Professional notice
The pick of the competition specialists at CMS Hasche Sigle are practice leader Harald Kahlenberg, who works in Stuttgart, and Hamburg-based partner Tim Reher. Kahlenberg leads a 29-strong team in Germany. With offices in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart, the group has corporate Germany's regional capitals covered, while five lawyers in Brussels provide auxiliary muscle.
CMS can lay claim to several blue-ribbon competition clients, including Alcatel, Akzo Nobel, ConocoPhilips, Johnson & Johnson and Novartis. Merger work is the practice's bedrock - it provides around 40 per cent of its work - and shows no sign of abating. A highlight of last year. however, was advising the German Football League on the sale of television rights for football matches.
Unusually, CMS's next largest area of competition work is abuse of dominance, which accounts for about a quarter of the practice. On the cartels side, the firm has advised clients in the insurance, cement and shipping industries, as well as Deutsche Bundesbank and Wild.