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My former startup operated in a regulated industry. As a result, I know a fair number of lawyers well. In my recent conversations with them, one topic kept coming up: the talent shortage and what it does to a firm. That made me curious. So I did some digging.
One sentence I came across stayed with me. It comes from Martin Wulf, partner at PKF Wulf Gruppe, a fast-growing audit and tax advisory firm: "A lack of staff is a major reason why we are not growing faster. We have to turn down mandates because we do not have the people." He said this a few years ago in the Finance ThinkTank.
By his account, his firm has no shortage of demand; it could grow. What it lacks is people. In the same article, Wulf describes what that leads to in practice: he had to turn down a payroll mandate covering 2,800 salaries. Five staff members would have been tied up for a month - capacity he would have had to pull out of other mandates.
The talent shortage costs firms business.
The Numbers Are Unambiguous
Current data confirms that the problem is no less glaring today than it was in 2022. Tax advisory, audit and legal services are, according to the ifo business survey from August 2025, the sector most affected by the talent shortage in Germany. 72.7 percent of firms report that they can no longer find qualified professionals - by a clear margin the highest figure of any sector surveyed.
A study commissioned by Haufe among tax advisors captured the consequences. The findings are uncomfortable; they show that many firms are managing their retreat, not their growth: around 30 percent of respondents are considering terminating existing mandates. One in four firms plans to stop taking on new mandates altogether. One in eight fears having to close entirely in the medium term.
A considerable number of firms are no longer asking "how do we grow?" but "which mandates do we give up?".
Recruiting and Employer Branding Only Go So Far
It is understandable that firms respond by investing in recruiting and employer branding. They run more ads, pay higher starting salaries and make themselves more attractive as employers. That makes sense, but it does not address the underlying problem: there are fewer trained professionals than the market needs. Supply cannot meet demand.
The number of qualified professionals retiring over the next few years is larger than the number coming up behind them. That is a demographic reality no HR strategy, however sophisticated, can change.
On top of that comes the steadily growing workload the current staff has to absorb. Reporting obligations, documentation requirements, statistics - much of what authorities used to handle themselves now lands on the firm's desk. The work per mandate rises while the number of people available to do it falls.
At the same time, the candidate pool is shrinking. In short: simply investing more in HR will not solve this. You cannot hire professionals who do not exist. Firms that want to serve the demand that is already there, rather than turning down new mandates, have to create the necessary capacity some other way.
The Lever: Rebalancing How Qualified Professionals Spend Their Time
A good place to start is a sober look at what trained professionals actually do all day. In many firms, a substantial share of it is grunt work: sorting and processing receipts, reviewing files, evaluating documents, moving numbers from one system into the next. Work that requires expertise but rarely calls for the judgment a professional spent years training to develop.
This is where potential sits unused. Firms that manage to automate precisely this kind of work can free up capacity for the tasks that do require the judgment of an experienced professional: assessment and advice.
The firms already going down this road are not doing it with a chatbot, they are doing it with a system. Recurring work gets encoded once as a standardized process - processing a client's receipts, reviewing case files, preparing recurring analyses - and is then applied reliably, over and over. With tools such as agents, skills and workflows, hours of review turn into an assessment in a fraction of the time. And with apps, you get interfaces friendly enough that clerical staff actually want to use them.
What is interesting is how the firms at the leading edge of this think about artificial intelligence. They do not see it as a replacement for people, but as a tool for them.
One example I like to bring up in talks is the American startup Moritz. It is a law firm from the emerging class of AI service firms. The startup employs lawyers from top universities like Harvard and Stanford, yet attacks the market with disruptive pricing. Companies pay a fixed price (!) of $750 for a bespoke contract of up to 30 pages - with full liability assumed. It works because they use AI in a sophisticated way and have designed a system in which 80% of the tasks run automatically, with the lawyers taking on the final, decisive 20%. Review remains the professional's job. The system delivers the groundwork.
Established firms here in Germany can create significant capacity too, provided they manage to document their knowledge and their processes in a way that lets AI applications take over individual steps while following the firm's standards.
But for that to work in practice, the system has to stand on solid legal and regulatory ground.
Compliance and Security Are Non-Negotiable
This is where the path for professional services firms diverges from other industries. A marketing team can try out an AI tool and drop it again if it does not work out. A licensed professional cannot. Above them sits § 203 StGB, client confidentiality under German criminal law, with personal criminal liability attached. A standard data processing agreement, of the kind generic tools offer, addresses the GDPR but not professional secrecy.
That is why firms evaluate vendors in a different order than other industries: the question of whether you are allowed to use a tool comes before the question of what it can do. The liability risk weighs more heavily than the efficiency promise.
A viable solution needs to bring a number of things to the table: client-separated workspaces, hosting in Germany, no US parent company and no exposure to the CLOUD Act. Training on client data must be ruled out. And a Berufsgeheimnisträger-Zusatzvereinbarung, the supplementary agreement for professionals bound by secrecy obligations that explicitly addresses § 203 StGB, is essential. This is exactly what we offer with nuwacom.
One more building block: PII scrubbing, the automatic detection and removal of personal data before content is processed further. It means professionals can trust that their clients' most sensitive information never leaves the protected space in the first place.
Building the Firm's Own AI Operating System
Once these foundational conditions are met, the next step is to build the system that defines the frame in which AI can reliably do the preparatory work. With an integrated platform like nuwacom, this requires no particular technical skills. The architecture for a firm's own operating system comes with it. You can read more about how our customers build their systems effectively in our eBook on the topic.
What This Comes Down To
The talent shortage will not be advertised away. That is the uncomfortable starting point - and at the same time the reason why capacity is no longer a question of headcount, but of the system your existing team works with.
The lever firms have, then, is a better distribution of their people's time. If you can free the people you already have from grunt work, within a frame a professional can stand behind in front of clients, the partnership and the professional oversight bodies, taking on new mandates becomes something you can do with confidence again.