Gerritzen-Rode was born in 1942, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War. Under that occupation, academic life at the University of Amsterdam came to a standstill by 1941, and the wartime period shaped the country's universities and professional institutions for the years that followed.
Gerritzen-Rode's documented education is at the University of Amsterdam, where the record shows admission to the bar beginning in 1985. The university traces its origins to the Athenaeum Illustre, which the city of Amsterdam founded in January 1632 to offer higher learning. The Athenaeum could not award degrees, and the institution became a university in 1877 before it was made a national university in 1961 under its current name.
Admission to the bar marks entry into the legal profession in the Netherlands and forms the professional qualification on which the lawyer's later practice in Amsterdam rests.
Gerritzen-Rode is documented as a partner of the Amsterdam law firm Stibbe, Blaisse & De Jong. The firm's origins lie in Amsterdam, where David Stibbe established a practice on the Herengracht in 1911, and the Dutch practice was founded in that year under H. W. Stibbe.
The firm name Stibbe, Blaisse & De Jong was in use in Amsterdam until 1991, when that practice merged with Simont & Simont in Brussels and became Stibbe & Simont, one of the leading law firms in the Benelux. After a merger with the Paris-based Monahan & Duhot in 1993, the firm was renamed Stibbe Simont Monahan Duhot, and it later took the simpler name Stibbe. Today the firm has main offices in Amsterdam, Brussels and Luxembourg and a branch office in London.
