized Businesses".
With this award, JUVE recognizes "the overall development of the law firms beyond individual areas of law and evaluates, among other things, special management achievements. The decisive factor is not the size of a law firm, but rather the fact that the focus of its activities is on advising medium-sized companies. The criteria also include client orientation, law firm culture, junior staff policy, profitability, personnel growth and expansion into new business areas or markets. JUVE recognizes both young units and long-established players that have developed dynamically over the past year."
As we are undoubtedly not one of the "young entities" - we will be celebrating our 25th anniversary next year and were formed in 2000 from the merger of three long-established law firms in Lübeck, Kiel and Flensburg - and were also nominated for the category "Law Firm of the Year for Small and Medium-sized Firms" in 2015, we must assume that the JUVE editorial team is pleased to see a certain "dynamism" in us. This actually corresponds to our self-perception. Each of us has developed further in recent years, but the development of the law firm as a whole has gone even further. This is not only due to the fact that we have succeeded in continuously attracting qualified young colleagues to work at BROCK MÜLLER ZIEGENBEIN. We have also opened up new specialist areas, carefully expanded our client base and, in this context, intensified our cross-specialization teamwork. However, nothing is more stimulating and can be more fruitful than the exchange with "new faces" and the confrontation with the "new". It is no coincidence that Western philosophy originated in the port cities of the Mediterranean as trading centers and places of contact with foreigners at the time - the fact that Lübeck, Kiel and Flensburg are port cities on the Baltic Sea should be noted in passing with a wink. The fact that we have modernized our law firm structures, including communication between the legal teams and our non-legal staff, has also contributed to the dynamic.
We are delighted to have been nominated for the "Law Firm of the Year for Small and Medium-sized Firms" award, but we are even more pleased with the recognition our clients have given us for our work. We are very aware that we also owe our development to them. They, in turn, appreciate the fact that we, as organs of the administration of justice, critically question positions, point out what works and what doesn't and develop solutions from this.
In the Frankfurt Opera House on October 24, our delegation this year will be waiting with both excitement and North German composure to see what works for BROCK MÜLLER ZIEGENBEIN.