Court costs

Does anyone else get stuck on German court costs terms? Nearly half my time struggling with a court record (Protokoll) was taken up trying to find out what was meant by überschießender Vergleichswert. Context:

bq. Der Streitwert wird festgesetzt wie folgt:
– elterliche Sorge XXX EUR
– überschießender Vergleichswert XXX EUR

It doesn’t matter much to my client, who just needs evidence of the custody situation, but I did want to find out what it was before I did the translation.With some difficult googling (after fruitless page-turning), I conclude it means the lawyer gets an extra fee in relation to a settlement that has not yet been part of the proceedings but has now been entered into in court, and that the figure called the Vergleichswert (value of the settlement) is the figure for the extra work the lawyer had on account of the settlement (the full figure is reduced to take account of the fact that work was saved because it was done together with other matters.

I did find a forum (123recht.net) in which laypersons ask legal questions, and that helped somewhat – whatever the standard of legal advice, it can help a translator. The explanation given there introduced the word Mehrvergleich, which was also new to me and was equally hard to pin down. Still, I found a helpful definition on the site of a lawyer, Ingo Lahn:

bq. Wird ein sog. Mehrvergleich geschlossen, bei dem weitere Gegenstände, die noch nicht Gegenstand des Prozesses waren, mitverglichen …

(text abbreviated to spare my brain). I don’t think I’ve got time to read BRAGO (or BRAGebO, as it should be abbreviated), but section 118 seems to apply:

bq. 1) In anderen als den im Dritten bis Elften Abschnitt geregelten Angelegenheiten erhält der Rechtsanwalt fünf Zehntel bis zehn Zehntel der vollen Gebühr

Perhaps it would be a good thing at least for translators from German if BRAGO ceased to exist, as suggested recently on Handakte WebLAWg.

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