law firm
A law firm or law firm is the office space and the company or business of a lawyer or several lawyers.
backgrounds
In common parlance , the term law firm is used both for the office of an individual attorney and for the offices of medium-sized or larger law firms and their branches.
In the law firm, the lawyer creates all the personnel and organizational requirements for practicing his profession. What these are in detail is handled differently from law firm to law firm. What all organizational forms have in common is that the lawyer can be reached by his clients through his office and that documents can be sent to him or the client he represents at the address of the law office. In the law firm he will (usually) hold meetings with clients and process his files.
Organizational forms
Modern forms of work organization are meanwhile also widespread in the legal profession. Due to the division of labor and modern means of communication, it can no longer be assumed that every lawyer can be reached or active on the premises of his office on a daily basis.
The following organizational forms of a law firm are conceivable:
- Sole lawyer
- Office community (only organizational community, in Austria also called "director's community")
- Society as a company under civil law
- Partnership company , in Austria until December 31, 2006 as an open company or limited partnership , also known as "partnership" (from January 1, 2007 this corresponds to the legal forms of open company or limited partnership in Austria )
- Partnership company with limited professional liability (PartGmbB) as a variant of the partnership company
- Capital company ((e.g. lawyers GmbH ), relatively uncommon in Germany, increasingly found in Austria)
- International law firm, e.g. B. in the legal form of a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) according to British / American law.
- Lawyer networks
Firm size
The size of a law firm is usually determined by the number of professionals working there. A determination according to turnover is in fact hardly possible in Germany, since only corporations are legally obliged to publish their turnover. However, the size of the law firm does not necessarily affect their turnover or the way they work.
The designation "large law firm" is a common but not used designation for law firms with ten or more professionals. Neither the Federal Statistical Office nor the Federal Bar Association have any surveys on the number and average size of law firms. It can be assumed, however, that the majority of lawyers in Germany practice their profession in law firms with fewer than ten professionals.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
