About

A highly experienced in-house lawyer in the oil sector, Aneeza Siddiqui enjoyed lengthy and extremely successful periods with British Petroleum (where she was involved in the response to the Macondo incident) and Weatherford before joining Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) Offshore as general counsel and company secretary in August 2017. Since then, she has enjoyed an extremely impressive record on transactional work, including advising on a major multi-jurisdictional asset sale, negotiating the shareholder’s agreement for a strategic joint venture in Middle East and North Africa and advising on and settling two significant contentious matters with a claimed value of over $900m. She has also built a far stronger legal function compared to when she first joined: ‘I joined at the peak of a merger between two large companies. My first focus was on uniting two separate legal departments with different organisation structures, roles, responsibilities and cultures by unifying them in one new office space, creating a new organisation suited to meet the operational requirements’. She has also put more robust procurement and claims management, compliance and ethics and governance procedures into place, helping the team to become an even more trusted advisor to the business. Siddiqui has flourished in an industry which is currently staffed mainly by men, and she provides some insight into what she found to be key things to consider for other women in order to emulate her success. Essentially, the tactic she used was to be better and more consistent than those around her: ‘Being the only female in the room 97% of the time has allowed me to create a professional space for myself to be heard and given respect because of the clear, diligent, and consistent advice given by myself and my team’. On the subject of where the in-house profession goes next, Siddiqui believes it will evolve in two key directions: ‘Firstly, with the current unpredictable global market and trade conditions, in-house lawyers will need to become increasingly commercially savvy. Secondly, with the advent of digitisation, legal needs to think differently on how it manages its legal archives, records, case management, task tracking mechanisms’, she concludes.