About

Joining SEDCO Holding as a vice president in 2015 and promoted to chief legal officer in February 2017, Zaid Mahayni reports directly to the CEO and supervises a department composed of 14 individuals including the compliance, document custody, and board secretarial functions. Mahayni regards being an in-house counsel as extremely rewarding both personally and professionally, due to the ‘opportunity to work in multi-disciplinary environments and widen my knowledge in other sectors and specialisations’. It has also allowed him to improve ‘leadership skills and the ability to present advice more clearly, briefly, and concisely, in a manner that increases the chances for its proper comprehension and implementation’. His effectiveness as a leader is borne out by his excellent management of the SEDCO legal team: ‘Since joining SEDCO Holding, I worked hard to make a number of changes to the workings of the legal department including introducing project management tools, improving record keeping, creating uniformity in work processes and increasing the amount and types of training offered to both the legal team and business team. Also, I have offered various legal training through an internal platform which offers certificates to non-lawyer participants’. Recently, Mahayni has been extremely busy in supporting a number of major SEDCO projects: ‘As well as assisting in closing a high-profile franchise agreement in the car rental industry, we helped in all legal aspects for the construction of one of the largest and most prestigious hotels and an important housing project in the Western province of Saudi Arabia and also helped in closing four separate equity acquisition deals in three different sectors – schooling, retail, and health’.