Your outsourced general counsel in Dubai

What the retainer covers

Contracts

Drafting, review and negotiation of the contracts your business signs every month: customer and supplier agreements, NDAs, consultancy and employment contracts, partnership and distribution deals. We also build and maintain your template library so routine contracts go out without waiting for us. See our contract drafting and negotiation practices.

Commercial advice

Pricing and contracting models, channel and partner strategy, market entry across the Emirates and the GCC, and how to structure a deal so that it can be signed. You get a view on what we would do, not a list of risks.

Compliance

Ongoing regulatory watch for your sector, licence renewals and regulator correspondence, data protection under the federal Personal Data Protection Law or the DIFC and ADGM regimes, and AML/CFT support from our compliance practice, including MLRO support and the quarterly board report for regulated firms.

Board and shareholders

Board and shareholder resolutions, minutes, registers and beneficial ownership filings, shareholder communications, and advice to directors on their duties when decisions get difficult.

People

Employment contracts and policies, incentive and share option plans, senior hires and exits, and the first conversation when an employment issue starts to escalate.

Disputes, early

Letters before action, responses to demands, and settlement before a disagreement becomes a claim. Where litigation or arbitration is unavoidable, we manage it and the specialist counsel involved.

Growth

Fundraising, acquisitions, new entities and new jurisdictions, coordinated through our M&A, structuring and licensing practices, with accounting and Corporate Tax through our group's accounting arm, Neo Finance.

Legal advice with a commercial view

An answer that only identifies risk is not an answer. Our partners have founded, run and sat on the boards of operating businesses, and we advise the way an experienced general counsel does: we tell you what we would do, what it costs to be wrong, and how to get the deal done. Because we see the whole business month to month, we spot the contract that undercuts your pricing, the partner arrangement that will cause a dispute in two years, and the compliance change that affects next quarter's product launch, before they become problems.

How the retainer works

1. Scoping call

We learn the business, its contracts, its regulators and where it is going over the next twelve months.

2. Legal health check

We review your key contracts, corporate records, licences and compliance position and give you a short, prioritised list of what to fix first.

3. A fixed monthly fee

The retainer covers a defined scope of ongoing work with agreed response times and a named partner. You know what legal support will cost each month.

4. Quarterly review

Each quarter we review what came in, what is coming up and whether the scope still fits. Larger projects such as an acquisition, a licence application or a dispute are scoped and quoted separately before any work starts.

We do not publish retainer fees. They depend on the size of the business, the volume of contracts and whether it is regulated, and we confirm them after the scoping call.

Who it suits

Founders and owner-managed businesses that have outgrown ad hoc legal advice; scale-ups that are not yet ready for a full-time in-house lawyer; international groups with a UAE subsidiary and no local counsel; family businesses formalising governance; regulated firms, including VARA-licensed and DFSA and FSRA firms, that need compliance and commercial support from one adviser; and in-house legal teams that need senior overflow capacity. Our guide to outsourced general counsel compares a retainer with hiring in-house.

Your team

Commercial work is led by founder and managing partner Harly Zappino, whose corporate and M&A practice covers shareholder and joint venture documentation, capital raisings and transactions exceeding USD 1.4 billion in aggregate value, with founding partner Levent Shevki, who has more than 17 years in corporate, commercial and M&A practice and sits on the other side of the table too: he is a founder and board director of Twenty3 Sport and Entertainment and oversees a portfolio of more than ten operating companies. Our Emirati founding partners Khalil Abdulla, Feras Al Sadek and Shihab Al Hashimi bring the regional judgement that decides how a UAE counterparty should be approached, and specialist teams cover construction, creator and brand deals and Chinese-language matters.