Bird & Bird

The firm: Bird & Bird is an international law firm, with a long-established reputation for having a rare and invaluable grasp of strategic commercial issues. The firm combines exceptional legal expertise with deep industry knowledge and refreshingly creative thinking, to help clients operating at the forefront of their industries to achieve their commercial goals.

Bird & Bird has over 1,400 lawyers and legal practitioners with broad advisory transactional and contentious capability, with a particular focus on key industry sectors. The firm has an extensive international reach with 32 offices across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, offering a seamless, cross-border service between locations and sector and practice groups.

Since 2018, the office in Amsterdam provides a comprehensive range of high-quality corporate and commercial legal services to its clients. Combining a strongly established Dutch practice with teams from each of the firm’s international offices, it is well placed to provide domestic and cross-border advice to national and international clients.

The firm has extensive experience acting for clients in a wide variety of intellectual property and other commercial litigation, as well as in disputes in regulated markets. It is also one of few law firms in the Netherlands that specialises in Dutch Supreme Court litigation.

The office is staffed by over 80 Dutch lawyers, all of whom are bilingual in Dutch and English. The team of lawyers, tax experts and notaries is switched on to the particular challenges of technology-oriented, regulated industry sectors.

Areas of practice: Underpinned by deep client and industry knowledge, the firm’s key sectors include:

Electronics: advising clients operating in or serving the electronics industry, from R&D and component manufacturing, to technology licensing agreements.

Energy and utilities: advising large multinationals, investors, project companies and large energy consumers on electricity generation, energy trading, renewable energy, clean Tech and climate change, and upstream oil and gas.

Financial services: advising global clients in the financial services sector, such as global retail and investment banks, investors and hedge funds, on transactions, regulatory issues, commercial contracts and dispute resolution.

Food and beverage: advising on a full range of areas, including branding, labelling, health claims, fair trade and patents on novel foods.

Life sciences and healthcare: advising clients in biotechnology, bioinformatics and pharmaceutical companies on licensing and drug development agreements, R&D collaboration, IP acquisitions and joint ventures.

Media and entertainment: advising clients from across the media spectrum on a wide range of issues, including exploitation across all forms of digital media and emerging areas, such as user-generated content exploitation.

Notarial services: (inter)national restructurings, mergers and acquisitions, real estate transactions and financing.

Technology and communications: advising on matters ranging from smaller innovative projects to some of the largest, most complex and ground-breaking transactions and disputes of recent years. Its team includes lawyers with a particular focus on communications, devices and components, digital tech and eCommerce, and software and services as well as a number of more specialist industries including data centres, postal and satellites.