On our recent Road Trip across Europe, we stopped at the main centres that are driving innovation in LawTech, thanks to a concentration of tech expertise and entrepreneurial thinking. Amsterdam was, of course, unmissable – the Dutch LawTech scene is one of the most exciting.

The UK Department for International Trade (DIT) is working hard to foster links and promote collaboration between UK startups and those further afield. They helped us out in spotting the hot properties to meet up with, and setting the scene in terms of the environment and advantages that LawTech companies can enjoy in the Netherlands.

The Netherlands is a great place for our LawTech community to do business. According to the Legatum Prosperity Index, it’s the number one country in the world for social capital, second only to New Zealand in economic equality and in the top three for the business environment, personal freedom and governance.

Low barriers to entry mean that more than 400 British companies have made their homes there, and legal innovators are hoping to do the same. We caught up with a bunch of startups that are looking to change the legal industry in collaboration with our friends at Dutch Legal Tech:

• Visual Contracts, a legal design thinking platform
• TiqTime, a tracking tool that reduces billable hour tracking to a minute a day
• CommonAccord, an open-source document automation platform
• Appjection, an app-based tool for querying penalties
• Clocktimizer, an award-winning business intelligence tool for law firms
• Nalytics, a tool that extracts usable knowledge from unstructured data
• Legalcomplex, a network of legal meetups
• LegalThings, a contract life cycle automation solution.

And there are plenty more. They’re also supported by General Counsel Netherlands (GCN), a professional network of members managing more than 3,000 in-house counsel. GCN is currently forming a think tank to engage better with LawTech and help startups take the next step.

We’re expecting big things from the Dutch LawTech startup market, because apart from the favourable business environment, they’re also blessed with a tech-savvy group of early adopters as customers, who are comfortable doing business in English, and providing a gateway to the rest of Europe.

Many of our Dutch friends will be in London for the Legal Geek conference in October – don’t miss your opportunity to find out what they’re cooking up, and how it could change the client experience for your law firm or legal department for the better.