Healthy Market for Legal Sector Lateral Hires in the UAE and Saudi Arabia

As we report in the guide launch webinar for Chambers Global 2024, the economies of Saudi Arabia and the UAE have continued to go against the global trend. In most other major markets worldwide, a combination of inflation, high interest rates and global geopolitical issues has kept transactional and non-contentious work at relatively low levels. By contrast, 2023 has been a record-breaking year for deal activity in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with Chambers’ research analysts noting energy and technology as two especially high-performing sectors creating work for lawyers.

With the Middle East showcasing some of the most buoyant deal activity anywhere in the world, it is no surprise to see numerous international law firms building up their teams in the region. There have been numerous high-profile lateral hires in recent months, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down.

Only weeks before the launch of Chambers Global 2024, we learned that Mark Devaney and Nicole Giblin had left Clyde & Co to join Abion as co-founding lawyers of its Dubai office. Devaney and Giblin are both ranked in the UAE Intellectual Property table of the most recent guide.

Discussing the new venture with the Chambers research team, Devaney remarked:

Keeping track of law firm lateral hires is an ongoing part of the job at Chambers. Compared to other legal markets within the region and around the world, the UAE has always been a hugely competitive environment, with lawyers such as Devaney and Giblin in high demand for their specialist expertise. While never quiet, it does feel – when observing current moves – that the market for lateral hires is going through an unusually active period at the moment, and it will be interesting to see what developments 2024 brings.

In Saudi Arabia, 2023 saw the enaction of long-awaited reforms to the regulations governing the operation of foreign law firms. From March that year, the Ministry of Justice began issuing licenses to international law firms allowing them to formally operate in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia under their own name – albeit subject to several strict conditions concerning issues such as the guarantee of partnership roles for Saudi lawyers. Before these reforms were enacted, international law firms had only been permitted to operate in Saudi via a cooperation agreement with a domestic Saudi Arabian law firm.

Under the previous system, the most successful pairings were always those existing between law firms that were already very closely integrated. Such integration typically paved the way for the Saudi law firm to become the local office of its international partner as soon as regulations allowed. In March 2023, Clifford Chance, Latham & Watkins and Herbert Smith Freehills became the first three international law firms granted permission to practice in Saudi, with law firms such as Linklaters, White & Case and King & Spalding joining the club in the months that followed.

The relaxation of the rules was no doubt a factor influencing the decision of several other law firms – such as Gibson Dunn and Kirkland & Ellis – to open in Riyadh, despite not having had a cooperation agreement in place with any Saudi law firm before.

The fast-evolving TMT landscape in the UAE has proved fertile ground for lateral hires, with what was at one time something of a niche practice area becoming a key offering for leading law firms in Dubai and the Middle East. This reflects the ever-growing influence of media and technology on our daily lives. The influence of AI was, after all, a central concern of the 2023 Hollywood Writers Strike.

Even if this were not the case, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are increasingly aware of the need to move away from their reliance on oil and gas, with knowledge-based industries such as the media and tech sectors well placed to bolster the economy. Chambers submissions to UAE TMT have increased significantly in recent years, as more and more law firms see the need to invest in specialists, often hiring from their competitors. Even looking purely at Chambers-ranked lawyers, 2022 and 2023 saw a raft of notable hires, including the moves of Martin Hayward from Al Tamimi to Pinsent Masons, and of Jamie Ryder from DLA Piper to Reed Smith.

One law firm which has made especially big waves in the market is Florida-headquartered Greenberg Traurig. Just before Christmas 2023, Greenberg announced the double hire of David Bintliff and Lewis Calder, both formerly with Bird & Bird. These hires added to the firm’s burgeoning Middle East sport, media and entertainment practice, and were considered significant enough within the field of to be reported in no less a publication than Variety.

Greenberg’s newly established Middle Eastern offices have hired consistently through the course of 2023 and it seems clear that this is a law firm to keep our eyes on as we enter the 2024 research period.

By Summer 2023, it was clear that the Middle East was once again firmly at the top of the agenda for leading global law firms. In June, the UK’s Financial Times newspaper ran a story detailing the flurry of interest in Saudi Arabia from the likes of Greenberg Traurig and Kirkland & Ellis, viewing this as a means for law firms to compensate for the downturn in M&A deals across Europe and North America.

The trend was particularly notable among US law firms. In addition to Greenberg and K&E, dispute resolution boutique Quinn Emanuel opened in the UAE, and drew further headlines in the legal press for its double hire of Joanne Strain and Parnika Chaturvedi from King & Wood Mallesons, following King & Wood’s announcement that it would be closing its offices in Europe and the Middle East by the end of 2024, as part of a formal cooperation agreement with Eversheds. Quinn’s UAE offices added to an increasingly robust Middle Eastern footprint for the firm. It set up in Riyadh, via the lateral hire of Nasser Alrubayyi (formerly from Khoshaim & Associates) at the start of 2022, and has also maintained an office in Doha for a number of years.

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher was another US law firm which redoubled its efforts in the Middle East in 2023. The firm began the year with the news that it would be opening in Abu Dhabi, having hired a team of lawyers from Shearman & Sterling, only a few short months after having taken on the group’s former Shearman colleague (and Chambers Band 1 lawyer) Marwan Elaraby. In the second half of the year, the news broke that Gibson had hired another team of lawyers in Riyadh, this time targeting White & Case.

These recent office openings demonstrated renewed interest in the Middle East among the top US law firms. The current situation is a far cry from that which existed a few years ago, when it seemed that every other month there came news that another law firm was closing one of its offices in the region. At that time, it was typically Abu Dhabi and Doha that closed their doors rather than Dubai and Riyadh.

In the past year, Qatar has not seen any major market entries, with sources typically remarking on a reduction in transactional work following conclusion of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Interestingly, in 2023 Simmons & Simmons – at the time considered the premier transactional team in Doha – announced plans to close its office in Doha. Yet the firm’s number of Middle Eastern offices will remain constant, following the news of its intention to open in Riyadh later in 2024.

While it does seem that the pendulum has now firmly swung back in the region’s favour, the current trend for office openings is one that doesn’t benefit all markets equally. There is no doubt that Saudi Arabia is where the money is. As such, for the foreseeable future, it is also where the leading global law firms are.