Lisette Hendrikse

Lisette Hendrikse is the founding partner of Liance Legal, an Amsterdam-based legal advisory firm, and was named Contracts, IP and M&A Law Expert of the Year in the Netherlands at the 2024 Corporate INTL Global Awards. The recognition reflects a career of more than twenty-five years spent advising companies on the legal dimensions of international business, and her standing among the Netherlands' leading independent commercial lawyers.

Liance operates as an outsourced legal department, giving start-ups, scale-ups and mid-market companies access to the breadth of expertise usually found only in an in-house team. Since its launch some years ago, the firm has developed into what it describes as a one-stop shop, bringing together virtually all the legal disciplines a growing enterprise requires. It works extensively with technology-driven and life-sciences businesses, and is well suited to companies operating across borders and multiple jurisdictions, often in their earlier and most formative phases of growth. This model responds to a familiar challenge for ambitious companies: the need for senior, commercially aware legal counsel before they are large enough to justify a full internal legal function.

Lisette Hendrikse's own practice centres on the areas for which she has been honoured: commercial contracts, intellectual property and mergers and acquisitions. She has extensive experience of M&A and joint-venture transactions, strategic co-operations, and cross-border and domestic contracts, alongside corporate law, IP and ICT matters, and competition and consumer law. She has a particular focus on franchise, agency and distribution arrangements, and advises on energy and renewables projects and on technology ventures, frequently supporting management teams through complex, multi-jurisdictional undertakings where legal, commercial and strategic considerations are closely intertwined.

Acting as a general counsel to the businesses she serves, she combines legal analysis with a commercial, board-level perspective, helping clients structure relationships, protect their innovations and complete transactions with confidence. Her work spans the full arc of a company's development, from establishing its contractual and intellectual property foundations to negotiating investment, expansion and eventual exit. That continuity of relationship is central to the Liance approach, allowing the firm to understand a client's business deeply rather than advising only on isolated transactions.

Her standing in the Dutch market is well established: she was previously honoured with the Dutch Independent Legal Award and is a recognised voice among independent legal practitioners in the Netherlands, contributing to professional discussion in her fields of expertise. The 2024 Corporate INTL accolade adds to that reputation, marking her out as a leading adviser to internationally minded companies that need pragmatic, senior legal support across contracts, intellectual property and M&A without the overhead of a full in-house function. For high-technology and life-sciences businesses in particular, her blend of transactional depth and everyday commercial counsel offers a distinctive and valued form of support.