Team size: 17

Focus on: Technological advancements

For me, the most challenging part of my role is anticipating technological changes, and how they will impact the bank. This requires flexibility, and the ability to understand the market and how such changes will affect the bank across multiple areas. They way that technological advancements will affect our role as lawyers for a bank this is vastly different to other areas – we closely analyse developments relating to electronic signatures, enforceability, and fraud related issues. We are also having to be one step ahead of fraudsters in their constantly evolving ways of defrauding customers and banks.

In addition, there are information security developments, concerns over how data is used, and we must ensure that data privacy concerns are managed appropriately. We have seen huge leaps forward in this area, and the Qatar government is very prescriptive in outlining requirements to ensure protections are in place. This is an area of profound change which has impacts widely felt in our industry.

Finally, recently there have been technological advancements in monitoring external counsel legal spend to ensure we are up to date and provided with accurate information in billing – this ensures no surprises at the end of a matter and can be beneficial to both law firms and their clients. It will be interesting to see going forward, if there is any lasting move away from the billable hours model that is so ingrained in the ethos of many law practices. We have seen alternative structures offered which work well for us and we hope this innovation continues.