[Xylakant]

It depends. Settlements can stipulate anything. If you loose in court, you usually have to pay the winners legal fees, but the cap is what's laid out in the Rechtsanwaltsvergütungsgesetz and depends on the value of the dispute and other factors (how complicated the legal matter, ...). The winning party would still need to pay the share above that.

If you loose/win partially, the court decides on the share of cost that each party will need to pay.

The difference to the US system is that the potential costs of loosing a case can be determined pretty well in advance and that the other side cannot threaten to rack up infinite costs by racking up lawyer hours.

> edit: corrected the spelling of Rechtsanwaltsvergütungsgesetz

[bandrami]

> Rechtsanwaltvergütungsgesetzt

German spelling bees only last one round

[arrrg]

Spelling bees aren’t really a thing in Germany, I think mostly because German language is too regular and not idiosyncratic enough when it comes to spelling (unlike English) to make those interesting.

Learning correct spelling is still important and still a skill that has to be taught, so I don’t want to chalk it all up to that.

Especially compound nouns like that one you quoted, however, that are just constructed from very simple German words (no loan words) are usually no problem when it comes to spelling.

I’m fact, my own spelling troubles as a native German speaker are mostly limited to some loan words and grammatical issues. I always struggle with which preposition to pick („dem“ or „den“) because I never properly learned to think about cases.

(There actually is a spelling mistake in that word, though. The “t” in the end is not correct.)

[Xylakant]

There are actually at least two spelling errors in that word - there’s an “s” missing as well: Rechtsanwalt_s_vergütungsgesetz.

In my defense, typing this on a mobile phone with (english) autocorrect interference makes it harder. In their defense - they copied and pasted my earlier spelling error in the text, so they’re not to blame.

[wongarsu]

I think spelling bees are a thing pretty unique to the English language. In most languages you can infer spelling from pronunciation (and the other way around) with high certainty. Of course, any living language is complicated and has its share of rules and exceptions, but usually only enough to cover in the first couple school years, not enough to make it interesting to run spelling competitions.

[rahimnathwani]

When I lived in China, I once participated in a company activity day that included some team games.

One of the games was similar to a spelling bee: the facilitator said a word out loud, and each team had to try to write it correctly on a flipchart.

There are many thousands of Chinese characters. So, even though the folks in my team were smart enough to be FAANG engineers, and were young enough not to have forgotten everything they learned at school+university, there was a lot of head-scratching and second-guessing going on.

[Xylakant]

Up until 2004 it was the Bundesrechtsanwaltsgebührenordnung, so it did get easier (and I still misspelled it. no points for me)

[peepee1982]

It's easy to spell, as are most German words. It's just a lot of letters.

Ironically, the word you quoted contains spelling errors.

[bandrami]

Fair. And, yes: spelling bees make no sense in a phonetic language. It really is an English thing.

[peepee1982]

Yes. And German isn't even the most phonetic language I speak. That would be Croatian, where even loanwords are spelled phonetically, which isn't the case in German.