NautaDutilh. Photo: Marcel Douwe Dekker, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NautaDutilh,_2019.jpg)
NautaDutilh. Photo: Marcel Douwe Dekker, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NautaDutilh,_2019.jpg)
Sylvia Witkamp was born in 1956. Her documented early life is limited, but her professional formation took place in the Netherlands, where she trained in law and was admitted to the bar in 1980.
Dutch admission to the bar marks the point at which a lawyer may practise independently before the courts. For Witkamp, it opened a career in the Dutch legal profession that later concentrated on labour law.
Sylvia Witkamp's university education in Rotterdam was followed by admission to the Dutch bar in 1980.
Rotterdam's best-known university is Erasmus University Rotterdam, founded on 8 November 1913 as the Netherlands School of Commerce through private initiative and backed by the city's business community. The school was renamed the Netherlands School of Economics in 1939 and, in 1973, merged with the Rotterdam medical faculty to form the present university.
Witkamp began her Dutch legal career with NautaDutilh, a firm whose history goes back to 1724. Chambers describes NautaDutilh as the oldest independent law firm in the Benelux, practising Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg law from offices that include Rotterdam. She worked there as a labour lawyer before moving on.
She later worked at Trenité van Doorne, a Rotterdam firm that became the Dutch branch of the international firm Simmons & Simmons. Labour law was one of her main areas, and her later work continued in that field.
She then joined SorensenWeijers&Ko as a lawyer. In a later move, she and a colleague, Pascal Kruit, both came from SorensenWeijers&Ko to Ten Holter Noordam advocaten, where they strengthened the firm's labour law section.
At Ten Holter Noordam advocaten in Rotterdam, she works as a senior labour lawyer and reports more than 40 years of experience in the profession. Her clients include hospitals, care, mental health and welfare institutions, and supervisory boards, and she is part of the firm's healthcare market area. She also gives training and workshops on labour law and works council law.
Witkamp also worked as a partner at Resident Associates. Labour law (arbeidsrecht) governs the relationship between employers and employees, including contracts, dismissal, and collective employment matters, and it has been a central field of Dutch legal practice since the late twentieth century.
