The lawyer before the minister

Admission to the bar, 2007

Bilger was admitted as a Rechtsanwalt, a lawyer entitled to represent clients, in 2007. The Bundestag biography for the 2017–2021 term states this, and a 2018 trade-press interview repeats it.

Admission was the end point of the training route described on the education page: law studies at Tübingen, the First State Examination in 2004, a two-year traineeship at the Regional Court in Stuttgart and the Second State Examination. In Germany only those who hold the qualification for judicial office, gained by passing the second examination, can be admitted.

MVV Energiedienstleistungen, 2006–2009

From 2006 to 2009 Bilger worked in the strategy department of MVV Energiedienstleistungen GmbH in Mannheim, a company of the Mannheim-based MVV energy group. The current Bundestag biography describes him as having worked there “as a lawyer in the strategy department” (translation), and his declarations to the Bundestag list the company, with the location Mannheim, among his previous occupations.

The start date, 2006, is a year earlier than his admission to the bar, so the description of the whole period as legal work should be read as the Bundestag's summary rather than as a precise statement of his status in each year. No source describes his tasks in the strategy department in more detail. The period ended in 2009, the year he was elected to the Bundestag. During the same years he was state chair of the Junge Union in Baden-Württemberg.

The Stuttgart law practice

Members of the Bundestag must disclose their professional activities, both those before entering parliament and those carried on alongside the mandate. Bilger's disclosures for the 19th electoral term (2017–2021) list:

Rechtsanwaltskanzlei Paliakoudis-Bilger, Stuttgart, Rechtsanwalt (bis März 2018)

His current disclosures for the 21st term list, among previous occupations, “Rechtsanwalt, Stuttgart”. German Wikipedia states that he founded a practice with colleagues in 2007; that detail could not be confirmed from a primary source and is not relied on here. The public record does not describe the practice's areas of law or clients, and this site does not speculate about them.

When did the practice end?

Three official or self-published sources give three slightly different answers.

The sources agree that active practice stopped in early 2018. March 2018 is when Bilger became Parliamentary State Secretary in the federal transport ministry. The law on Parliamentary State Secretaries applies to them the rule in the Federal Ministers Act that members of the government may not practise a profession alongside their office. That rule is consistent with the timing, although none of the sources states it as the reason. The 2019 date on his website is not explained in any source consulted.

From law to full-time politics

Bilger was elected to the Bundestag in September 2009 for the Ludwigsburg constituency. His employment at MVV ended in 2009. German members of parliament are permitted to continue a profession alongside their mandate, provided it is disclosed, and his disclosures show that he remained a practising lawyer in Stuttgart until early 2018. That was the period when he was a member of the transport committee and, from 2014, chair of the Junge Gruppe of younger CDU/CSU members.

From March 2018 he held government office, first as Parliamentary State Secretary, then in the group leadership from December 2021, and since July 2026 as Federal Minister for Transport. His later Bundestag disclosures list honorary board and trustee roles rather than professional work.

Fact and interpretation

It is tempting to draw a straight line from a lawyer's training to the way a politician works. The record supports only part of that line, so the two are separated below.