As ETL GLOBAL celebrates 10 years of empowering SMEs, the spotlight turns to the people who have contributed to its growth. In this interview, Dr. Jörn Brockhuis, Managing Partner of ETL GLOBAL Polska, looks back on his professional path and shares his perspective on the network’s development over the past decade.
Background and the beginnings of a career in law
Born in Iserlohn, a small town in western Germany, Jörn Brockhuis admits that his path into law was not the result of a long-term plan. At school he was drawn to mathematics and first considered studying it at university, but a friend convinced him otherwise. “He advised me against studying mathematics because it would lead to a career as a teacher, where you have to teach bored children.” Jörn recalls laughing. Taking that advice to heart, he decided to study law instead, a choice that set him on a path which has now spanned about four decades.
His first years after graduation were spent at larger German firms, beginning with Gleiss Lutz in Berlin and later Rödl & Partner in Nuremberg and WrocławWorking in these environments gave him the chance to handle demanding cases early on and to learn how bigger offices approached client work. From the beginning he was involved in corporate matters, and it was here that his focus turned towards mergers and acquisitions, real estate and asset finance, becoming the core areas of his practice and have remained central to his work ever since.
Moving to Poland and joining ETL GLOBAL
After several years, Jörn relocated in 1998 to Poland, his wife’s home country, where the growing economy created new opportunities for international lawyers. It was in this environment that he founded his own practice, BSJP, and over the following decade he built it into a well-established firm in the market.
As the practice developed, new perspectives opened up, and in 2015 Jörn was introduced to ETL GLOBAL through Franz-Josef Wernze and Dr. Christian Gorny. What began with an initial meeting led to the decision to bring BSJP into the network. “It was an easy decision,” he recalls, describing the step that would gradually see him take on the role of the Master Partner for Poland, coordinating and expanding ETL GLOBAL’s presence in the country.
When he thinks back to those early years in the network, what comes to mind are the first conferences, which were still small and personal in scale. “It was a little club of some people coming together and discussing a lot of good topics,” he says. His first event was an ETL meeting in Sopot, Poland in September 2015, the year of ETL GLOBAL’s official creation. This event had much fewer participants than the ETL GLOBAL international events have nowadays, but already back then he noticed the quality of the exchanges and the participants’ willingness to collaborate. His first participation in an ETL GLOBAL Conference followed in Berlin in the year 2017.
From these meetings he built lasting working relationships with colleagues such as Juan Bermúdez in Spain, Robert Jurka in the Czech Republic, Sara and Peter Brassington in the UK and Vanessa Spaans in the Netherlands, which continue to this day. Over time the conferences have grown, with more than 200 people now taking part, but in his view the character has remained the same. “Of course it’s a little bit bigger now, but it’s always a nice and family-like atmosphere. More people mean more fun, and more opportunities to exchange ideas and develop projects together.”
Jörn Brockhuis at the 2019 ETL GLOBAL Conference held in Mallorca.
Building the Polish network
This mix of personal contact and professional collaboration also defines how he sees the Polish network. “The goals always stay the same. We want to make every year a little bit more profit, a little bit more turnover, and I hope that most people have fun working in this group and together with me.” For Jörn, financial results are important but cannot stand alone; the enjoyment of the work is just as crucial. “If the profit is good, it’s wonderful. If not, then we try again the next year.” This down-to-earth approach has guided the steady development of ETL GLOBAL in Poland.
As the network has expanded, he has also seen how this growth translates into daily practice. More colleagues across countries not only bring more opportunities to share clients but also create a broader exchange of knowledge about how different markets evolve. For Jörn, this kind of information is essential in a cross-border environment because it directly strengthens the advice he can offer to his clients. “It gives you more perspectives.”
Facing new challenges
Looking to the future, Jörn sees technology as the force that is already transforming the profession and will only grow in importance. “Artificial intelligence, automatisation, e-invoicing… this will have a big impact. In Poland, e-invoicing will even become legally binding. There will be a lot of changes, especially in bookkeeping and accounting, but also in legal work.” For him, these developments show that legal tech is not a distant prospect but a reality that is reshaping how lawyers operate. “In the next two or three years there will be big changes in how we work. Maybe for younger people it’s more interesting. I hope in my last years I can live without legal tech, but let’s see.”
Even as he acknowledges the scale of these shifts, he insists that the essence of the profession lies not in the tools but in the attitude with which the work is approached. “If somebody enjoys his job, he doesn’t really feel it as work. If somebody only wants to earn money, it will be difficult.” This perspective has guided him throughout his career, shaping more than three decades in law and his leadership within ETL GLOBAL. For Jörn, lasting success comes from combining professional growth with personal fulfilment, and this conviction continues to define his role in the network today.
A look back at ETL GLOBAL CONFERENCES
