Leading Law Firm in the MENA Region: Partner Alex Saleh Presents Al Tamimi and Company

Interview with Alex Saleh, Partner and Co-Head of Office at Al Tamimi and Company

How does Al Tamimi distinguish itself from the competition and what are your competitive advantages?

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.

You have this regional approach in Kuwait. Do you offer the same services that you offer everywhere else? Is there anything that is more specific to Kuwait?

In Kuwait, we have three big practice groups. We have a large team of both Kuwaiti and Egyptian lawyers in litigation, we have a large corporate team, and we have a large banking team. Because we are part of an overall regional team, we have the specialties too. We use a lot of the individuals from Dubai. We have specialists for real estate, we have specialists for TMT, we have specialists for IP, we have specialists for taxation. Because we are one firm and we are integrated, we offer a service in Kuwait that really no other law firms do. We have other local firms here, but we do not have any full international law firms here now. So, we are able to give a full service to our local Kuwaiti clients and multinationals who are doing business here.

Have you seen new trends in clients with COVID?

Al Tamimi and Company is a full service law firm that specialises in a broad range of practice areas. It provides its clients with professional legal expertise, quality strategic advice and maintains a superior level of client service.

There are two major trends. We have seen a huge shift around the world to ecommerce because of COVID. There is an entire generation of young Kuwaiti entrepreneurs who have set up a number of great ecommerce apps and sites for food delivery, delivery of pharmaceuticals, e-wallets, doing banking online, delivery services, like Amazon, etc. We see an explosion of Kuwaiti entrepreneurs who have arrived on the scene and want to take their models regionally now because they were tested during this crisis situation. Kuwait was an oil producing country from the 1950s. So, you have third or fourth generation of very high talent, by far within the Gulf the highest level in terms of expertise and sophistication in terms of grads. Kuwaitis are just born entrepreneurs. I see the switch now from the basics, like real estate and retail, going into this ecommerce, especially with the younger generation. We are there to help them because the one thing that we offer that other law firms cannot is, as you grow, whether you are an ecommerce or whether you are a traditional brick and mortar, if you want to do well in business in the Gulf, you cannot just be in Kuwait or you cannot just be in UAE, you have to be across the entire six GCC region countries. That is where we have an edge because when entrepreneurs come to us and say they want to expand regionally, whether they are coming from outside like UAE or Saudi and coming here, or vice versa, we are able to serve them throughout the entire region and establish them in each jurisdiction because we have these large teams in each country within the GCC. I have seen a different trend coming the other way with the multinationals. I have to give Dubai credit. When I came here in 1994, Dubai was not much. Then, in the late 90s, Dubai became a small hub for multinationals dropping one or two people in. Then, over the last 10 or 15 years, those hubs in Dubai have become major hubs for the multinationals. It means that the multinationals have felt more comfortable doing business in the region. In the past where they may just have had a small presence in Saudi or Qatar or Kuwait using an agent, now, they want to have their own operations in these countries, which in the long run is better than just having an agent. It means having their own people on the ground, bringing technology into the country, hiring more, in our case Kuwaitis, and the legal regime has changed to help assist that as well.

What are these new generation ecommerce clients looking for?

Usually when they come to see us, it is about expansion, bringing in foreign investment, best corporate structure to bring in that foreign investment, to bring it in at a Kuwaiti LLC level, to set up offshore companies or more regionally and in the rest of the region. We have dedicated IP people, dedicated patent people, so we are able to help them and secure their knowhow. We do a lot of the private equity that comes along with this – the Series A, Series B, Series C investments – because there is a lot of investor interest in getting in on the ground level for a lot of the Kuwaiti and the GCC high tech companies they are developing. It is a very interesting time.

Who are these new ecommerce clients you are working with?

We are representing a group that is going regional and is considered to be the Kuwait version of Toys R Us and has done extremely well. We have done it with retail, outlet, online retail that have thousands of Kuwaiti influencers on site that have done very well. We have a number of investments that our clients have made. We work with companies that deliver flowers that are our B2B type delivery services for the last mile. A lot of this is over the last year and we are still in progress with a lot of them because this field is so new in terms of this ecommerce expansion that is happening now. We are 10 years behind what you see in the States and other parts of the world. So, there is going to be a huge explosion of this type of businesses over the next few years.

Obviously multinationals and these big companies are very stable and they are good business partners. But, do you think the future of business is going to be all of these young online entrepreneurs?

We do a lot of work in the oil industries with the main contractors that contract with the K companies. Obviously, we deal with a lot of brick and mortar banks that finance a lot of these large projects and we deal with the large developers who do the infrastructure projects in country. We just closed on the large PPP project for Umm Al Hayman Wastewater, which is the largest wastewater project. So, those types of things will always continue. What is going to have to change over the next few years is retail and food and beverage. That is where ecommerce is making a lot of strides. The retail outlets that are traditional are going to have to change very quickly or they are going to be outgunned and out maneuvered by the ecommerce sites that offer the same services and menu. At the more elementary stages, we see a lot of work in tele-medicine in the region, tele-dental, tele-education, which opens up a lot of things because it gives people living in this region access to the top consultants in medicine, education, etc., anywhere in the world. That is going to be a great change for the consumers of these products, a great opportunity for those who sell these types of services, and it is definitely a disrupter of business in so many different ways.

Have the dynamics changed since the pandemic? Are clients asking for different services?

There has been a revolution within our firm in terms of being able to deliver services. Before, everyone had to be in the office. Now I have a number of associates who sit in the Cairo offices that help us. At the end of the day, the legal services are the same, but what clients demand now is quicker service. When we started in the 90s, things were done by fax and then by email and now, a lot of my clients just have me on WhatsApp or FaceTime and they want 24/7 access to us. And you have to deliver: you have to be available 24/7. With the pandemic, there is no distinction between home life and business life. I even have a couple of our lawyers in the States. Having people in different time zones means that we can service work throughout the day, regardless of what time it is. So, we are still evolving on that front. Internally, we see a lot of possibilities in terms of changing for the better and trying to have a better quality of life in terms of spending time in different jurisdictions or original home countries, but still being able to do the work. The legal work is still the same, but the clients demand it much quicker, much faster.

What projects are you working on at the moment?

We do a lot of the project finance work in country, the old traditional finance, representing a lot of the banks and big projects, whether it is the wastewater project or the airport project. We worked on a lot of the finance projects for the K companies. The other side is that we represent a lot of multinationals who are restructuring their business here or they are moving away from the agency and distributorship route where they may be buying up the assets of their agents and distributors so they can have full operations. We do a lot of work on the PPP side. We have not had a lot of success in terms of as a country closing on this, but there have been a dozen other PPP projects that we have worked on. We are hoping that we will see a little bit more success on that over the next couple years. We are working with a lot of the entrepreneurs and a lot of the ecommerce activity that we see here that is going to continue to grow.

Are you looking for investors or technological improvement to come to your firm? Are you looking to expand in one way or another?

As a firm, we are always looking to expand into different jurisdictions. When I joined Al Tamimi, we had one or two offices, maybe three outside of UAE, and now we have 17. We are still looking at other jurisdictions. There are still great areas within the Middle East to expand, possibly Morocco and the Maghreb as a whole, maybe even East Africa or Turkey. The reason is that this is more Dubai centric. Dubai now is a hub for most of the multinationals. When it first became a hub, the multinationals used it as a hub just for the six GCC nations to try to transact business. Then, over the last 10 years, they began to use it as a hub to do business in the MENA region as a whole. Now, most large multinationals use Dubai as a hub to transact their business in the old Russia, Soviet, the CIS states, the subcontinent, Middle East, and East Africa. A lot of our clients love the fact that we are able to service them in the MENA region. But, we are starting to hear questions about East Africa, Morocco, and the Arab West. We intend to expand to where our clients want us to expand.

Do you have any recent success stories or achievements that you are proud of?

Lawyers are not the most interesting group. IFLR 1000 ranks us as a market leader, which is their top ranking. Chamber and Partners ranks us as Band 1. In each group, there are three or four people in Kuwait that have this level. We are definitely proud of that. But I am more proud of the team here. We have a great team. It is a great mixture of lawyers from Arab nationals, Kuwaitis, and Western qualified people. They are the ones who get the credit for these deals that we have worked on. We hear the praise from our clients and when our clients come back to us that means they must like us.

How do you see the sector evolving?

There needs to be more Kuwaitis in the private sector here. That is important. Even internally, I want to see more Kuwaitis in our office here. We have three right now out of the 25. In the next five years, at least 50% of our lawyers should be Kuwaiti. As Al Tamimi, we owe it to each jurisdiction to have a number of the nationals in the country. The country needs it because it produces lifelong employees who will obviously stay in country. We are actively recruiting Kuwaitis now because the level of quality lawyers, especially the young ones, is great. They are fully bilingual in Arabic and English. It is not like it was when I came here in 1994, where you could find maybe a small handful of Kuwaiti lawyers that could speak English. Now, the younger generation ranks on par with any country. A personal interest that I have is that before I leave Kuwait, I want to see half the office at minimum be Kuwaiti nationals, because this is the future here.

What is your vision for the company for the next three to five years, the medium term?

For the firm, we want to continue our expansion, we want to continue to bring in locals in each of our jurisdictions, we want to maintain our status as the largest firm in the region. But, we also want to be involved in all the innovative deals and continue that progress. At the same time, individually for our employees, because of the pandemic, we want to give them more of a balanced work life. If they want to work from home from time to time, instead of losing good quality people, they can work from their home countries. These are some of the important issues that we want to see over the next three, four years, as we grow in Kuwait. Once you get to the top – and we are there as a firm in Kuwait and the region – it is important to stay there too, because there is always competition and competition is awesome. We have seen a big change in competition in Kuwait, especially from the younger Kuwaiti firms. There are a lot of great ones emerging right now. What we need to do in order to keep up with them is to adapt and to make sure we are bringing in good, young, quality talent just to stay at that level. That is going to be a challenge.

How has the legal system evolved in Kuwait?

In terms of the legal system in Kuwait, the country has done a great job. When I first came here, our laws were basically three or four main business laws like Civil Code, Commercial Law, and the Companies Law. There has been an explosion in terms of specialized law and regulatory bodies over the last 10 years to try to assist and be there as business has evolved. We have a great functioning Capital Markets Authority and its own legal regime. For the foreign investment side, KDIPA gives approval for companies to be 100% foreign owned and transact business in Kuwait. We have a regulatory body for our PPP regime. For internet and telecom, we have CITRA. From 2010 to 2020, we must have had 15 regulatory bodies and legal regimes develop in Kuwait. Businesses want certainty when they invest in a foreign country. They want regulatory bodies. They want to know what the law and the rules are. It helps to develop business. Kuwait has done a great job on that side in terms of the development of these regulatory bodies.

What inspires you? What is your drive to stay in this business, to stay in this industry, to keep doing what you are doing?

You have to have a purpose when you wake up. Personally, I am not very interested in the management and admin aspects of running a law firm, but I love deals. It is great to take a deal from its inception to closure. That still gives me a high. Even at my advanced age, I still love getting to the last few days when we are trying to get to closure, making sure the deal does not collapse at the last second. I find it as interesting today as I did when I had a little bit more hair 20 years ago. I like to see it from start to finish and have a hand in the process.

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