I hired Mr. Johannes Hofele from Breiholdt Rechtsanwälte to represent myself in a case against my…read morelandlord who wanted to move into the apartment he was renting out to our family. Well, the experience was a total disaster.
Motivation.
Mr Hofele was very energetic and cheerful until he got the money. After that I had hard time getting him on the line or having my emails answered. When he did get back to me, it was always like he didn't have enough time to talk or I was an annoyance distracting him from something more important.
Ways of working.
Everything about Mr. Hofele is poorly organised and totally unstructured. He never came prepared to a meeting, always trying to come up with a half-baked solution on the fly in the middle of the call. He always struggled to find the case-related documents despite myself keeping everything in a shared Google Drive folder and sharing a link with him multiple times. Each time we had a call, he spent good 5 minutes looking for the right document, failing, and ending up with "okay, I'll find it later and take a look".
Mr. Hofele had to be constantly reminded of the legal deadlines because he was unable to keep track of them himself. One time, when I cautiously inquired about why we had nearly missed another deadline, I was told by Mr. Hofele that "I should consider myself lucky because he was on a vacation and didn't read his emails".
Professionalism.
While there was quite a number of eyebrow-raising moves on Mr. Hofele's side, the true pinnacle of his "professionalism" was the court hearing. Mr. Hofele was supposed to announce the date we we ready to vacate the apartment, and we discussed the date multiple times both by email and in phone conversations. Well, in the court Mr. Hofele managed to announce a different date. Since I don't speak German, I didn't catch that during the hearing and only was able to find that out after we got the written copy of the court's decision. For a moment I wasn't sure whether Mr. Hofele worked for us or for the other party we had a dispute with. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, they say.
Bottom line.
I don't know if this is what Mr. Hofele has always been or if all of the above is the result of aging and declining mental capabilities, but I totally recommend staying away if not from the the company itself then at least from Mr. Johannes Hofele.