Scope of Work
Companies in the UAE operate within a layered legislative landscape: the federal Commercial Companies Law, the commercial transactions framework, and the distinct regimes of several dozen free zones, each with its own rules on ownership, licensing and dispute resolution. Choosing the right vehicle on day one settles far more than the formation paperwork, it fixes the boundaries of liability, the fiscal and regulatory treatment of the business, and the entity's capacity to admit partners and investors later.
We accompany clients through the full life of the enterprise: structuring and incorporation; documenting the relationship between shareholders; acquisitions and share transfers; and, when the time comes, orderly restructuring or exit. In the day-to-day, we draft, review and negotiate the commercial contracts a business runs on, written to be performed, not litigated.
And when dispute arrives despite every precaution, we act for clients in commercial litigation before the UAE courts and support arbitration proceedings conducted under the rules of the institutional centres, within the UAE and beyond.
What We Do
- Incorporation and structuring across the UAE mainland and free zones, and selection of the legal form best suited to the business and its aims.
- Founders' and shareholders' agreements, memoranda and articles of association, drafted to resolve deadlock before it arises.
- Mergers and acquisitions: legal due diligence, transaction structuring, and share sale and transfer agreements.
- Commercial agency and distribution arrangements: negotiation, drafting, registration, and the consequences of termination.
- Franchise agreements, together with the trademark and know-how arrangements that surround them.
- Drafting, review and negotiation of commercial contracts: supply, services, subcontracting and trading partnerships.
- Corporate governance: board charters, delegations of authority, and continuing compliance obligations.
- Restructuring of entities and obligations, exit arrangements and voluntary liquidation.
- Representation in commercial litigation before the UAE courts, and support for institutional arbitration.
Our Approach
We begin where legal advice should begin: with the statute and the courts' reasoning, not with received impressions. In every corporate matter the research comes before the opinion; we then put before the client a candid account of the position, what the law supports, what it does not, and the margin of judgement in between, before any talk of outcomes.
Because the parties to a single transaction so often work across two languages, we draft agreements and submissions in Arabic and English to the same standard of precision, so that the two texts never part company in meaning should they one day be read by a judge or an arbitrator.