About

Driven by the ‘volatility and atrocity of the oil markets’, the Weatherford legal teams for the Middle East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa merged to form a 23-strong team for the super region of Middle East and Africa. Preserving the majority of lawyers, the team led by Yazid Tamimi have together overcome the challenges while maintaining a strong and impressive delivery of legal services to their internal clients. ‘The pressure was intense and at times it felt like we were trying to build a ship while sailing’ says Tamimi. ‘However, with lawyers from 17 different nationalities and 12 jurisdictions speaking seven different languages, we were certain of a wide spectrum of expertise to handle whatever came our way’. One of the biggest contributions of the legal team, on the strategic front, has been their management of all third-party sales representatives, with the aim to reduce numbers and spend on commissions while not impacting sales. Tailoring the initiative to each jurisdiction, the end results were impressive as the team managed to cut back from ‘130 representatives to nine without missing a dollar in sales’, making millions in savings while adding to the brand integrity and improving service quality. The team manages over 165 legal entities, 19 joint ventures, over 70 intermediaries, and has a litigation portfolio of around $800m, supports 34 countries, more than 8,500 employees and over 500 clients with over 5500 annual sales opportunities. All lawyers are members of the leadership teams for their respective countries and participate in all strategic decisions. The legal team stresses that they ‘all understand that we are not here to win arguments; we are here to run a business. Our biggest strength is our diversity and the resultant breadth of knowledge’. The market of 2015 proved to be challenging for the industry and the company; to combat this the legal team re-negotiated billing rates with 18 firms to reduce external legal spend and brought internal efficiency in knowledge sharing across borders. ‘All Weatherford lawyers started working across different jurisdictions. If it can be done internally in full then it can’t go out‘. Despite the hardships, by April 2016 it was clear that the legal team had exceeded its cost saving targets while not compromising on the quality of their service. Weatherford’s legal team is regarded as the most mature and respected function across the region.