Germany's New Commercial Courts: English-Language Proceedings and What They Mean for Document Handling

Since April 1, 2025, German state courts have been able to hear large commercial disputes in English, before specialised panels that agree the shape of the case with the parties at the outset. The Justizstandort-Stärkungsgesetz of October 7, 2024 gave the federal states the power to set up Commercial Courts and Commercial Chambers, through new provisions such as § 119b of the Courts Constitution Act (GVG), and most of the larger states have used it.

In its overview updated on October 2, 2026, Gleiss Lutz counts nine states with a Commercial Court: Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony. For the people who run document review, the reform changes three practical things: the language exhibits travel in, the point at which the court expects the parties to know their case, and the protection available for confidential material.

This story sets out the statutory framework and the differences between the states, then looks at how a review team working in Nuix Discover can prepare a document set for one of these courts with Claira.

What the Act set up

Under § 119b GVG, a state may establish a Commercial Court at a Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) to hear, at first instance, civil disputes between businesses with a value in dispute of at least 500,000 euros, including disputes over business acquisitions and corporate governance. The court takes a case where the parties agree on it, expressly or by implication, or where the claimant asks for it in the statement of claim and the defendant does not object. An appeal on points of law goes straight to the Federal Court of Justice, and under § 614 of the Code of Civil Procedure (ZPO) it needs no leave.

The states have used the framework in different ways. According to the same Gleiss Lutz overview, Bavaria has a Commercial Court but no Commercial Chambers, Bremen limits its court to certain legal areas and industries, and proceedings before the Commercial Court in Dresden can be conducted in German only. Gleiss Lutz also notes that at the Federal Court of Justice the parties must first request that the proceedings be conducted in English. A jurisdiction clause therefore needs to name a specific court, and the review team should know early which one it is preparing for.

English proceedings and the documents that stay in German

§ 184a GVG lets each state designate English as the court language for selected areas of these disputes. Where the parties have agreed to English, expressly or tacitly, or the defendant answers the claim in English without objecting, the entire proceedings are conducted in English.

The effect on exhibits is set out in the numbered items of § 184a(3) GVG. Ordinarily, § 142(3) ZPO allows a court to order a translation of foreign-language documents, prepared by a certified translator. In English proceedings that rule does not apply to documents in English. For documents in German, the court may, on application, order the party relying on the document to provide a translation into English.

That reverses the usual position for a German party. Its own internal emails, board minutes and technical reports may need English translations if the other side asks, so the cost of an exhibit now depends on its language. A team that knows early which documents are in German, and which of those matter, can plan the translation budget around the exhibits it will actually rely on.

Claira can help with that triage. An objective coding prompt can extract a document's language into a field in Nuix Discover, alongside its date, author and document type. The Translation workflow detects the primary language of each document and produces a concise English-language summary, so reviewers who do not read German can judge relevance before anything is sent to a translator. The help centre is clear that these summaries are not certified translations: documents intended for a court filing need a qualified human translator. It also notes that a mixed-language document is identified by its primary language only, which matters for email chains that switch between German and English.

The organisational hearing rewards an early view of the documents

§ 612 ZPO requires the Commercial Court and the Commercial Chamber to hold an organisational hearing with the parties as early as possible, and to agree how the proceedings will be organised and run. The provisions of the ZPO on time limits and late submissions apply to what is agreed there. A party that arrives without a realistic view of its documents may commit to a timetable it cannot keep.

German procedure still has no general disclosure. Under § 142 ZPO the court can order a party or a third party to produce documents that a party has referred to, so most of the document work lies in assembling a party's own evidence and answering targeted orders. We looked at where that work comes from in our story on eDiscovery in Germany without discovery.

Several Claira features help a team prepare for the hearing. Early case assessment analyses metadata only, without reading content or changing anything in Nuix Discover, and reports volume, people, date coverage and suggested segments. Case Context is a structured briefing on the matter, shared by everyone on the case, with templates for litigation and for arbitration; the help centre warns that it is no place for privileged work product or strategy. The Chronologies workflow turns each document into a single dated sentence, and Insights can then roll those results into one timeline with citations back to the documents it read.

Trade secrets and the verbatim record

The Act also added § 273a ZPO, under which the court may, on a party's application, classify information in dispute as confidential where it may be a trade secret under the Trade Secrets Act, applying that Act's protective rules. The application has to identify the information, which means someone has to find it in the documents first. A review can ask Claira to flag documents that may contain pricing, technical know-how or other commercially sensitive content, with the answer written to a field so that counsel can decide what to put before the court.

On the joint application of the parties, § 613 ZPO requires the court to keep a verbatim record of the hearing or the taking of evidence, which the parties can read as it is written. Parties used to transcripts in arbitration will recognise the practice.

Running the review at scale

Once a prompt has been tested on a handful of documents and approved, a bulk scan applies it across the whole set, and the results populate the connected Nuix Discover field while the task is still running. For a German matter, Claira can keep a case's data in the EU, and the help centre states that there is no replication between its deployments.

Preparing for the first filing

The Commercial Courts give parties to large business disputes an English-language forum inside the German court system, with an appeal on points of law to the Federal Court of Justice that needs no leave. The implementation differs from state to state and may continue to change, so the court named in the contract shapes the language and the procedure available. This story is general information about the framework, and the rules for a particular matter should be checked against the current state regulation.

For document teams, the practical work starts before the organisational hearing: knowing the volume, the people and the dates, sorting German from English, and identifying confidential material early enough to apply for protection. If you would like to see how that preparation looks on your own documents, you can talk to our team.