She brought bunches of flowers to the office, treated colleagues to lunch on their birthdays, and joined in the Christmas celebrations. She had a company email address, an access pass and a company laptop. And yet she was not an employee. At least, that was the ruling of the Zeeland-West-Brabant District Court on 2 July 2026, in an unusual case between dental group Clinias Dental Group B.V. (CDG) and a self-employed lawyer who worked for the company as Legal Counsel.
In the spring of 2024, the parties reached an impasse. CDG wanted to hire her on a permanent basis, but the negotiations stalled over salary. She terminated her engagement as of 1 September 2024. What followed was a standoff: the lawyer sent a final invoice of almost €17,000, but did not return her laptop and access pass. CDG invoked a penalty clause of €50 per day with no cap, which added up to almost €48,000 for a laptop with a residual value of around €400. The lawyer then went to court and claimed the existence of an employment contract.
The district court’s ruling: no employment contract
The district court applied the standard set out in the Supreme Court’s Deliveroo ruling. That standard holds that it is not the name or label given to an agreement that is decisive, but the actual way in which the parties dealt with one another. The outcome was clear: the working relationship qualified as a contract for services, not as an employment contract.
The lawyer worked entirely at her own discretion, using her own resources, at times and locations of her own choosing, including her home. CDG had no say over how and when she worked; she worked for other clients and conducted herself as a commercial entrepreneur in economic dealings. Moreover, her legal work did not touch on the core activity of a dental group. The social integration, the email address and the office parties carried insufficient weight to conclude that there was an employment contract.
Although all employment-law claims were dismissed, the court reduced the contractual penalty to €3,000, because a penalty clause may not produce a disproportionate result in relation to the actual damage suffered. After settlement, CDG was left owing a net amount of €13,783.91.
Key lessons for SME entrepreneurs
The court does not look at the name at the top of the agreement, but at day-to-day reality. A freelance (zzp) arrangement is not a label that keeps you safe as long as everyday practice looks like regular employment. Conversely, if the collaboration is genuinely free, independent and commercial in nature, that arrangement will hold up in court.
This is more relevant now than ever. The so-called “soft landing” — the period during which the Dutch Tax Authorities enforced the rules on false self-employment with restraint — ends on 1 January 2027. From that point on, the Tax Authorities will enforce the rules in full, which means that, as a client, an incorrect classification can still expose you to back payments of payroll taxes and fines. The applicable test remains the Deliveroo ruling; there is, as yet, no new law or other standard that has replaced it. The question asked by both the courts and the Tax Authorities is the same: what did the collaboration actually look like in practice?
This requires two things from SME entrepreneurs. First, honesty about your own arrangements: if someone effectively works as an employee, with fixed hours, direct supervision and no other clients, a freelance agreement is not sustainable, however carefully it has been drafted. Second: anyone working with self-employed professionals who play a central role in the organisation would be wise to assess, in the coming months, whether that collaboration would pass the Deliveroo test — not as an administrative exercise, but as a serious risk analysis.
Do you need legal support with this? Feel free to contact The Legal Company’s DBA Act experts at info@thelegalcompany.nl or 020 345 0152.
Blog by our corporate lawyer Niels Terlouw LL.M.
