With our offices in Cologne, Freiburg, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Hamburg we are firmly anchored in regional Germany and are excellently networked. The offices enjoy a long tradition: Friedrich Graf von Westphalen established the Cologne office in 1973. The Freiburg office's roots go back to 1924 when the publishing lawyer, Walter Bappert, first opened his law firm in Staufen, which he then relocated to Freiburg in 1926. In 2014, we established an office in Frankfurt am Main in order to be present in the Rhine-Main region and to offer our many international clients a hub for their business throughout Europe. The Berlin office was added in 2020. This office offers the opportunity to be closer to the federal authorities; Berlin is also the central point of contact in Germany for the start-up scene and for private equity and venture capital investors. Since 2024, an office in Hamburg has added to the firm's presence in the north of the country. In the metropolitan region of the Hanseatic city, which is home to a thriving SME sector as well as a relevant center of global trade, we advise our clients on both their regional and international projects.
The Freiburg office was internationally oriented at an early stage and established an office in Brussels, where the EU Commission is based, in 1991. In addition, we maintain our own office for trademark law in Alicante, where the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) is based.
Our clients travel all over the world, and we support them in this. This is why we maintain a close network of law firms in all the world's economic centers, with which we work closely together. These are law firms that we know personally through many years of cooperation and the exchange of young colleagues and with whom we meet regularly, on whose quality we can rely and who offer our clients the same service they have come to expect from Friedrich Graf von Westphalen & Partner. You can find out more about our services abroad here under International.