Weagree’s advisory board. We strongly recommend that any startup company seeks external advisers, and meet with them regularly. We are proud to have such knowledgeable, experienced and loyal advisory board, always available for quick feedback, tips or reflection, making Weagree’s proposition one of (our values) ‘excellence‘ and ‘learning‘.
And finally, we have the members of Weagree’s advisory board ‘in the picture’. Weagree has been advised by each them individually since we began some 11 years ago; and about five years ago, we started meeting to discuss various topics that an legal tech innovator or startup may encounter in a lifetime. It is certainly not a ‘supervisory board’ and non of our advisers has tasks or responsibilities similar to non-executive directors (by no means), but being able to revert to them proved extremely helpful. Let’s introduce them to you:
Barbara Penders She is a leader-by-nature, has extensive experience as in-house legal counsel in multinationals (including as former general counsel of Unilever Benelux, responsible for a team of some 60 people). She knows very well what Weagree’s customers need.
Barbara has always been committed to support us, chairs our customer meetings, and sharply analyses how and where we ought to improve our way of working.
Gertjan de Ruijter is a strategist and an original thinker. He has been involved in designing Weagree’s strategy from scratch, always available to soundboard on all kinds of commercial and business aspects.
As a physics engineer and MBA consultant, he has extensive experience with innovation (before the word was invented), used to work as a business and implementation consultant for Capgemini, as a strategic purchasing manager at Philips Electronics, and has been advising numerous startups and innovators in their growth strategy.
Marijn Rooymans knows the legal sector and in-house legal departments as only few others do. As a renown head-hunter and moderator of the largest network of independent legal professionals in the Netherlands, he is well informed about the needs of legal departments and how to optimise legal processes.
Marijn learned of Weagree shortly after we had developed our prototype, has been following us ever since, and has been advising Weagree on all aspects of entrepreneurship. Enthusiastic visionary, always immediately available, but also contacting us whenever he feels there is a need for Weagree to re-focus or re-prioritise our business proposition.
Ruud Harinck is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the legal services industry in the Netherlands. As a founder of leading legal headhunting and selection agency Voxius, Ruud knows ‘as no-one else’ what legal departments of all kinds and sizes need.
Having been attorney at a premier law firm, an in-house legal counsel and a successful pioneer of the legal sector himself, Ruud empathises with Weagree’s mission. Since our beginning (and in fact, as one of our first customers), Ruud has always been available when we needed him in finetuning our support proposals to customers, the improvement of our service model for customers (‘customer-first’ !), and keen to keep Weagree on track to remain successful.
