The problem with "I'll keep an eye on it"
A statute that matters to an ongoing case rarely changes loudly. Usually it's a single subsection amended, a new citation, a quiet update — and nobody at the firm has time to manually reopen the relevant statute every week and compare it line by line.
What a monitor does
In our Rechtsbibliothek you set up a subscription to a specific statute — for example the German Civil Code (BGB), the GmbHG, or a state law. Three settings determine how tightly it applies:
- Standalone — you want to be informed of every change, independent of a specific case file.
- Tied to a case file — the monitor runs for as long as the matter is open and resurfaces there in context.
- Firm-wide — a monitor the whole team can see, not just the person who created it.
The moment the official wording changes, you receive a notification — with a link straight to the amended passage and, wherever technically possible, a before/after view of the affected section.
Why at statute level, not practice-area level
A subscription to "tenancy law" or "employment law" sounds more convenient, but it would be vague: which of the dozens of affected provisions do you actually mean? We deliberately chose the precise, verifiable level — the specific statute, not a blurry topic area. That can be technically guaranteed and doesn't flood you with notifications about things that don't actually concern you.
Two separate signals
A change feed can report two very different things, and we show them deliberately apart:
- "Wording changed" — the actual category relevant to your matters.
- "New in our records" — we've subsequently imported a statute that was previously missing. That's housekeeping on our part, not a change in the law, and it's labelled accordingly.
What a monitor deliberately does not do
It does not judge whether a change affects your specific matter — that remains a lawyer's call. The monitor reliably delivers the "something has changed", not the "what this means for you". That division of labour — machine-reliable detection, human judgment — runs through the entire Anwaltsportal.
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