About

Abdel Kader Ahmed El Khatib has been with SEHA since 2007 and having been board secretary since 2010, he has a unique purview into its overall organisational operations. As group director of legal affairs, he takes on a wide range of responsibilities, including some that are atypical of a general counsel: ‘Whether as a legal professional or in general management, social media is a channel that can quickly shift perceptions even if the person posting did not intend to do so. The stakes are amplified even further within a healthcare environment, since there are patients and personal health data involved. Keeping a vigilant eye to maintain security, minimise claims on privacy breaches and safeguard the organisation’s image is paramount. This does not stop after developing a policy or training employees, it’s a continuous process’. Amongst his main career achievements, El Khatib is proud to report he was ‘instrumental’ in developing a special purpose vehicle for the Abu Dhabi government to address the reporting, monitoring and supervisory requirements of government officials for SEHA and other entities across the UAE. ‘This required extensive restructuring of all subsidiaries, the acquisition of new entities and developing corporate governance mechanisms from scratch while carrying out extensive due diligence. This was one of the biggest restructuring and acquisition projects carried out’. In the future, El Khatib believes that in addition to the adoption of new technology, and a revolution in service delivery, the ‘most transformative change’ will come with an overall increased reliance on legal operations. ‘This change could include the evolving role of legal operations professionals, so the new wave of legal professionals should be well-positioned to help legal better understand the business and to help the business to better understand legal’, he says. ‘This transformative role of knowledge management and domain knowledge expertise will evolve to provide legal with an opportunity to become more effective and well-received’.