About

Menha Samy is no stranger to high-value transactions, having worked on multiple significant projects during the course of her 16-year career. Samy recalls that, while engaged as a private practice lawyer (during which she rose from the rank of trainee to partner with Egyptian law firm Ibrachy & Dermarkar), ‘the biggest deal was with Lafarge Egypt construction’, and while working as an in-house lawyer for GE she was involved in its landmark $2bn deal to supply gas turbines and other generators to supply power to Egypt. Samy spent over five-and-a-half years focusing on the Midde East and North Africa with GE and, alongside the Egyptian power generator deal, Samy mentions as another career highlight that she ‘worked through the integration of the Alstom power business into GE Power’. This was complex, being ‘the first time Alstom and GE worked together using lawyers of both companies’. ‘We had a team of 15 individuals and the project involved horizontally working across the whole region’, Samy goes on. Her multi-jurisdictional and cross-border expertise is finely honed due to her role as counsel responsible for MENA for GE, with Samy feeling she has ‘built a large amount of experience in operating in difficult geopolitical regions’ that pose unique challenges. Her strategy for dealing with these external factors – though of course significant geopolitical effects cannot always be mitigated entirely – relies upon detailed cultural, political and economic understanding of the regions involved. ‘You have to marry compliance with actual regional and local expertise as much as possible’, she explains. ‘We also look not only at the time of contracting but at the time of project execution and beyond’, in order to truly appreciate the risks inherent in a project. As someone who has built a legal team from scratch, Samy outlines what she believes makes an in-house legal team great. ‘It is about being humble and building a team with capabilities that are better than the counsel themselves, a team that is better than the sum of its parts’, says Samy. Recently (in June 2017), Samy has moved on to become legal counsel Middle East and India for global high-end cosmetics powerhouse Chanel at their Dubai office. This notable change of sector is evidence of her willingness to test herself and continue to achieve new and exciting career goals, a trait which has already manifested itself in her legal work to date.