Dutch IP litigators launch AI-native law firm in Amsterdam
The law firm has been a long time in the making. Now Arvid van Oorschot and Jelle Drok, have launched Driven Lawyers in Amsterdam. Drok is a former patent litigation partner at Freshfields, van Oorschot is a former Vondst partner. They position their boutique as the first AI-native law firm in the Netherlands, built around a self-developed software platform and a fixed-fee model.
17 September 2026 by Laura King
In September, Driven Lawyers officially opened its doors in Amsterdam. The firm focuses on commercial disputes, intellectual property law, and contract and liability law. According to Arvid van Oorschot and Jelle Drok, patent disputes and other technology-driven IP cases form a core part of the practice.
Both founders bring more than two decades of litigation experience to the new venture. Van Oorschot was most recently a partner in the patent litigation team of Dutch boutique Vondst. Earlier in his career, he worked as counsel at Brinkhof and as an associate at Freshfields and Klos Morel Vos & Schaap. His practice covers patent litigation in life sciences, ICT and engineering, as well as IP disputes for clients in the creative industries.
Drok joined Freshfields in 2006 and became a partner in the firm’s dispute resolution practice in 2019. Before turning to law, which he studied in Leiden, he read aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology. His caseload has focused on patent proceedings and technology-driven commercial disputes in sectors including life sciences, semiconductors and telecoms, often involving cross-border coordination across several European jurisdictions.
The lawyers had worked together at Freshfields for some time. In February and March respectively, can Oorschor and then Drok left their former law firms and have spent the past seven months working on setting up their own practice.
Branching out from IP litigation
The technical foundation of the new firm is the Driven Drafter, a platform the founders developed themselves over the past year. The system is designed to embed the lawyers’ own legal frameworks and to anchor each output to a directly verifiable source. According to the founders, this set-up allows the use of AI in client work while maintaining a controlled review process.
JUVE Patent understands that the new firm is no longer focusing on IP and patent litigation only but rather more on general commercial litigation.
Drok, who also has a programming background, says: “The added value of our system is that it safely combines our legal domain knowledge and experience with the best AI available.” The founders act as both developers and users of the tool, which they say shortens the feedback loop between practice and technology.
Van Oorschot describes the underlying rationale as an experiment in firm design: “We wanted to know what a law firm would look like if you set it up today, from scratch, using today’s technical possibilities. The only way to answer that question was to actually go and do it.”
Fixed fees instead of hourly billing
Driven Lawyers works on the basis of fixed fees agreed in advance rather than hourly billing. The founders link this pricing model directly to the efficiency gains they expect from their software.
At the same time, the founders emphasise that certain elements of litigation practice remain reserved for the lawyers themselves. According to Van Oorschot, these include client contact, strategic and argumentative assessment, ethical judgment, and appearances at hearings.
The firm’s location in Amsterdam’s The Stack building, alongside around 25 AI companies, is also a deliberate choice. “We’d rather be among the people building AI,” Drok says.
Driven Lawyers is not the only such firm. In June 2026, well-known patent litigator Christopher Weber left Kather Augenstein to set-up his own AI-native litigation firm patlit.xyz. Unlike Driven Lawyers, however, the Düsseldorf-based firm focuses on patent litgation. (Co-author: Mathieu Klos)
