About

Mohammed Al Noor is group chief legal officer and international advisor for internationally-invested Action Group Holdings, an investment company headquartered in Kuwait with subsidiaries in Europe, North America, Australia, and the MENA region. He is the ideal individual for the role given immense experience accrued during his private practice career by advising leading Kuwaiti family offices and private clients, managing cross-border private deals and transactions, handling matters involving commercial and corporate M&A works, and establishing joint ventures (JV) with foreign companies including in the oil and gas sector. Al Noor emphasises the scale and variety of his day-to-day role from the outset, and that Kuwait and other GCC countries have a very unique business culture and traditions which any legal officer has to respect. ‘As chief general counsel’, he explains, ‘I have increasingly faced new and complex legal issues arising from the accelerating growth of our global business and international operations, which have given us much to consider in how to get effective legal services around the globe’. He has developed an all-encompassing strategy to deal with the key issues facing the legal team of Action Group Holdings. ‘Firstly, I focused on the in-house team’s structure and performance’, he outlines, ‘as ensuring that our law department is working at utmost efficiency meant it had to be aligned internally within the department on key factors and externally with the strategic needs of the business. Secondly’, he goes on, ‘I developed an action plan on legal department cost control and devised a plan on executing this, and thirdly I focused on implementing a plan to reduce legal costs while maintaining quality through the introduction of IT solutions and software’. Al Noor has fostered a relationship with owners, shareholders, and senior management in which the legal team is delegated more and more responsibility as time goes on through a proactive approach: ‘as GC, I bring to the CEO and company environment a style that emphasises providing alternative strategies for dealing with issues rather than simply pointing out obstacles. This type of relationship with CEO gives me as GC an integrated role into the business of a company which can make all the difference’, concludes Al Noor.