About

Andrew Cooke, general counsel and head of strategy, leads a two person team at Flash Entertainment, and will be expanding the team to four professionals by the end of the year. He has been spearheading an initiative to make the department more efficient in its output, in particular revaluating the supply chain contract process, splitting it up and evaluating each part. On this, Cooke says that it has ‘sometimes meant simple tweaks to a process to make it more efficient – for example, using simplification and standardisation; in other parts, notably contract execution, we’ve used cheap or existing technologies to enhance our delivery capability. The more efficient our process and use of resource, the better we can support our clients’. Cooke goes on to identify, that ‘of my current team, UK-qualified Emirati lawyer Elham Al Marzooqi has consistently demonstrated her capabilities – most recently in managing our GDPR compliance programme. Her ability to get the job done while maintaining a healthy approach to work-life balance is also a great natural counterweight to my workaholic tendencies’. The team’s most important projects by value and volume are the FIFA Club World Cup in the UAE, and the 2019 AFC Asian Cup, also in the UAE. It has incorporated these projects into its workflow with no additional resource support. Cooke places a lot of emphasis in the adoption of new technology to lower costs and increase efficiency in the in-house legal market. On this subject and the in-house market in general, Cooke feels that lawyers are ‘beginning to better understand the importance of soft skills in managing compliance and legal risk, and specifically to better understanding business requirements and how to meet them. It’s critical this trend continues, particularly as AI begins to affect how more complex legal tasks are delivered’.