How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience? 

Working and living in the Middle East, as I have for almost 20 years now, means being part of a kaleidoscopic tapestry of constant evolution. Amidst all of the rapid changes taking place in a part of the world that is anything but monolithic, where some days bring economic miracles while others bring geopolitical uncertainty, some look around them and see instability. Others, like me, see dynamism. This is particularly true for those of us whose roles span the entirety of the region, supporting organisations aiming to serve multiple countries whose unique risk profiles are matched by distinct portfolios of opportunity.

Thus, whether we characterise overnight changes as either instability, crises, challenges or strategic possibilities, the one common thread for General Counsels is that our task is to remain steady and focused in helping to steer the ship and indeed serving as a symbol of resilience ourselves. In practice, this means personifying that resilience: staying calm no matter what the mood in the room may be, projecting stability both internally and externally, calibrating verbal and written communication to emphasise both awareness and readiness in the face of challenge, and understanding that the tone we set has the potential for shaping the outcome. This takes a special mindset, to be sure; but it also takes quite a bit of planning ahead.

As a strategic thought partner to the business, it is not my role is to ensure that the organisation’s direction of travel is risk-free or frictionless: rather, it is to counsel my stakeholders so that the degree of risk aligns with their appetite for it and the extent of their ability to mitigate against it. Ultimate effectiveness as a competent steward involves building and nurturing the relationships that are key to designing contingency plans, which of course then become all the more critical once it becomes time to execute them. If the currents of risk, reward and mitigation can meet at a macro level from the outset to form an risk-conscious strategy, and that particular calibration can then be cascaded and replicated to individual business decisions day to day (whether they concern contractual terms, litigation, or others) then we will benefit from all of that foresight when an expectedly unexpected event inevitably occurs.

What are the main cases or transactions that you have been involved in recently? 

As General Counsel, I have the great fortune of leading a talented team of lawyers responsible for all legal matters arising in connection with the internal or external activities of the Firm. This effectively means that we act as a full-service internal law firm, supporting a single (yet extremely busy) client, across 12 countries and 17 jurisdictions. Consequently, our portfolio of matters spans a wide variety of practice areas: dispute resolution, regulatory matters, M&A, corporate structuring, commercial advice and contract management, employment, IP and still others. While I am ultimately responsible for all of my function’s work, my personal and direct involvement is focused on cases and transactions of particular sensitivity or strategic importance. Recent examples include large and complex litigation in multiple jurisdictions involving high-value claims, a territory-wide corporate structuring optimisation, and several M&A transactions focusing on various sectors. While the details of these activities cannot be disclosed publicly, what I can say is that my goal in each instance is to seek outcomes where the legal position adheres closely to the business objective rather than the other way around.

What is a topic, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about?

All of us are faced with the same tantalizing dilemma, which is that our lives our finite whereas our possibilities are not. As the years pass, I become increasingly aware of the importance of spending my time purposefully. My passion as General Counsel is creating and sustaining a meaningful experience for my team members, marked by learning, development, curiosity, empathy and a focus on service for others. In this way, my humble hope is that the time they have chosen to spend working together, and the alternative paths they have foregone in so doing, will reflect the pursuit of a higher purpose that transcends a mere career choice.

I am blessed to be surrounded by the Middle East’s top talent, drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds and industries, all of whom are living their own journeys. I am profoundly aware that this personal investment on their part entails sacrifice: they have elected to dedicate the hours, days, months and years of their lives to a common endeavor. My commitment to them is to create a safe space for them to grow as future leaders by embracing authenticity, to innovate through experimentation, and to engage in lifelong learning both professionally and personally.

My ambition is for our collective enterprise to be deserving of the faith that they demonstrate through their tremendous effort, notwithstanding the allure of alternate optionality, so that the meaning that they derive from the time that they have spent together as teachers, students and role models is quite literally worth their while. To do this, we emphasise that excellence is merely a baseline; surely they would deliver competent and timely legal advice at any number of other places, and of course that is our job at the most basic level. But for the truly outstanding team members in my care, who have entrusted their futures to each other as well as to me, reward must take a different and compelling form.

What must make their time in this team special, and what fuels my passion, is the notion that high performance as lawyers is only the starting point and that actually the larger goal is to be transformative in their own lives (and more importantly) in the lives of those for whom they are responsible. How much have we learned in our time together? How much have we taught? What is our legacy? We can measure success by looking at legal outcomes such as cases won or contracts signed, and indeed those are important, but I believe that when we ultimately ask whether we made a difference to each other and to our clients – whether our choice to be here, together as a team and as an institution, was not only rewarding but indispensable – the metric we apply should measure how we are remembered by those whose lives we touched.