Competitive Advantages of Full Service Regional Law Firm Al Tamimi and Company

Alex Saleh, Partner and Co-Head of Office at Al Tamimi and Company, explains what are the competitive advantages of the full service regional law firm. Founded by Essam Al Tamimi in 1989, Al Tamimi and Company has become the leading law firm in the MENA Region.

“As a partner with Al Tamimi and Company, I have been with the firm now for 12 years. I opened up the Kuwait office for them back in 2009. I had different backgrounds coming into the firm in that I had been a managing partner for an international English firm. But what convinced me to actually join Al Tamimi is that in the Middle East we have really two different types of law firms. We have local firms in each country – Kuwait, Saudi, Qatar – where it is mostly focusing on litigation and whatnot and more of an Arab focus. And we have, obviously, a lot of international law firms, both the large British and the American ones, Magic Circle firms like Clifford Chance, Allen and Overy, Freshfields. When Essam Al Tamimi, the founder of Al Tamimi, came to me in 2009, he had a different vision. He wanted to be a regional firm, focusing on the Arabic speaking countries with Arab civil law, but having the high level of international law firms, and I had never thought about that before. At Al Tamimi and Company, we are in a niche by ourselves. We have the largest firm and we have 17 offices in the GCC, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. But, there is really no one that fits our niche because in each jurisdiction we have large litigation teams, large corporate teams, and large banking teams. It is a good mix in the region of local GCC nationals as lawyers, Arab nationals from the Levant and Egypt, and Western qualified lawyers from places like the UK, the US, and Australia. For me, it was wonderful joining the team in 2009. Now I had a platform because most of my clients were doing business within the region – it could be a Kuwaiti company expanding into Saudi, it could be an Emirati company opening up in Kuwait. There is all this cross border work going on within the Middle East that we are able to service as a one stop shop. In order to really do service to these clients, you have to know how the Arab civil law implications are in each country whether you are setting up companies, whether it is direct investment, whether it is financing, and that is our specialty”, says Alex Saleh.

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