On 1 January 2026, parts of the german law ‘Gesetzes zur Änderung des Zuständigkeitsstreitwerts der Amtsgerichte, zum Ausbau der Spezialisierung der Justiz in Zivilsachen sowie zur Änderung weiterer prozessualer Regelungen’ will come into force. As a result, on 1 January 2026, the jurisdiction value of the local courts will be raised from the current €5,000 to €10,000, which will allow significantly more civil disputes to be heard before the local courts. In addition, the law provides for the assignment of jurisdiction regardless of the value in dispute: for example, areas such as medical treatment, procurement or publication disputes are always to be assigned to regional courts. In this way, the legislator is pursuing the goal of achieving greater specialisation and efficiency in the courts through subject-specific jurisdiction rules.
Effects on attitudes within IKAROS
To ensure that this change takes effect in IKAROS immediately after it comes into force, an adjustment has been made to the core of IKAROS: two new system settings will be read out in future for the treatment of the value in dispute limit.
One where you specify the applicable limit amount for the determination of the court of jurisdiction based on the amount in dispute in the Default Summons Application and for the custom code method ‘Ccase.getLitigationCourt()’.
One where you must tick a box when the law comes into force so that, from this point onwards, the court determination for certain claims in the JDP is made independently of the value in dispute.
Integration of changes into our patches
Both new system settings will be delivered with the following IKAROS versions:
- 2023.1 Patch 5: Delivery expected in calendar week 50 of 2025.
- 2025.1 Release: Already delivered.
- 2024.1 Patch 1, Supplementary Patch 20:
- Delivery expected in calendar week 50 of 2025.
- This supplementary patch is an intermediate step towards Patch 2, which is planned for early 2026. It does not contain any content from previous supplementary patches. If you have already received and installed a supplementary patch for Patch 1 and require the functions described above, please do not install this patch and contact our support team instead.
As soon as the change in the law comes into force, you will need to adjust the two system settings accordingly.