About

As Etihad Airways’ special projects legal head, Ashley Whitcher has led some of the airline’s most ground-breaking cross-border transactions of recent years. He is also credited for his role in modernising the legal department, with a focus on greater efficiency, in response to Etihad’s substantial growth over recent years. ‘Keeping up with the pace of growth in one of the world’s fastest-growing airlines’ is the biggest challenge, Whitcher says. His response to it has been working to reposition the function as a ‘business partner’, as he terms it, moving away from ‘the push or pull approach to legal practice’.