Board

David Detjen is a partner in the New York office of Alston + Bird LLP and leader of the firm’s German Practice Team. His practice is concentrated on the representation of European clients regarding US legal matters, including mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, licensing of intellectual property and general corporate and commercial issues.

David was editor-in-chief of the International Law Practicum for twenty-five years, a publication of the New York State Bar Association, and is author of The Germans in Missouri, 1900 – 1918, (University of Missouri Press, 1985); Establishing a United States Joint Venture with a Foreign Partner (Matthew Bender & Co.: 1988, 1990, and 1993); United States Joint Ventures with International Partners (Juris Publishing, 2000); and two German-English bilingual handbooks for the German American Chamber of Commerce: Das Handelsvertreter – und Eigenhaendlerrecht in den USA/Distributorship Agreements in the United States (1983 and 1989); and Lizenzierung von Technologie und Warenzeichen in den USA/Licensing Technology and Trademarks in the United States (1988 and 1997).

He is a member of the American Bar Association; The New York State Bar Association and its International Section (and a former Vice-Chairman); The Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis; The New York City Bar Association; and The Missouri Bar Association.

In addition, he is a member of the Board of Directors and a Chairman of the Friends of Goethe New York, Chairman of the German Forum New York, Vice-Chairman of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, a Member of the Board and a former Vice-Chairman of the German American Chamber of Commerce in New York, Vice-President of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, Chairman of the Friends of Atlantik-Brücke e.V.; and a member of the board of various other German-American organizations.

He received his JD with honors from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and his AB, magna cum laude, from the College of Arts and Sciences of Washington University, and has been honored as a distinguished alumnus of the College, the School of Law, and the University. He also studied law and history at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität in Tübingen, Germany.

Karl Geercken is the national co-leader of Alston & Bird’s 300-plus member Litigation Department. Like the attorneys he leads, Karl has experience representing clients across the U.S. and the world in a broad range of complex, high-stakes commercial litigation and arbitration. Karl is fluent in German and is co-leader of the firm’s German Practice Team and is a member of the Global Business Strategies Team.

Karl focuses on the business goal of the client and works with his team to devise a strategy that supports it. He emphasizes early, thorough case assessment as a tool to reduce uncertainty in litigation.

In addition to his work for U.S. clients in manufacturing, financial services, technology, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, real estate and other industries, Karl has represented a number of ultra-high net worth individuals in a variety of business disputes and art law matters. He frequently manages parallel U.S. and foreign litigation and has extensive experience in cross-border litigation and jurisdictional issues and has been called upon to represent foreign governments or their agencies in U.S. courts. As a result, he has developed insight into handling issues common to international dispute resolution, including those relating to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), the Act of State Doctrine and obtaining discovery abroad.

Jim Hanks focuses his practice on general corporation and securities law, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate governance. He is a Senior Lecturer at Northwestern Law School and a Visiting Senior Lecturer at Cornell Graduate School of Management.

Since 1996, Jim has taught Comparative Corporate Law and Governance at the Cornell Law School-Université de Paris I Summer Institute and since 2003 he has taught International Mergers and Acquisitions at Bucerius Law School. From 1997 until 2003, Jim was a member of the ABA law school accreditation committee and also served as a member of the Board of Regents of Morgan State University. He received his LLM from Harvard Law School, his LLB from the University of Maryland School of Law and his AB from Princeton University.

Jim also advises governments on revision of their company and securities laws. He is the author of the definitive 700-page treatise Maryland Corporation Law (supplemented annually) and the co-author (with former Stanford Law School Dean Bayless Manning) of Legal Capital (4th ed. 2013). For many years, he has been listed in The Best Lawyers in America. In 2008, Jim received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award of the Maryland State Bar Association Section of Business Law. In 2012, he was the fifth (and first American) recipient of the Honorary Medal of Bucerius Law School.

Manuel Hartung, born 1981 in Fritzlar, has been C.E.O. and Chairman of the Executive Board of the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius since January 2022.

Previously he headed the WISSEN section of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT from 2019 and was publisher-editor of ZEIT GERMANY. Manuel Hartung has been engaged with DIE ZEIT since 2004 – including positions as editor-in-chief of ZEIT CAMPUS, as managing director of the ZEIT-Verlag subsidiary TEMPUS CORPORATE, and – between 2015 and 2019 – as head of the education section CHANCEN. Manuel Hartung attended the Henri Nannen School of Journalism in Hamburg und studied history in Bonn and New York as well as public administration at Harvard.

He has instructed in the past at the Universities of St. Gallen and Göttingen and at present teaches at the Institute for Arts and Media Management – a branch of Hamburg’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater – where he was appointed as professor in 2021.

Manuel Hartung has served on the Board of Trustees of Bucerius Law School since 2017. Further, in 2022 he became chairman of both Bucerius Law School’s Supervisory Board and the Bucerius Kunst Forum’s Board of Trustees. He previously served on the University
Council of the Hochschule Coburg, on the Advisory Board of Common Purpose Deutschland, and on the Wertekommission’s Board of Directors.

Dr Nina Lemmens studied art history and history at the University of Bonn and worked as a freelance journalist for ten years during her time at university. After finishing her PhD, she worked as personal assistant for a MP in the German Parliament for one year.

Nina joined the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in 1997 and has held several positions, including Director of the DAAD London office (2000 to 2006), Director for the Asia-Pacific Section in the Bonn head office (2006 to 2009) and Director of the Department for Internationalization and Communication in DAAD in Bonn. From January 2014 to September 2018, Nina Lemmens was the Director of DAAD’s North America office in New York (USA and Canada), and the Executive Director of the German Center for Research and Innovation in New York.

From October 2018 to March 2023, Nina served as a as Member of the Executive Board (Programmvorständin) at the Joachim Herz Stiftung in Hamburg, Germany.

In October 2023, Nina started her new position as CEO of a newly founded charitable institution, the Open Embassy | doing democracy in Bonn.

Wolfgang Sturm is a Partner at Linklaters, focusing on public and private M&A transactions and pre- and post-closing restructurings. He has long-standing experience in the area of foreign direct investments in Germany and across Europe and is a regular advisor to European and Anglo-American corporations in their acquisitions of German targets with multinational structures. Until 2006, Wolfgang chaired the M&A corporate department in Germany. He began his career at Oppenhoff & Rädler, becoming Partner in 1997. In 2001, the firm merged with Linklaters, where he took the lead in initiating the China Desk in Germany to coordinate German-Chinese transactions. Wolfgang studied law at the University of Cologne.