About

After making the move into in-house legal work within brand-new company Gulf Aviation Academy in 2011, an organisation that trains captains and first officers for Gulf Air and other airlines, Fadia Mubarak quickly showed her aptitude in this role. Among other accomplishments, she successfully built an effective legal team from scratch during the three years she was employed here. This achievement and others were noticed by major downstream aluminium facility Gulf Aluminium Rolling Mill, and she was taken on by them as general counsel in June 2014. Again, Mubarak had to develop an in-house legal department from scratch (though this time with an already established company founded in 1981), and sought to build it based around her own principles of what an in-house team should do. ‘The most important thing for an in-house lawyer to keep in mind is excellent organisation and time management’, she outlines, ‘as work overload is common. As well as this, you should look to engage other departments as much as possible and utilise this to achieve business objectives’, she adds. This collaborative approach underpins much of Mubarak’s work: ‘my style is always based on team work, and an in-house lawyer should improve team work and liaise with senior management as much as possible, but this relationship should go both ways; this would definitely improve the quality of work’. An issue close to Mubarak’s heart is that of increasing the number and seniority of female legal personnel in in-house roles in Bahrain. ‘I think that one of the most important changes that could be made to the in-house legal profession in my opinion is that we as female lawyers look for more opportunities and support wherever possible’, she explains. ‘That, and practicality in legal training needs to be higher and could be improved a lot. Lawyers should always receive practical training and updated associations to improve their knowledge, rather than simply learning technical skills’, Mubarak concludes.