Utrecht University. Photo: CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Academiegebouw-utrecht-the-netherlands.png)
Utrecht University. Photo: CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Academiegebouw-utrecht-the-netherlands.png)
Roelof van Holthe tot Echten was born in 1960. He entered the legal profession at a time when Dutch practice was changing: in 1960 most law offices in the Netherlands consisted of a single lawyer, and the average number of lawyers per office roughly doubled between 1960 and 1993. His early career therefore coincided with the growth of larger firms.
Roelof van Holthe tot Echten completed his studies at the University of Utrecht in 1984. Founded in 1636, Utrecht University is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands.
In 1984 he was admitted to the bar in Amsterdam, the step that marked his entry into legal practice.
He began his career as a lawyer at Stibbe, then known as Stibbe, Blaisse & De Jong. The firm had started in Amsterdam in 1911, and its Brussels office dates from 1966. He worked at the firm for about eight years, in both Amsterdam and Brussels, and held the position of partner there. In 1991 the Amsterdam firm merged with Simont & Simont in Brussels, creating Stibbe & Simont.
After his time at Stibbe, he spent about ten years as a partner at Baker & McKenzie, an international law firm founded in Chicago in 1949. In 2001 he founded the Oostwaard practice, which handles litigation before the state courts, arbitration, and corporate advice for businesses, entrepreneurs and wealthy private clients.
His firm's profile describes him as an expert in art and law. In 2006 he acted for Marei von Saher, the heir of Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam who fled the Netherlands in May 1940 after the German invasion and died in an accident while escaping. Goudstikker left about 1,400 works in his gallery, most of which Hermann Göring looted. After the war, paintings from the collection were found in Germany and returned to the Netherlands, and in February 2006 the Dutch government restituted about 200 of them to the heirs.
The fee arrangement was a no-cure-no-pay agreement with the heir, under which he and a Baker & McKenzie colleague were to receive a share of the collection's value if restitution was granted. In a later tax dispute over the roughly seven million euros he earned from the case in 2006, the Dutch Supreme Court rejected his appeal and confirmed that the fee was taxable.
He is a member of the Nederlandse Orde van Advocaten, the professional body of Dutch lawyers. He is an associate of the American Bar Association, a voluntary professional association of American lawyers founded in 1878. He is also a member of the International Bar Association, founded in 1947 to bring together bar associations and law societies from many countries, and of the London Court of International Arbitration, an institution that administers international commercial arbitration.
His membership of Collections Legal connects him with a network of independent legal advisers worldwide who advise collectors, institutions, art dealers and artists on legal aspects of art, including sales, loans, authenticity disputes and donations.
