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?

I believe that during instability, the best way through is to focus on a few things:

Figure out what is in your gift to control: either as an individual or as a legal department (because by it’s nature and very definition, “instability” means that there a great many things that are out of your control so don’t stress over what you have no control or influence over, but deploy your energy where you can control or influence;

Map out Dependencies: instability causes anxiety at an individual level and inertia at a corporate level. So rather than throwing your hands in the air with an exasperated sigh, work backwards to figure what steps are necessary to go from A to B and where the dependencies lie. Where such a mapping exercise shows you a roadblock, determine whether you can find alternative or parallel routes and steps to take that allow you to keep moving forward. This will help you devise your plan B, C and D if you need it.

Finally (and I think spending 14 years living and working in London helped with this one): “keep calm and carry on” during periods of instability. This is that infamous expression used across the UK during wartime. Same can be said for working during periods of corporate instability, whether it’s management change, restructuring or personnel movements. One lesson I learnt working for the UK Treasury during changes in government, was to keep your head down and do your job as best you can in the circumstances – it’s not easy when everything is changing around you but sometimes it’s all you can do.

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

BEEAH Legal supports our group across multiple sectors and jurisdictions, for example: developing large scale infrastructure (such as a Solar PV Plant and a Hydrogen from Waste facility) for BEEAH Energy; developing, designing and constructing a healthcare district for BEEAH Healthcare; supporting BEEAH Egypt by establishing two new joint ventures; strengthening, enhancing and digitalizing legal and compliance procedures by establishing BEEAH’s Compliance Office; creating a suite of templates for BEEAH Real Estate to use in their HQ art gallery exhibitions, photo shoots and events. This is a small sample of the breadth of transactions we are involved in and the areas in which we assist.

How have you integrated technology into your legal processes, and what impact has this had on efficiency and compliance?

BEEAH Legal has begun to implement legal tech in four core elements of it’s service to the business: entity management; a contract repository; litigation management; and board Portals. All four modules have begun to impact on how BEEAH Legal operates and the efficiency that it drives in our day-to-day operations. Being quite candid, implementing this change took time, not just from the perspective of integrating the tech into our systems, but also trialing and testing the voracity of the outputs so that our lawyers can trust the output. Now that is done, we are moving to our fifth pillar for legal tech which is probably one of the more significant in terms of how we service the business: CLM (contract lifecycle management).