Jurisdictions your role covers: Kuwait.

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

When I joined the Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait (BBK) as Director of the Legal Department, my first task was transformative: establish the bank’s first in-house legal function. This wasn’t just about creating a department; it was about redefining how legal risk is managed across the organisation.

We built the framework from the ground up, including bilingual (Arabic and English) contract templates for facilities, guarantees, mortgages, and other key banking operations. I also partnered with a specialist technology provider to launch an automated legal system, enabling real-time tracking and resolution of cases.

A defining achievement was resolving a backlog of complex debt and bankruptcy cases, recovering over KD 370,000 in coordination with regulators. It was a win not just financially, but for compliance, governance, and operational efficiency.

Before BBK, I spent over 12 years at Kuwait’s only credit information centre. I led the legal drafting of the Credit Information Exchange Law – issued as Law No. 9 of 2019 – and worked closely with the Central Bank of Kuwait on its executive regulations. These reforms played a direct role in Kuwait’s leap into the World Bank’s “Top 10 Global Reformers” in the 2020 Ease of Doing Business Index.

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?

Our philosophy rests on three pillars: agility, integration, and foresight. In any crisis, be it economic turbulence, regulatory change, or operational disruption, the legal function must be an active player in business continuity.

During the pandemic, our team anticipated regulatory shifts, updated contracts, created emergency protocols, and kept the bank fully compliant – often ahead of official enforcement deadlines. This proactive approach allowed operations to continue without interruption.

We don’t operate in a silo. Legal strategy is embedded into the bank’s risk and strategy committees, ensuring that legal insights directly shape commercial decisions. In times of crisis, the legal department is both a brake and an acceleration slowing risk, speeding solutions.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in- house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

The decision is strategic. Day-to-day advisory, compliance, internal investigations, and routine contracts are handled in-house for speed and efficiency. We engage external counsel for high-value litigation, complex cross-border matters, or specialised cases requiring local representation as mandated by Kuwaiti law.

Selection criteria are clear: responsiveness, technical expertise, industry insight, quality of advice, cost transparency, and ability to work seamlessly with our team.

After every major matter, we conduct a debrief—what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned. One of our most telling metrics is the recovery rate on legal accounts, particularly in litigation and collections, because it links directly to financial performance.

The right external counsel should feel like an extension of your in-house team, not an outsourced service.

From contributing to national reform to modernising internal processes and steering through global crises, I’ve learned that the most effective legal teams are not just guardians of compliance, they are architects of resilience and enablers of growth.