Biography: Insolvency & Restructuring

Hans-Jochem Lüer is a partner in Heuking Kühn Lüer Wojtek, one of the larger German business law firms. Originally with a smaller firm specialising in banking, insurance, reorganisation and insolvency work, he has been involved in a number of major German reorganisation and insolvency proceedings, regularly advising or representing either the liquidator, the trustee, or the debtor company. He also advises on numerous cross-border situations, both to preserve foreign assets of debtors and to protect the domestic trustee's interests in certain assets abroad, and to protect collateral securities of domestic creditors against unfounded foreign claims. Dr Lüer has been a member of the insolvency committee of the German Bar Association for many years and he has been its chairman from 1991 to 2005. He was also active in the International Bar Association, section of business law, and has been vice-chairman and co-chairman of the committee for Creditors' Rights and Insolvency for six years. He is a member of the American College of Bankruptcy, the International Insolvency Institute, and the American Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel as well.

For his legal education, Dr Lüer attended the Universities of Tübingen, Bonn, and Cologne, where he obtained the degree of Doctor Juris. He attended the University of California School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 1963/64, earning his LLM there before finishing his legal education in Germany. Until 1969 he was an assistant at the University of Cologne at the Institute of Foreign and International Private Law. After several years in banking and the mutual fund business, he started on his own as a lawyer in 1974. His original Cologne based firm later merged with others to become one of the more important, internationally oriented German law firms with offices in many German business centres such as Berlin, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich, and in Brussels and Zurich as well.

Dr Lüer has published extensively with contributions to major legal publications, primarily in the areas of corporate law, transborder insolvency and reorganisation. Special reference is made to his articles on German Insolvency Law, in International Insolvency, edited by C Felsenfeld, A L Gropper, and H Beltzer (NY 2000), on "The Revision of International Insolvency Law in Germany", in Current Issues in Cross-Border Insolvency, edited by Leonard/Besant (1994), and particularly his contributions to Uhlenbruck, Insolvenzordnung, 13th edition (2010). In this leading German insolvency publication, Dr Lüer comments in particular on the Reorganisation and Insolvency Plan provisions (InsO §§ 217-269), the articles on International Insolvency (InsO §§ 335-358), and the EU Regulation on Insolvency.

During the last decade, the active business of Dr Lüer has had its center of interest in the areas of M&A and corporate restructurings. He has represented regularly institutional investors (also foreign) acquiring medium-sized domestic enterprises or disposing of them.

Other Practice Areas

Hans-Jochem Lüer also features in the following practice areas:

• Insurance & Reinsurance