MIWE has relied on the Maxfeld team as its external legal department for global procurement since 2021.
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Six situations in which the legal workload becomes recurring, while a full in-house department is not yet economical.
A dedicated legal team becomes familiar with your business, works within your systems and supports decisions at an early stage. MIWE, a manufacturer of bakery technology, has used Maxfeld as its external legal department since 2021.
We provide ongoing legal advice and establish reliable standards through playbooks, templates and deadline management. A dedicated contact understands your business and supports decisions before a question develops into a dispute.
For German subsidiaries of international groups, we consolidate legal advice in one place and align it with headquarters. For projects abroad, our German team coordinates the jurisdictions involved.
Step 1 of 4
You gain a reliable legal function with clear responsibilities, without the fixed cost and headcount of a full internal team.
You reach us at partner level, without being passed from one contact to the next. We get back to you quickly.
Answers on the model, costs, liability and international support.
An external legal department assumes responsibility for a company’s ongoing legal function. Unlike individual law-firm mandates, a dedicated team works continuously with management and operational departments and becomes part of the company’s processes. The model is also known as Legal as a Service or General Counsel as a Service.
We often agree a monthly retainer covering a defined service portfolio and response times. Peaks in demand and larger projects can be handled through additional time budgets or fixed project fees. Billing by time spent or under the German statutory fee schedule remains possible. The appropriate model depends on the regular workload and expected special projects.
A traditional mandate usually concerns a single matter. An external legal department is designed as a continuing function, with a dedicated contact, agreed response times, ongoing advice and an overview of the company’s wider legal context.
The model is particularly suitable where legal work is recurring but does not yet justify a full-time in-house role. Scope and budget can be adjusted as the company grows. The support may later transition to an interim general counsel model or an internal legal department.
This is a genuine attorney mandate. We work independently and free from outside instructions under Section 43a of the Federal Lawyers' Act (BRAO), are bound by attorney confidentiality and are covered by professional indemnity insurance under Section 51 BRAO. In addition, the prohibition on representing conflicting interests under Section 43a(4) BRAO and Section 3 of the Professional Rules for Lawyers (BORA) applies to us, so we keep mandates organisationally separate. Unlike an in-house company lawyer (Syndikus), external lawyers hold a right to refuse testimony and, in particular for materials kept by the firm, broader protection against seizure (Sections 53 and 160a of the Code of Criminal Procedure, StPO), which strengthens the confidentiality of the legal work.
In legal advice, the law firm is usually a controller in its own right rather than a processor. A data processing agreement under Article 28 of the GDPR is therefore usually not required for the core advice; data access is safeguarded through the duty of confidentiality and technical protective measures. For purely technical processing, such an agreement can still be advisable.
Yes, this is a core use case. We assume all legal advice for the German subsidiary in one place, translate global group policies into legally sound German law, and represent the company locally before the authorities. Conversely, for German companies with projects abroad, we coordinate several jurisdictions centrally.
