About

Air Arabia is a low-cost airline operating a fleet of 45 Airbus A320 narrow-body airliners based out of five regional hubs located in the UAE, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan. The company was the first Arab airline to list publically and has posted consistent growth since its inception, due in no small part to the work of their head of legal, Sherif Bishara. Working at private practice before a long spell with Barclays, Bishara moved to the ‘completely new business area’ of Air Arabia in 2010. Since taking over the airline’s legal team, Bishara has strengthened all team members’ legal knowledge via ‘providing in-house training on updated aviation law and improving legal policies and processes, then communicating these efficiency improvements to relevant stakeholders’. One of the main areas of potential cost spirals for airlines is aircraft acquisitions, which can be labour intensive and involve large amounts of capital. As to how to keep costs down here, Bishara looks to provide excellent service delivery within the team: ‘We look to improve accessibility and turnaround times with the customer as much as possible, and to do this I have looked to prepare ‘thorough precedents for all company departments to reduce time taken and increase efficiency’. Alongside this, Bishara is keen to see the in-house legal role increase in prominence throughout the Middle East, and to achieve this, he advises other in-house counsel to ‘understand the nature of business, as the role of an in-house lawyer should be to support the company to achieve its targets’.