24.09.2012
[Cologne, ] At the beginning of 2013 GÖRG Partnerschaft von Rechtsanwälten (blue logo) will open a new office in Hamburg. The office will be initially staffed with a total of seven partners and an additional 15 lawyers, as well as a separate accounting and tax advisory business with two partners (each licensed as a chartered accountant and tax adviser) and additional professionals.
Dr. Thorsten Bieg (lawyer/tax adviser) and Dr. Wolfram Lohse (lawyer/tax adviser) have joined GÖRG Partnerschaft von Rechtsanwälten as new partners effective as of 1 January 2013. Dr. Bieg and Dr. Lohse are known throughout Germany as proven restructuring experts with special expertise in trustee arrangements.
Along with these, Hans-Jürgen Wilke (chartered accountant/tax adviser) and Peter Stoffersen (chartered accountant/tax adviser) will also be teaming up and will initially work together with Dr. Bieg and Dr. Lohse under the name “BWLS Partnerschaft von Steuerberatern und Wirtschaftsprüfern”, cooperating with GÖRG and enhancing GÖRG’s services with accounting and tax advice. GÖRG Partnerschaft von Rechtsanwälten has the option of fully integrating these accounting and tax advice activities in the future. BWLS Partnerschaft will have a special focus on tax structuring advice – including in the context of restructurings – and insolvency-specific accounting services.
Lawyers Marc Odebrecht and Hans-Jürgen Rieckhof will join GÖRG as further partners. Both have managed insolvency proceedings and compulsory receiverships in northern Germany to date; as new partners of GÖRG, they will be expanding their activities into the Hamburg region. The legal services with a focus on private construction and facilities construction law and labour/employment law will be concentrated in Hamburg in future. GÖRG Rechtsanwälte/Insolvenzverwalter GbR (red logo) acquires two new insolvency locations in Hamburg and Schwerin which also offer professional receivership capabilities. To date, GÖRG Rechtsanwälte/Insolvenzverwalter GbR has been represented by offices in Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf and Wuppertal, among other places.
The Hamburg insolvency team will be strengthened by lawyer Oliver Dankert, who has served as an insolvency administrator in the Hamburg region to date. Together with our partner Marc Odebrecht he will assist as counsel of GÖRG Rechtsanwälte/Insolvenzverwalter GbR to help expand the future GÖRG insolvency office in Hamburg.
Lawyers Hartwig Albers who is active as an insolvency administrator, primarily in Berlin and Brandenburg, and Gerhard Brinkmann will also be joining GÖRG as new partners as of next year. For their part, these will contribute insolvency centres in Berlin and Rostock to GÖRG Rechtsanwälte/Insolvenzverwalter GbR.
Lawyer Gerhard Brinkmann is joining GÖRG Partnerschaft von Rechtsanwälten as a partner; as of the beginning of next year, he will head up the insolvency administration office of GÖRG Rechtsanwälte/Insolvenzverwalter GbR in Rostock.
Dr. Gerrit Hölzle will be joining GÖRG Partnerschaft von Rechtsanwälten as an additional partner to support the Hamburg office. Along with him, lawyers Rainer Beck and Marcus Nierkens will be departing from the firm Beck & Hölzle, which is run solely by Dr. Gerrit Hölzle, and will then bring their further insolvency sites in Bremen and Kevelaer into GÖRG Rechtsanwälte/Insolvenzverwalter GbR. Dr. Gerrit Hölzle, who also teaches as a lecturer at the University of Bremen, will concentrate his medium-term focus on serving as an insolvency administrator for the insolvency courts in the Bremen and Bremerhaven regions. As counsel, Marcus Nierkens will strengthen GÖRG Rechtsanwälte/Insolvenzverwalter GbR as an administrator for the insolvency courts in Kleve and Duisburg, enhancing and strengthening GÖRG’s Düsseldorf office.
GÖRG will start up operations in Hamburg and at the new insolvency sites on 1 January 2013. It is intended that the Hamburg office be expanded quickly, in particular, by enhancing the core competencies of the firm at that location. After a very short time, Hamburg should be home to a GÖRG office which offers a full scope and quality of legal services that are second to none.
GÖRG partner Dr. Michael Dolfen sees in this combination of forces a further milestone for GÖRG in its development as a nationwide firm in the area of legal advisory services and as a regional power in the field of inter-regional insolvency administration: “The facts speak for themselves. We are very pleased alongside Berlin, Cologne, Essen, Frankfurt am Main and Munich to be able to open our sixth office under our blue logo – and to do this with the size and team that represents our expectations with respect to our performance capabilities for legal advisory services. With Dr. Thorsten Bieg, Dr. Wolfram Lohse, Hans-Jürgen Rieckhof, Marc Odebrecht and Dr. Gerrit Hölzle we have been able to attract a number of proven experts with a focus on restructuring and insolvency as partners. The collaboration with the accounting and tax advisory business that will be led by Hans-Jürgen Wilke and Peter Stoffersen will not just be limited to Hamburg. It will also complement and expand our corporate law advice through the other GÖRG offices up toward the option to completely integrate accounting and tax advisory services at a later point in time.
We are equally pleased to significantly expand the presence of the GÖRG Rechtsanwälte/Insolvenzverwalter GbR red logo outside of the Rhine-Ruhr region toward the lower Rhine area, northern Germany, Berlin and the eastern German Federal States. With lawyers Hartwig Albers and Gerhard Brinkmann in Rostock, Dr. Gerrit Hölzle in Bremen and in the lower Rhine we are supplementing our administration capacities with a series of proven insolvency administrators. In particular, we are increasing our chances of managing larger complex insolvency proceedings; we have already proven our abilities in this once again in the recent past with Arcandor and Edscha, among other matters.
We are not only welcoming those who are joining us as partners, but especially those legal and non-legal professionals who are joining us along with our future partners. Within the legal professionals we see numerous highly-talented and extremely motivated lawyers for whom our doors will be open.”
From the perspective of our new partners as well there is little to be added to the facts as they stand, commented lawyer Dr. Gerrit Hölzle: “GÖRG is the most dynamic law firm in the market – not just, but especially in the field of restructuring and insolvency. The contribution of the insolvency administration practice managed to date under the name Beck & Hölzle and our advisory practice to GÖRG is the logical result of our growth strategy, which has been built for the past decacde solely on high expectations of quality”.
Dr. Thorsten Bieg is also enthusiastic about the future direction: “By joining one of the absolute top firms our proven team of insolvency and restructuring experts gains access to excellent development opportunities from a regional and professional perspective. The discussions on joining were characterized from the beginning by great mutual respect, matching tone as partners and substantive correspondence. The multidisciplinary new Hamburg office will be powerful as of its launch and will join the ranks of the other large northern German law firms. By numbers of lawyers, the largest law firm in the capital city of Berlin will be created”.
