Friedrich Graf von Westphalen & Partners (FGvW) has announced it will open in Düsseldorf at the beginning of May, its sixth office in Germany.

The office will be lead by real estate law partners Jessica Hanke and Gregor Lamla, as well as fellow partner Sven Köhnen, an expert in commercial distribution and antitrust law. 

The trio are moving from Cologne to set up the office. The initial team will consist of six lawyers.

Hanke joined the firm in June 2024 from McDermott Will & Emery, where she had spent over thirteen years, having previously worked at Taylor Wessing, while Lamla, a fellow McDermott alumnus of nearly ten years standing, joined from Lighthouse in 2022. 

Sven Köhnen has been a partner at the firm since 2001. The trio and their teams will aim to offer a full-service law firm facility locally, with further expansion planned.

The new office will be based at Heinrich-Heine-Allee, in Düsseldorf's central business district, close to key business and retail locations, with sufficient space to support the firm's growth and strengthen the firm’s presence in the Rhineland while expanding client relationships.

Cologne and Düsseldorf and are only 33km apart and the firms said the two offices would be regard as a “single location, thus providing partners and employees with additional flexibility and mobility in terms of their place of work”.

The firm’s other offices are in Freiburg, Frankfurt, Berlin and Hamburg, which opened at the start of the year.

Cologne-based partner and firm spokesman Carsten Laschet said: “With this experienced team on site, we will establish another strong office location, enabling our clients to benefit directly from our high-quality full-service offering in one of Germany's most important economic centres. We look forward to further developing this offering and see this as a significant milestone for the further growth of our firm,” 

He added that Cologne and Düsseldorf “are complementary rather than contrasting” with the new office “ideally strengthens our presence in the Rhineland”.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, IP specialist Gabi Müllejans joined the Cologne office as a local partner after nine years at a local Cologne IP outfit firm Jonas

Last month Hogan Lovells announced the hire of Thomas Nebel as a partner in its disputes practice from Dentons, where he was co-head of the German dispute resolution practice, and DLA Piper unveiled the hiring of real estate partner Gerold Jaeger from Clifford Chance.