Measured 26 September 2026 · Netherlands
Fifteen questions an expat asks before hiring an employment lawyer, put to ChatGPT and to Google’s two AI answers. Forty-five runs, thirty-nine of which produced an answer.
Someone who has just been handed a settlement agreement, or dismissed, or pressured to resign while on sick leave, often does not know a single Dutch lawyer. So they ask a machine: who is a good English-speaking employment lawyer, what does one cost, who can review this agreement before I sign it.
We asked those questions in a browser that was not signed in to Google and wrote down which firms the machines named. Every answer is stored verbatim, so every number on this page can be checked against the text it came from.
ChatGPT named at least one employment law firm in 14 of its 15 answers. Google’s AI Mode did so in 9 of 15. Google’s AI Overview appeared on nine of the fifteen questions and named a firm on most of them.
These are the firms named at least twice:
| Firm | Answers naming it | Surfaces |
|---|---|---|
| GMW Advocaten | 8 | all three |
| Sørensen Advocaten | 6 | all three |
| Law & More | 5 | AI Mode, ChatGPT |
| Loyens & Loeff | 5 | all three |
| Arslan & Arslan Advocaten | 5 | all three |
| LVH Advocaten | 3 | all three |
| ScheerSanders Advocaten | 3 | all three |
| Clifford Chance | 3 | all three |
| De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek | 3 | all three |
| DLA Piper | 3 | all three |
| Stibbe | 3 | all three |
| Baker McKenzie | 3 | AI Mode, ChatGPT |
| Fennek Advocaten | 3 | AI Mode, AI Overview |
| SEC Arbeidsrecht Advocaten | 3 | AI Mode, AI Overview |
| AvanC Arbeidsrecht Advocaten | 3 | ChatGPT |
| Minerva Advocaten | 2 | AI Mode, ChatGPT |
| Houthoff | 2 | AI Mode, ChatGPT |
| Palthe Oberman Advocaten | 2 | AI Mode, AI Overview |
| NautaDutilh | 2 | AI Mode, AI Overview |
| A&O Shearman | 2 | AI Mode, AI Overview |
| Ploum | 2 | AI Overview |
Every other firm we could match to the register was named once. A firm named once can be gone from the list a few days later: when we measured the same questions for immigration lawyers again after three days, half of the names ChatGPT gave had changed.
The Dutch bar register lists 1,441 firms with lawyers practising employment law. 220 of them have an English version of their website, which is the minimum an expat needs before contacting them. Twenty-one of those 220 were named at least once in these answers.
The others are not worse lawyers. They are simply not what the machine says when someone asks. That is the whole finding, and it is a finding about the answers, not about the firms.
The questions were written before the first answer was read. Five ask who to hire, six describe a problem (a settlement agreement, unpaid salary, a non-compete clause), four ask how to choose. The same method as our measurement of immigration lawyers, described in full on the method page.
A firm counts as named when its name, as registered with the Dutch bar, appears in the answer. Generic phrases (“employment lawyers”, “legal aid”) are not names and do not count. A firm named once could be a namesake of another firm, which is why the table starts at two mentions and each of those answers was read.
One day is one day. AI answers move, and a firm absent here may be present next month. That is why we re-measure rather than conclude.
How this page counted, and how I count now. This page also counted a firm whose name appeared only as a source link under Google’s answer. From October I count a firm only where the answer writes its name. The October index uses that rule, so some numbers there are lower than here.
Corrections welcome. If your firm is listed wrongly, write to danil@sysenko.com and the page will be corrected.
Then it was not named in these answers, or was named once. It is still worth knowing which questions it was absent from: absence on “who should I hire” is a different thing from absence on “my employer wants me to sign a settlement agreement”.
I will send you the full list for free: every question, every firm named on it, and the text of the answers. One email, and you can check every line of it yourself.
If you then want the longer version — where exactly you are absent, who occupies the questions your clients ask, and which single change is worth making and measuring three weeks later — that is a paid audit, €500.