The cultural diversity of businesses operating in the Middle East is often difficult for outsiders to understand. With multinationals across the region continuing to depend on a large expatriate workforce, multiple nationalities often work side-by-side. Bringing together so many different cultural and linguistic perspectives can be a challenge for any organisation. For their in-house lawyers this is compounded by the need to reconcile civil and common law approaches across the team, along with disparate notions of what a lawyer is and how they should interact with their business.
However, this eclectic workforce is also helping to forge new ideas. As this year’s Powerlist shows, the legal teams in the Middle East are not only catching up with peers abroad, but in some cases are leading the way by being creative in finding new ways of providing support to the business. The in-house community across the region is growing each year in size and sophistication and there is clearly a hunger to engage with new ways of working.
We at The Legal 500 are delighted to draw attention to the maturing legal market and provide a platform for legal teams to exchange ideas. For this year’s GC Powerlist: Middle East Teams, we have diversified our focus away from the traditional political and economic heartlands of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Legal teams based in Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Lebanon are all given greater coverage and we also profile our first ever Iraq-based team, signalling the opening of the region’s next boom market to international business. A big thank you must go to all the legal teams who took the time to make this year’s publication even stronger.
