De multiples options pour nos confrères allemands

A large variety of UIA seminars and events in Germany and its neighbor countries in 2019 provide multiple options for activities and participation for German members. Local bars are accepting to grant training credits with respect to particular events. Plans for a German Regional Meeting will be developed during the Annual Congress in Luxembourg. Social media groups for German speaking colleagues will be established soon.

With two seminars in Hamburg (Drafting International Contracts, 24-25 May 2019) and Munich (Development and Cross-Border Sale of Technology, 28-29 June 2019), the 10th Annual Business Law Forum in Vienna (20-21 September) and the 63rd UIA Annual Congress in Luxembourg (6-11 November 2019), the options for German colleagues to participate and involve themselves in UIA’s activities are particularly broad this year. We are confident that the variety of events will enhance the awareness of UIA’s activities in Germany and create attraction for interested colleagues and possibly new members.

We cannot disregard the fact, however, that UIA has strong competitors and that the number of high quality international seminars and events is high. Even more delightful was it to hear that the Hamburg Bar accepted to grant training credits (§ 15a FAO) to the participants of the seminar in May with respect to the qualification of the recently established “Certified Expert in International Commercial Law”. This granting of training credits clearly increases the value of UIA seminars for German colleagues and should be expanded not only not to other UIA events in Germany and other countries but also to other professional specializations (e.g. IP, corporate law, labor law, etc.). Given the fact that the decision to grant training credits for certain events is taken by each local bar itself, we kindly encourage every colleague to request its competent local bar for such training credits with respect to a particular UIA event program and to provide us with his/her experiences with that request.

At the same time, given the above activities in Germany, our plans to host a “German regional conference” focusing on German speaking members were set aside for the moment and will be discussed and further developed in Luxembourg during the Annual Congress. In our opinion, such a limited regional conference could provide a low-threshold access to UIA’s activities for colleagues who mainly deal with their direct neighbors.

In the meantime, we also enhanced our social media activities on LinkedIn and Instagram by creating respective groups for German speaking colleagues. The publication and recruitment for these groups will start soon. We trust that these activities will be a useful supplementary communication tool for up-to-date communication among all interested colleagues.

Dr. Mario Krogmann
President of the UIA German National Committee
Blaum Dettmers Rabstein, Hamburg, Germany