Lawyer in DE
What this register publishes today, what is missing, and the smallest change that would move it up.
What was found
Germany gave every lawyer a signing key and a national identifier, and still publishes no file. The national official directory is free to inspect for anyone, by statute, with an electronic search system the law explicitly requires. Each lawyer carries a SAFE identifier inside the judiciary’s electronic communication infrastructure, and a chip card holding a signature certificate used to file with courts. The directory is not advisory: courts and prosecutors are required by criminal procedure law to use it when appointing defence counsel. So the state has already decided that this register is authoritative enough to bind a court, and has already issued the cryptography. It just points both at the channel rather than at an artefact. This is the Estonian finding again, in a country with a completely different administration, which is the reason it belongs in the index twice.
What it publishes
| Check | Answer | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| A public page per licence | Yes | Gives a reader something to look at and a checker something to archive and attest against. |
| A bulk export | No | Lets a consumer hold the whole list instead of fetching one licence at a time, and lets anyone hash it. |
| Machine readable | No | A CSV or JSON rather than a page built for a browser. Decides whether checking can be automated at all. |
| Signed | No | Makes the file impossible to forge or mirror convincingly. Nothing reaches grade A without it. |
The next step
Give every licence a stable address
The register exists but lives behind a search form, so there is nothing to link to, nothing to archive and nothing to attest against. A permanent address per licence costs little and moves this row to grade C on its own.
A grade describes a register, not the authority behind it and not the quality of its supervision. An authority can run an excellent register and still sit at grade D because it is a search form.
If this row is wrong, it gets corrected with the correction published beside it. The index is useful only if it can be argued with. Tell the lab.