Legal Services for Expats

This chapter helps you do one specific thing: find, choose and pay for legal services in Germany. It is the entry point to the whole Finding a Lawyer section of this guide. It explains how the legal profession here is organised, who is actually permitted to advise you, how lawyers’ fees are set (mostly by statute, not by the lawyer), who pays the bill when a case is lost, and how to locate someone who will work with you in English.

It deliberately does not explain the law itself. German employment law, tenancy law, property law, tax law and immigration law are large fields, and this guide covers each of them in its own chapter. Those chapters are linked throughout and gathered again at the end. Read this one first if what you need is a lawyer. Read those if what you need is an answer.

The single most useful thing to understand before you make a call is that legal services for expats in Germany are priced in a way that has almost nothing in common with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or most of Asia. The hourly rate is not the default. The fee is frequently a matter of law. And the loser of a court case usually pays the winner’s lawyer. Once those three facts are in place, the rest of the system makes sense.

Who may provide legal services in Germany

Germany regulates legal advice as a protected activity. The Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz (RDG), the Legal Services Act, restricts the provision of Rechtsdienstleistungen, meaning legal services in an individual case, to people and bodies that are permitted to provide them. You can read it at gesetze-im-internet.de. The practical effect is that a great deal of what an unlicensed consultant, a relocation agency or a helpful website might offer you elsewhere is simply not lawful here if it crosses into advice on your individual case.

The general-purpose adviser is the Rechtsanwalt, a lawyer admitted to practise. The feminine form is Rechtsanwältin. Admission is granted by one of the regional Rechtsanwaltskammern, the bar chambers, under the Bundesrechtsanwaltsordnung (BRAO). A Rechtsanwalt may advise and represent you in any field and before any court, subject to a few specialist admissions. If your problem does not obviously belong to one of the specialist professions below, a Rechtsanwalt is who you want.

Several other professions hold carve-outs. A Steuerberater, a certified tax adviser, is the standard choice for tax returns and dealings with the Finanzamt, and a Lohnsteuerhilfeverein, an income-tax assistance association, can help employees with straightforward returns for a membership fee. A Rentenberater advises on pensions. A Notar draws up and certifies deeds. Membership organisations may advise their own members inside their own field: a Mieterverein, a tenants’ association, advises its members on tenancy matters, and a Gewerkschaft, a trade union, provides legal advice and representation to its members in employment and social-security matters, which for many employees is by far the cheapest route to competent help.

One point catches foreigners repeatedly, and it is worth stating in plain terms. A Notar is not your lawyer. The Notar is a neutral officer of the state. When you buy a flat, the same Notar reads the deed to both you and the seller and is required by law to be impartial between you. The Notar will explain the deed and check formalities, but will not negotiate for you, will not tell you whether the price is sensible, and will not act in your interest against the other side. If you want someone on your side of a property transaction, you hire a Rechtsanwalt in addition. Our chapter on buying property in Germany goes into the Notar’s role in detail.

What a Fachanwalt title means, and why it matters

German lawyers advertise, but their advertising is constrained by professional rules, and the most useful signal on a German law firm’s website is not a slogan. It is the word Fachanwalt, meaning specialist lawyer. Unlike vague terms such as “specialising in” or “focus on”, Fachanwalt is a regulated title. It is awarded by the Rechtsanwaltskammer under Section 43c BRAO and the Fachanwaltsordnung (FAO), the specialist-lawyer regulation issued by the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer.

Earning it is not trivial. Under Section 4 FAO the applicant must normally complete a preparatory course of at least 120 Zeitstunden, not counting the written assessments, covering every relevant area of the field. Under Section 5 FAO the applicant must document a substantial minimum caseload personally handled in that field over the preceding three years, with a set number of court proceedings. The chamber may require a Fachgespräch, a technical interview. And under Section 15 FAO the title must be maintained: at least fifteen Zeitstunden of continuing education a year in that field, proved to the chamber unprompted, or the title can be withdrawn. The current text is on the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer’s professional-law page.

Section 1 FAO sets out the fields in which the title may be awarded. It is a closed list, and the ones that matter most to foreign residents are Migrationsrecht (migration law), Arbeitsrecht (employment law), Miet- und Wohnungseigentumsrecht (tenancy and condominium law), Familienrecht (family law), Steuerrecht (tax law), Erbrecht (inheritance law), Verwaltungsrecht (administrative law), Sozialrecht (social law) and Strafrecht (criminal law). There is no Fachanwalt for “expat law”, and anyone marketing themselves that way is describing a client group, not a qualification. A Fachanwalt für Migrationsrecht is the real thing.

A lawyer without the title may still be excellent, and in a narrow question the title may not matter. But when you are choosing between strangers in a language you may not speak well, a certified specialism is a hard, checkable fact, and hard checkable facts are scarce in this decision.

How the price of legal services is set by statute

This is the part that surprises almost every arrival from a common-law country. German lawyers’ fees are governed by the Rechtsanwaltsvergütungsgesetz (RVG), the Lawyers’ Remuneration Act. In the default case the lawyer does not price the work. The statute does. You can read the whole thing at gesetze-im-internet.de.

The mechanism runs like this. Every matter has a Gegenstandswert, the value of the subject in dispute. In a claim for unpaid wages it is the wages claimed. In a dispute over a rent increase it is a multiple of the annual difference. In an unfair-dismissal case it is normally a few months’ salary. Where nothing has a monetary value, the statute or case law supplies a notional figure. That value is then looked up in the Gebührentabelle, the fee table in Anlage 2 to the RVG referenced by Section 13, which returns a single fee unit. Every fee in the case is a multiple of that unit.

The multipliers come from the Vergütungsverzeichnis (VV), the schedule of fees in Anlage 1 to the RVG. Out-of-court work earns a Geschäftsgebühr under Nr. 2300 VV, set within a range so the lawyer can reflect how difficult and extensive the work was. Litigation earns a Verfahrensgebühr under Nr. 3100 VV for conducting the proceedings and a Terminsgebühr under Nr. 3104 VV for attending the hearing. Settling the matter earns an Einigungsgebühr under Nr. 1000 VV, which is a deliberate incentive to settle rather than fight. Disbursements and a postal and telecoms allowance are added, and Umsatzsteuer, value-added tax, is added on top under Nr. 7008 VV. Every figure in the statute is therefore a net figure with VAT still to come.

The practical consequences are worth spelling out. Your bill scales with what the fight is worth, not with how long your lawyer spends. A three-hour dispute over a large sum costs more than a thirty-hour dispute over a small one. You can estimate your exposure before you instruct anyone, because the inputs are public. And under Section 49b(1) BRAO your lawyer may not agree or demand fees lower than the RVG provides, except where the RVG itself allows it, which means haggling the statutory fee downwards is not merely unwelcome, it is generally unlawful. Deliberate undercutting is a professional offence, not a discount. A reduction or waiver for a client in genuine need is permitted only after the mandate has been completed.

We are not reproducing the fee table here. It is amended periodically, and a copied table on a guide page goes quietly out of date while looking authoritative. Read the current one in Anlage 2 to the RVG and the multipliers in Anlage 1, or ask the lawyer to calculate it for your Gegenstandswert. They will, and they are used to being asked.

The first consultation and its statutory cap

Section 34 RVG deals with plain advice, meaning oral or written advice that does not connect to other fee-earning work. It is the provision to know before you pick up the phone, and its structure is often reported carelessly, so here is what it actually says.

First, the statute directs the lawyer to work towards a Gebührenvereinbarung, a fee agreement, for advice. Second, if no agreement has been made and the client is a Verbraucher, a consumer acting outside a trade or profession, the fee is capped: at most 250 euros for advice or a written opinion, and for a first consultation, an erstes Beratungsgespräch, at most 190 euros. Those are net figures under the RVG, so VAT under Nr. 7008 VV comes on top. Third, under Section 34(2), unless something else is agreed, the advice fee is credited against the fee for related follow-on work, so an initial consultation that turns into a mandate is not billed twice.

The trap is the order of those rules. The cap applies where no fee agreement was made. If the firm asks you to sign a Vergütungsvereinbarung before the meeting, the cap does not protect you, and many commercial firms do exactly that. So ask one question when you book: is this Erstberatung billed under Section 34 RVG, or under a fee agreement, and if the latter, at what rate. A firm that will not answer that in writing before the meeting has told you something useful. Note also that the cap is a consumer protection. If you are instructing the lawyer for your business or freelance activity, it does not apply to you at all. The statute is at gesetze-im-internet.de; check the current figures there rather than trusting any secondary source, including this one, indefinitely.

When your lawyer charges by the hour instead

The statutory system is a default, not a cage. Section 3a RVG permits a Vergütungsvereinbarung, a remuneration agreement, under which you and the lawyer agree a different fee, in practice usually an hourly rate above the statutory one. In commercial work, in complex international matters and in large firms this is now common, and for cases with a low Gegenstandswert but high complexity it can be the only way a competent lawyer will take the file at all.

The statute imposes form requirements that exist for your benefit. The agreement must be in Textform. It must be labelled as a Vergütungsvereinbarung or something comparable. It must be clearly set apart from other agreements, and it may not be hidden inside the Vollmacht, the power of attorney you sign. And it must contain a warning that in the event of a costs award, the opposing party, another participant or the state treasury will as a rule reimburse no more than the statutory fee.

Read that last requirement twice, because it is the whole point. If you agree to pay 400 euros an hour and you win, the loser reimburses the RVG fee, not your hourly bill. The difference stays with you. An agreed rate raises your cost of winning as well as your cost of losing. Section 3a(3) gives a court the power to reduce an agreed fee that is unreasonably high, having taken an opinion from the bar chamber’s board, but only down to the statutory level, and you should not plan around it. Section 3a(4) makes any agreement for more than the statutory fee void where the lawyer was assigned to you under Prozesskostenhilfe.

Contingency fees run the other way from American practice. Section 4a RVG permits an Erfolgshonorar, a success fee, only in narrow cases: where the mandate concerns a money claim of at most 2,000 euros; where it is an out-of-court debt-collection service or one in the limited proceedings named in Section 79(2) ZPO; or where the client, on a reasonable view of the individual case, would be deterred from pursuing the claim at all without one. The availability of state-funded help is expressly disregarded when judging that last case. There is no general “no win, no fee” market here, and any provider promising one for an ordinary dispute is either operating in one of those narrow lanes or is not a Rechtsanwalt. The text is at gesetze-im-internet.de.

Loser pays, and what it does to your risk

Section 91(1) of the Zivilprozessordnung (ZPO), the Code of Civil Procedure, states that the losing party bears the costs of the dispute and must reimburse the costs incurred by the opponent, so far as they were necessary for appropriate prosecution or defence. Section 91(2) confirms that the winner’s statutory lawyer fees and disbursements are reimbursable in all proceedings. Court fees under the Gerichtskostengesetz follow the same logic and are also scaled to the Gegenstandswert, and the claimant normally has to pay them in advance before the court will act.

This transforms the risk calculus compared with the United States, where each side generally carries its own costs. Losing in Germany means paying your own lawyer, the other side’s statutory lawyer fees, and the court fees. A partial win produces a split, apportioned by the court. The upside is that a strong case is genuinely cheap to bring, because if you win, you are largely made whole. The downside is that a weak case is expensive in a way that has no counterpart in American litigation, and the person deciding whether your case is strong has a financial interest in taking it. That asymmetry is the reason legal costs insurance is so normal here.

There is one enormous exception, and it applies to exactly the disputes foreign employees are most likely to have. Under Section 12a(1) of the Arbeitsgerichtsgesetz (ArbGG), in first-instance judgment proceedings before the Arbeitsgericht, the labour court, the winning party has no claim to reimbursement of the costs of legal representation. Win your unfair-dismissal case and you still pay your own lawyer. The statute requires the lawyer to point this out to you before the representation agreement is concluded. It cuts both ways: it also means that losing an employment case at first instance does not saddle you with your employer’s legal bill, which is why so many employment disputes are worth defending. Our chapter on German employment contracts and rights covers the substantive side.

Rechtsschutzversicherung, the mainstream German answer

Because losing is expensive and the amounts are predictable, Germans insure against them. A Rechtsschutzversicherung, legal costs insurance, is a normal household product here in a way it is not in most countries. It is sold in modules: Privatrechtsschutz for private life, Berufsrechtsschutz for employment, Verkehrsrechtsschutz for traffic and driving, Mietrechtsschutz for tenancy, and so on. When it covers a matter, it pays your lawyer’s statutory fees, the court fees, the costs you are ordered to reimburse to the other side, and often the cost of an expert, subject to your Selbstbeteiligung, the excess.

Two features decide whether it will help you, and both are about timing. The first is the Wartezeit, the waiting period, typically three months from the start of cover for most modules, though traffic cover often has none. The second is the Rechtsschutzfall, the point at which the insured event is deemed to have occurred, which insurers define by reference to the first act said to breach a legal duty. Between them these mean that buying a policy once a dispute is under way, or once you can see one coming, does not work. The insurer will decline, and it will be entitled to. This is not a loophole; it is the entire economics of the product.

The consequence is uncomfortable but simple: legal costs insurance is a decision you make while nothing is wrong. If you are newly arrived, employed and renting, and you would find a four-figure legal bill painful, it is worth pricing now rather than after your landlord sends the letter. Cover is usually declined for matters you knew about when you signed, and often excluded entirely for some fields, most commonly family and inheritance law, where you may get funded advice but not funded litigation. Read the exclusions before the premium. Our chapter on insurance essentials in Germany puts it alongside the other policies you may need and explains which ones are actually compulsory.

If you cannot afford a lawyer

Germany funds legal help for people on low incomes through two separate regimes that are frequently confused, including by people who should know better. They cover different things, they are applied for in different places, and getting one does not get you the other.

Beratungshilfe is state-funded legal advice outside court, under the Beratungshilfegesetz (BerHG). You apply at the Amtsgericht, the local court, for the district where you live. Section 4(1) BerHG makes the Amtsgericht of your allgemeiner Gerichtsstand, broadly your place of residence, the competent one, and if you have no domestic Gerichtsstand, the court for the district where the need arises. Section 4(2) allows the application to be made orally at the court’s Geschäftsstelle, its registry, which matters if forms are hard for you. You then take the Berechtigungsschein, the certificate, to a lawyer of your choice; the state pays that lawyer a reduced statutory fee, and you pay a small Beratungshilfegebühr, currently 15 euros under Nr. 2500 VV RVG, which the lawyer may waive.

Section 12 BerHG contains a wrinkle that catches people in three cities. In Bremen and Hamburg, an established öffentliche Rechtsberatung, public legal advice service, takes the place of Beratungshilfe unless state law says otherwise. In Berlin you may choose between the public service and Beratungshilfe. If you live in one of those three, the Amtsgericht route may not be your route, and you should check locally first.

Prozesskostenhilfe, usually shortened to PKH, is different: it funds litigation, not advice. Section 114(1) ZPO grants it on application to a party who cannot bear the costs of the proceedings in full, in part or in instalments, provided the intended claim or defence offers hinreichende Aussicht auf Erfolg, sufficient prospect of success, and is not mutwillig, roughly, not something a self-funding person of sense would not pursue. You apply to the court hearing the case, not to the Amtsgericht as such, and you must file a detailed declaration of your income and assets with supporting documents. The court may grant it outright or against monthly instalments, and it can be reviewed later if your circumstances improve.

The most important sentence in this entire area is Section 123 ZPO, and it is one line long: the grant of Prozesskostenhilfe has no effect on the obligation to reimburse the opponent’s costs. PKH covers your court costs and your own assigned lawyer. It does not cover what you owe the other side under Section 91 ZPO if you lose. People discover this at the worst possible moment. Our chapter on legal aid and pro bono services covers both regimes properly, including the income thresholds, the forms and the alternatives such as university Rechtskliniken, refugee law clinics and charitable Beratungsstellen.

Where to find legal services, and how to check them

Start with the official register. The Bundesweites Amtliches Anwaltsverzeichnis at rechtsanwaltsregister.org is maintained by the Rechtsanwaltskammern and lists every lawyer currently admitted in Germany, with their chamber and their Fachanwalt titles. It is not a marketing directory and it is the authoritative answer to two questions: is this person actually admitted, and do they hold the specialism they claim. Use it to verify anyone you find anywhere else.

For a referral rather than a check, two routes are standard. Your regional Rechtsanwaltskammer, the bar chamber for your area, operates a referral service and can point you to admitted lawyers in a given field; the chambers are listed via the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer. And anwaltauskunft.de, run by the Deutscher Anwaltverein (DAV), the German Bar Association, is a searchable directory filterable by field, location and language. Membership of the DAV is voluntary, so it is not exhaustive, but the language filter is genuinely useful.

On English, be specific about what you need. “Speaks English” and “can conduct your litigation in English” are different claims, and the second is rarer than the first. German court proceedings are conducted in German as a matter of law, so even an English-speaking lawyer will file in German, and documents you supply may need a certified translation by a beeidigter Übersetzer, a sworn translator. What good English gets you is a lawyer who can explain the case to you and take instructions from you accurately, which is not a luxury. Ask directly whether correspondence with you will be in English and whether the hearing will need an interpreter, and ask who pays for one.

Your embassy or consulate almost certainly keeps a list of local English-speaking lawyers, and it is a reasonable place to start. Understand what the list is, though. Embassies compile these as a courtesy; they do not vet, endorse, supervise or take responsibility for anyone on them, and they will tell you so in the disclaimer at the top. Being on an embassy list is not a quality signal. Being in the official register with a relevant Fachanwalt title is. Use the embassy list for names, then verify the names yourself.

Expat forums and community groups are worth reading for one thing only: how a firm actually behaved. Did they answer emails, did they meet deadlines, did the bill match the estimate. That is real information that no register holds. What forums are not good for is legal conclusions, and a confident answer from a stranger about your residence permit is worth exactly what you paid for it.

Preparing your case before the meeting

Lawyers here bill by the value of the matter, not the hour, so being organised does not usually save you money in the direct way it would elsewhere. It saves you something better: accuracy. A lawyer working from a clear chronology and complete documents gives you a better answer than one reconstructing your situation from a worried conversation.

Bring the paperwork in order. The contract or decision at issue, every letter both ways with its date, proof of when things were sent and received, and a one-page timeline in plain language. If a German authority or court has written to you, bring the whole letter, envelope included, because the date of service starts the clock. Deadlines here are short and unforgiving: a Widerspruch, a formal objection to an administrative decision, generally has one month; an appeal against a dismissal under the Kündigungsschutzgesetz has three weeks. Miss the Frist and the merits stop mattering. If a letter has a deadline in it, that is the fact you lead with when you call.

For the mechanical parts of that preparation, the tools on Werkzeu.ge can help, and it is worth saying plainly what they are and are not. Werkzeu.ge is built by Cryon UG, the company behind WeLiveIn.de. Its Formularamt (free, no account needed) collects official federal, state and municipal forms in one searchable place, each with its source, retrieval date and status, and lets you fill them in the browser. The Brief-Vorlagen-Bibliothek (Plus tier) holds DIN 5008 letter templates including Widerspruch and Einspruch, which is useful when you need to preserve a deadline in correct German form. The Vollmacht-Generator (Plus) produces powers of attorney for a bank, the post, a court or as a Vorsorgevollmacht. The Aktenzeichen-Decoder (Plus) breaks down a German court file number so you can tell which court and which type of proceeding a letter actually comes from, which is more useful than it sounds when a brown envelope arrives. The Vertragsmuster tool (Pro tier) holds German contract templates with their statutory basis. Tier availability and current pricing are on the pricing page; the platform is in beta, its own terms note that tools may be incomplete, and the free tier carries advertising.

Now the honest limit, which matters more in this chapter than in any other. Werkzeu.ge’s own terms state that it does not provide Rechtsberatung, legal advice, and German law is not neutral on that point: under the RDG, advice on your individual case is restricted to those permitted to give it. A document generator produces a document. It does not know your facts, cannot tell you whether the clause you just generated is enforceable against the person you are dealing with, and cannot take responsibility if it is not. Use these tools to prepare, to hit a deadline, to understand what a letter is, and to arrive at the meeting organised. Do not use them instead of the meeting. Nothing on that platform, or on this page, is a substitute for a lawyer looking at your actual case.

Where this guide covers the law itself

This chapter is about hiring. The substance lives elsewhere in this guide, and each of those chapters goes far deeper than a paragraph here could. If you know which field your problem sits in, go straight there.

For work: dismissal, notice periods, contracts, working time, the Arbeitszeugnis and what your employer may and may not do, see German employment contracts and rights. For housing: the rental contract, the deposit, rent increases, service charges and ending a tenancy, see finding accommodation; for purchase, the Notar, the Grundbuch and the transaction itself, see buying property in Germany. For tax: income tax, tax classes, filing, and when you need a Steuerberater rather than a lawyer, see understanding German taxes. For residence permits, registration and the Ausländerbehörde, see an expat’s first steps in Germany. If you are facing a criminal allegation or the police want to speak with you, that is urgent and has its own rules, including the right to say nothing: see criminal defense lawyers before you say anything at all.

What to do next

If you have a live problem with a deadline on it, deal with the deadline first. Find the date on the letter, work out when the Frist expires, and treat that as the only thing that matters today. A lawyer can fix a weak argument. Nobody can fix an expired Frist.

If you have a problem but no deadline, work through it in order. Identify the field, so you know which Fachanwalt title to look for. Check whether you already have cover: a Rechtsschutzversicherung you forgot about, a Mieterverein membership, a union membership, or an employer’s legal-help benefit. Check whether Beratungshilfe applies to you if money is tight, remembering the Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin variation. Then find two or three candidates through anwaltauskunft.de or your Rechtsanwaltskammer, verify each of them in the official register, and call. Ask what the Gegenstandswert is likely to be, whether the Erstberatung is billed under Section 34 RVG or under a fee agreement, and what the realistic total exposure is if you lose. Those three questions will tell you more about a firm than an hour of reading its website.

If you have no problem at all right now, this is the moment to do the one thing that will not be available later: decide whether legal costs insurance is worth it to you, while there is nothing to insure. That is the whole German answer to legal costs, and it only works in advance.