About

A real estate and real estate finance lawyer in private practice in New Zealand and a project finance lawyer for Allen & Overy, Katherine McAdam originally moved to Qatar a decade ago on secondment at Qatar Rail before moving in-house permanently. She has been in her current role as head of legal for Commercial Bank (CBQ) for four years, and relishes her role. ‘Working as an in-house counsel means that you get really involved in the business side of managing a bank’, she says, ‘which has allowed me to really widen my experience including dealing with all manner of disputes, HR issues, operational contracts as well as traditional banking documentations, syndications and capital markets transactions’. McAdam’s leadership of the legal team has been also been remarked upon. Alongside insourcing a large number of previously outsourced roles to Qatar, and thus creating a number of jobs in the process, she has centralised the legal function into a single location in order to foster specialisation within the team and improve knowledge-sharing capabilities.