A-LAB was closely involved in the establishment of the Netherlands Academy for Empirical Legal Studies on behalf of the VU Law Faculty. The ELS Academy serves as a platform to bring together (future) empirical legal researchers from all Dutch universities. The ELS Academy embodies a national collaboration on empirical legal studies in the context of the sector plan for legal studies and aims to train and support researchers interested in empirically exploring legally relevant questions. Much ELS research is conducted in interdisciplinary research teams. Within the VU Law School, the goal is for empirical methods to become commonplace within all research groups. The emergence of empirical research methods within law is expected to offer more starting points than before for collaboration with other disciplines.