About

Bernadette Baynie is a well-known presence in the Middle Eastern in-house legal community, frequently appearing in various media to provide the benefit of her immense experience to a wider audience. Indeed, she has been enamoured with the mix of business and legal work that in-house roles bring since the early stages of her career, recalling that she ‘thoroughly enjoyed being a lawyer but particularly as an in house counsel’, when first starting out. Having had personnel management responsibilities from a relatively young age, Baynie says she was ‘fortunate that because of my people management abilities I made some amazing relationships’ that have allowed her to draw from a wealth of shared experience throughout her career. This served her particularly well when forming the Batelco Group legal team, where she remains today as group general counsel. ‘When I came to this company ten years ago, I was fortunate to have been offered the opportunity to shape the vision, quality and resources of the team’, she explains, ‘which has been a huge success. It wasn’t a go-to department when I joined, and now it is a department that is in high demand by all business units of the organisation; the company brings us on board during the development of products from the start and the team’s profile has changed from being a service provider to a valued business enabler’, Baynie concludes. She is emphatic when outlining the characteristics that she looks for in her in-house counsel, which she sees as ‘very straightforward: you really need to have a caring and can-do attitude, and make use of the proximity and accessibility you have to your clients in comparison to external lawyers’. Alongside this, she goes on, ‘you have to be empathetic towards everyone around you and look to manage relationships with internal and external clients as a part of one team’. With her legal experience gained both in Australia and the Middle East, she is an ideal person to compare the unique challenges posed by these jurisdictions, and Baynie mentions the positives of both working environments: ‘The valuable relationships that I have built in both locations have been highly rewarding, but working over here in the Middle East means that you don’t have the same level of internal corporate politics and consequential stress that you have back home, which means I have been able to devote my full attention to my work’.