On today’s Legally Speaking Podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Ahmed Elnaggar. Ahmed is the Founder and Managing Partner at Elnaggar & Partners. He has over a decade’s experience in Corporate Structures, Succession Planning and Trust Services. Ahmed has expertise dealing with clients worldwide, including Bahrain, Qatar, Mauritius and Switzerland. Ahmed is also the proud Founder and President of the Emirates Legal Network. He is on a mission to help extend the law to people, launching The Jurist, the number one legal show across the MENA region providing a platform for lawyers, legal consultants and experts to share their knowledge.

So why should you be listening in? 

You can hear Rob and Ahmed discussing:

– Building a Successful Firm Requiring Trust

– Clear Ownership Preventing Inheritance Issues

– Offshore Structures Offering Legal Safety

– How to Avoid Postponing Succession Planning Decisions

– Team Building Focusing On Shared Values

Connect with Ahmed Elnaggar here – https://ae.linkedin.com/in/aelnaggar

Transcript

You will only excel if you really love what you do. A huge misconception about succession planning is that everybody thinks that this is for rich people. A big misconception, to be very honest. I think that the people who are not very rich, they need to do the planning more than anybody else because they have limited resources and limited assets. I would like to take care of these limited assets for loved ones and people who need it the most.

What’s most important is not even the fact of inheritance itself or succession planning, but the fact that no one else knows what you own, but you. 

On today’s Legally Speaking podcast, I’m delighted to be joined by Ahmed Elnaggar. Ahmed is the founder and managing partner of Elnaggar and Partners. He has over a decade’s experience in corporate structured succession planning and trust services. Ahmed has expertise dealing with clients worldwide, including Bahrain, Qatar, Mauritius and Switzerland.

Ahmed is also the proud founder and president of the Emirates Legal Network. He is on a mission to help extend the law to people, launching the Juris, the number one legal show across the MENA region, providing a platform for lawyers, legal consultants and experts to share their knowledge. So a very big warm welcome to the show, Ahmed. Thank you very much, Rob. Thank you for having me and an amazing introduction. Thank you so much.

well, it’s all true. You’re a super busy person and you do an incredible amount for the legal community. Before we get into your career and what you’ve been getting up to, we have a couple of icebreaker questions. Firstly, what is your favorite beverage and what is your preferred choice of footwear on a typical workday? wow, for sure coffee in the morning, very early, so I have to make myself a very nice, dear cup of coffee. But I have it in the office, not at home.

I have to have the coffee as the first thing that I drink. And what’s the best footwear? Yeah. What’s your comfy footwear you tend to work on a typical work day or your preferred? ⁓ I forgot those days, my friend. I wear my classic shoe every day. I love it because I really like my suits and I like to wear them. But at the same time, very early before I come to the office and have a very nice walk.

on the beach and Kai Beach in Dubai and I wear my sneakers. They might allow to say the brand or not. Absolutely. Say what you would like. Yes, they are Nike. nice. Okay. So coffee and Nikes. And with that, we can move swiftly on to talk all about you. So would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your background and career journey? Thank you so much. I always start with that because I’m very proud with my family.

father is a lawyer and my three elder sisters are lawyers. I grew up in a law firm. I grew up amazed and ⁓ excited as well because I knew I would be a lawyer because I loved it from the very beginning. that’s fast forward. Here we are. did ⁓ my studies at Cairo University and I worked during these university days with my father. I got the bar ⁓ association membership in Cairo and then I moved to Dubai.

Swiss law firm, the IFC, six years, then I resigned and I started my firm and here we are. That’s all about it. Absolutely. A huge success story along the way. What was the inspiration behind wanting to build your own firm? To be very honest, I did not see building a firm is like really my dream because I had the chance to stay with my dad in Cairo and I worked for him and I’ll be the

kind of name partner from day one because I have my dad’s name on the firm, but that was not really my ambition. My ambition was to do something different and learn something new. didn’t like litigation and he was into litigation and conflicts. That was not my thing. I decided to move out and go to Dubai, try my luck somewhere else. And I did the corporate and corporate structuring and trust services. And I loved it. And I think that’s why I’m

received to be one of the good ones here just because I really like what I do. And I did not even start my firm because it was again a dream of mine. I just started my firm because I realized that I needed to do something different. Six years with the Swiss firm, I was very happy and I was very, very well paid. And I was very satisfied with that. But ⁓

I just wanted to do something different and I wanted to grow more. And I realized it is not possible where I am and I have to move on. And the easiest way to move on and do something is to actually build it. Absolutely. And you know, you’re super ambitious. I can see that your pro growth mindset from the interactions we’ve had together as well.

But it’s not straightforward, is it? Building a firm. So could you talk us through the process of building obviously our nagging partners to where it is today and how that vision, if it’s all has evolved as the legal landscape, particularly across the UAE is transformed? Well, I don’t know. Maybe I was surprised a lot of people by the easiest thing to catch is the legal expertise and the knowledge. you don’t have to be like building a firm is not

anywhere close to be the best in providing legal services. Building a firm is quite a business. You have to understand sales and marketing. You have to understand branding. You have to understand psychology because you need to work on the trust and the confidence that you need to build. You have to work a lot on your values and to stay in line with all these values and ethical parts so that you don’t accept certain clients. don’t accept

even the good ones to be treating your staff in a bad way or so and have to stand up for your team. And there’s so much to learn and I did so much mistakes. enjoy talking about these mistakes a lot, but I hired the wrong people and I hired the right people. I, ⁓ yeah, it was a bumpy ride, but very enjoyable. What’s been the biggest mistake you’ve made that’s really helped shape

where you are today as a law firm leader? ⁓ Yeah, I think not one, many, probably the biggest one was to not ⁓ trust myself enough. So I really doubted myself a lot in many steps and that took a lot of energy from me and I started late with a lot of things.

So I should have started earlier and it was all coming from self doubt. And when I realized that this shift is that I think I amazed myself at certain point is like, wow, I’m actually very good. wow. I’m not a worst manager. no, no, no. I’m a good lawyer. So this is the thing that you need to have a little bit of more confidence in yourself. And it doesn’t really matter what mistakes you can do because you’re going to learn anyways.

but to be amazed how good you are. And I was amazed on how good I am by just taking risks. And I talk about this a lot on the show, know, hard work is great and that’s key to a point, but actually the more risk you take, the more success is ahead. And it sounds uncomfortable, particularly to a legal audience, but it’s so true. And I speak to so many law firm founders and legal tech entrepreneurs and people who’ve been highly successful. And I think that’s a really key.

key message. mean, you talked about hiring and you know, that piques my curiosity, obviously being in the legal recruiting space for quite some time now and high performing teams and a lot of the law firms I lead talk to are talking about the need to build good teams and can’t go alone. So how have you gone about forming a very high performing legal team in the region that is constantly evolving? You’d be surprised, maybe not.

One of the things that I thought when I was starting to build a firm is that I wanted to really hire the best people who know very well the best knowledge and education and so on. While this still remain a very important element, ⁓ on hiring one of the most important thing that you need to look at is values of the people and work ethic and this fire inside that you want to grow.

or not you want to do something with the career because it really is different. ⁓ So this is one of the biggest mistakes that I’ve done in the beginning and I fixed it right now. I really don’t care much about how heavy is the CV and how much ⁓ the people worked in big law or in big organizations. Good for them, amazing skills and amazing badges from big universities but that

really doesn’t make a team. A team is being aligned with values and being aligned with mission. And every strong technical candidate you have who is not rowing with you on the same direction is basically an obstacle and probably the worst thing that you might hire. So on hiring, I tell you, I don’t hire

high grades and big universities anymore, unless I see something really special. And that’s a really good point. And thank you for highlighting that because you are known for heavily investing in your team’s growth and you everyone, you know, speaks very highly of you in the region more generally. What ways could you maybe help other law firm leaders go about screening for that?

Are there any things you ask in interviews, particularly to candidates to make sure they are aligned with your values or ethics or any strategies you’ve incorporated to ensure you get it right? That might be helpful for our audience. I always ask for, for really basic stuff to understand the people and I’d never take, ⁓

anything with face value because to be very honest, I trust everyone. But the thing is you need to really go a little deeper into the details just to understand what’s behind it. So the technical part you need to really cover. I want to ask most of the people I try to interview or speak with before we hiring, what’s tomorrow? What do you think of this law? I mean, you’re an expert in labor law. What do you think the law

is going to change too because this happened, the changes happened before. And if they’re aware, if they have an idea and they have actually a creative idea or an insight to this branch that they are ⁓ experts in, then I understand that there is something different. There is someone who actually thought of the work that he’s doing or she’s doing. One more thing is technology, how tech savvy they are because it’s really

an obstacle if someone is not willing to adopt very basic stuff. mean, the CRM and emails and smartphones and so on now is the norm. 10 years ago, it was a little bit of a struggle. 20 years ago, was completely new. AI is the same thing right now. If they’re actually exploring and trying to understand and trying to play with it, even with, I don’t know, photos of the families or creating a video for their social media or something that is good enough.

and the willingness to join and to learn how to use it for daily work and how to use it to optimize tasks or save time or even for legal research. And these things are, is this the lawyer of yesterday, is the lawyer of today or is the lawyer of tomorrow? If he’s the lawyer of tomorrow, then we are aligned. This is the same value, the same journey that we are going to together and then it’s a good fit.

And I can see that natural synergy then isn’t there in terms of them being that future-proof lawyer in line with your values, but also they become as a value add, you know, if they have those skills or they’ve been testing or maybe they’ve got something slightly different that could be an additional value add to the firm that you haven’t been testing or a tool or something. So I absolutely agree with that. And thanks for sharing with it. Okay. You’ve got so much incredible experience, decades of experience across corporate, you know, structuring and also succession planning.

Quite a hard question, but what’s one lesson that fundamentally changed how you advise your clients today? Trying to understand the motivation behind their requests because a lot of clients come to you or come to me to find a solution for a problem that they really don’t want to fix. They just want to sometimes to talk and I always ask the clients amazing ideas. You have a lot of

corporate structures and you have a lot of plans and you were going to touch on seven jurisdictions and I’m gonna make you a huge ⁓ tax planning and accession planning and corporate structuring and we look at the legalities and so on. It’s an amazing fee for me but can you tell me why are you doing that? What exactly are you trying to save? And this is what changed completely.

my practice. I started to try to understand the motivation behind the task or the ask from the client. What did they want to do? And sometimes we were able to eliminate maybe 50 % of the checklist of things that we were supposed to do and maybe deliver this other 50 % with much more productivity and much more accuracy than just

just following whatever, I mean, you want a memo of a hundred pages, here you go, that’s my fee and that’s it because the client want to come to you to feel like you’re actually inside their head or you’re thinking with them. That’s why how they trust you more and they understand they rely on you more. And that’s why I have clients for the last 15, 16 years from generations, I guess I’m speaking to them and they still use our service.

really change happened and made my life a lot easier and better. Yeah. And it just shows that you are the trusted advisor and expert. you know, when people hire you and they don’t hire you necessarily, of course they hire you for your knowledge. They don’t hire you to answer their questions. They hire because you know the right questions to ask in the first place to get the information, to understand why they’re doing it. And I think that’s what separates you. And obviously the success you’ve had with your firm and the growth that you’ve had, you know, across multiple regions. And with that you’ve worked across

As I say, multiple jurisdictions from kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Mauritius, et cetera, et cetera. What are the most memorable cases or types of cases you can share with our audience that stay with you? I was talking about this because the suit I’m wearing last time I, I, I put that jacket on was in 2018 and it stayed in my closet for a very long time. And when I wear it today, I remembered something. ⁓ It was a case in Abu Dhabi.

where one of my clients is subject to a real estate fraud ⁓ from the developer, but was not from the developer, was from an employee of the developer. So, it triggered a few things for me because my client was a victim of this fraud and he actually paid a huge amount of money wrongfully to a wrong bank account, not even the developer, but the developer employees were

inside. So ⁓ they are orchestrating the fraud. So I just remember how clients come to you after doing a mistake, not by checking first. And this made me try as much as I can since then until now to tell all of them, please, let’s just check with each other before you take legal action and big transactions like this so that we

do some due diligence on the transfer or on the transaction itself so you don’t get as a victim and then we go and chase the funds or fix the problem. Another thing happened as well is that me realizing because I have clients who are developers and CEOs and CFOs of these big development companies and I started stressing on auditing, internal audits and client

compliance and corporate governance to make sure that you don’t have a chance inside the organization to get something like this happening. And I learned at that time that people who are fraud, doing fraud transactions and doing tricks like this are super smart. And sometimes it’s like, wow, well played, you know, it’s a good crime. It’s funny that you reach this level.

But it was smart. So the smarter they get, the smarter we get. And the more stringent are the regulations, the smarter they get. So it’s always a moving ⁓ thing. And this case was funny. We got back the money for the client, of course, so very happy about it. I’m proud of it. I’m talking about it from time to time. But yeah, that’s something that was significant in my career.

Yeah, absolutely. And like you say, the main main objective is you delivered for your client and you know, it’s continuously what you’ve done time and time again. I want to stick on the learnings now and some misconceptions because around offshore structures, because what is the biggest misconceptions clients have about offshore structures that you find? Yeah, this is really the word offshore is a bad word. This is always the first thing that rings a bell.

When you say offshore, you hear money laundering or terrorism financing, hear drug dealers and other bad stuff, but you can’t imagine how important are these structures for confidentiality, for safety of families, for asset consolidation, for asset protection, for a lot of legally important topics that we always think about. Take it like that.

If you are in Dubai for example and you own a property on your own personal name I can tell you of at least 17 organizations some of them are private and some of them are public will know Ahmed and they will know his address and that in many jurisdictions and in many cases even in jurisdictions as safe as the UAE is a safety and security hazard maybe Ahmed and Nagar is not so famous but

Roger Federer is famous, Will Smith is famous, and I can imagine that they would like to keep the residence house address as ⁓ secure. So the first thing that we do for confidentiality, for example, is put in the structure so that their name does not really appear everywhere. And this is a very, very small example, but I’m going to go a little bigger. A baseball ⁓ bat.

is a sports tool, right? Yes. You can use it right, in the right place at the right time. Well, I’ll try. Maybe a paddle racket. So it is not about the structure that smells bad or sounds fishy. Whenever you hear about it, it’s the use. It’s like anybody, any, any body of us as a human being and as a professional, can do good and do bad.

Any tool can be used in the right way and the wrong way. And this is one of the biggest misconceptions that when you hear offshore, already inside your head, you hear, oh, something is wrong here. That’s not true. It’s so important that we highlight this as well, because, know, the way things are discussed or marketed actually with the wrong connotation could actually help, you know, people could avoid.

lots of mistakes if they kind of came somebody like you got the education, understood how they could structure things. And then the end result would be so much better rather than offshore. Like you say, that jumps to negative, negative thoughts where actually we like to talk about the positives and the way law can be used in the right way, not just from obviously practicing the law, but the technology and law, so many other things. Okay. Sticking with some of your key areas then succession planning, you know, it’s often very emotional, not just legal.

So how do you navigate family dynamics whilst focusing on the overall objective that why you’re doing it in the first place that you discussed? What I always say this way, if you’re not immortal, you should have a succession plan. You know, if you know that you’re going to live forever, for example, then okay, you don’t have to worry about that, but maybe you need the wealth just to define things when you forget them, you know, because maybe you don’t die because you’re immortal, but maybe you don’t.

Want anything else and someone should take these assets and define them? There’s so many aspects of how and why people should think of succession first of all we don’t know what happened and when and What’s most important is not even the fact of inheritance itself or succession planning but the fact that no one else knows what you own but you No one have an idea if you ask yourself right now to make me a list in

two hours of everything you own or everything you have as interest you’re probably going to take more than two hours and you will come back tomorrow and say oops I forgot something I have a watch that I lended to my sister I don’t know two years ago blah blah blah and you want these things the valuables because you work very hard all your life to go to the right ones or to go to the people you want them to go to so in order for you to be able to make this ⁓

happen, you need to have them writing because our brain, our capabilities are very limited. Unfortunately, we are not AI yet. You know, we’re not computers. We’re just human, which is really nice and we are enjoying it. But at the same time, we’re going to die and the assets will go to someone at the end, whether we write it down or we don’t, whether we decide or we don’t because anywhere in the world, in so many countries, there are forced leadership regimes.

like what we have here in the UAE, it’s majorly Sharia law and if it’s not Sharia law, it is another law that is regulating the personal status for the expats and it says certain conditions. If you go to France, if you go to Germany, if you go to UK, if you go to US, we have also first-tier ship worldwide. But if you want to decide, if you want to make sure that your wishes, your ideas will be implemented, you have to put it down.

easiest way to do that is to write a will or maybe a different structure because a different structure fits you more because you’re Muslim and you’re married to a non-Muslim or you’re a non-Muslim and you’re married to a Muslim or maybe one of your kids decide to have a different faith one day and all of these elements would make a contribution to the shared distribution do you want to take charge and make the decision or you want someone else to make the decision it’s up to you

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always say if it’s meant to be, it’s up to me, right? If you want something to happen, you’ve got to take self-accountability, put the structures in place so you know that that legacy, whatever you’re trying to plan is actually going to happen. So really sage advice once again. Let me not interrupt you, but I have one thing that is a huge misconception about succession planning is that everybody thinks that this is for rich people. It’s a big misconception. It’s a huge wrong mistake. And to be very honest, I think that the people who are not very rich,

They need the well or they need to do the planning more than anybody else because they have limited resources and limited assets. I would like to take care of this limited assets to the loved ones and to the people who need it the most. Plus we don’t know. I have minor children. I have 15 and 10 years old. I would like to know who’s going to be taking care of them. And I would like to know what decisions are going to be made. If I don’t have the writing and if I don’t decide right now, we don’t know.

what’s going to happen to them. So it’s much better to make this decision whether you have children or you are rich or you’re poor. If your life makes sense in any way, you should have a plan. Really good point there as well, because they’re for everybody, I think is the point that you’re saying there. particularly if you have limited resources, you want to protect that and make sure that gets to the right hands and the right people. And also from the parenting perspective, a really valid point as well. Okay, flipping to the ultra high net worth families though.

When they’re planning their generational wealth transfer, what are some of the common mistakes they tend to make? They put their decisions on hold because they’re used to spend a lot of time making decisions. And this is one of the biggest mistakes a lot of high net worth individuals and high net worth families are doing. They keep talking a lot. They make all the researches. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

for opinions and they wait for the action and this is a huge mistake and ⁓ another one which is really something that needs to be avoided is to put too many emotions into the decisions. I understand that we are all human beings and we are all people driven by our emotions and our feelings but you never

ever should make a decision when you’re so happy. You should never make a decision when you’re so angry. And you have to be in a place where you actually think about it, think about your decisions and make the well balanced decision. And this is probably most of the high-networked individuals do because they feel like they can. And unfortunately, they have a lot of resources to allow them to do that. Some smart ones don’t do this mistake.

advised by very good advisors ⁓ and some don’t. Another thing that just came to my mind right now because I’ve seen this a lot is that a lot of high net worth individuals do not put all the stakeholders of such decisions in the same room at the same time. So they speak with me alone and then they speak with the tax advisor alone and then they speak to their

CFO alone and take all this information because they don’t want to share all the information with all the professionals and then they cook it on their own and make all the decisions and sometimes the huge mistakes happen. I always advise when there is a strategic decision on tax planning or succession planning or even corporate structuring, please put everybody, all the stakeholders in the room.

Let’s put the CFO together with the legal advisor, together with the tax advisor. If there’s an immigration advisor who’s going to be making some decisions as well and saying what works and what doesn’t, let’s put them all in the room, have one discussion. Everybody say that this possible or not. And when it works, then we have a decision that actually fit what you need. right. Now we must talk about the jurist. You launched the Juris podcast, the first independent legal blog in the United Arab.

Emirates, could you tell us about the show and the audience, what you’re hoping for them to learn from it? Well, to be very honest, I am figuring it out still. I mean, there’s when it started in the very early beginning, it was just articles and I was inviting my friends and my colleagues who I know of their expertise and they’re good at what they do. I told them, okay, let me take your text. Let me publish it. Let me put your photo, put your company name and your website and your email.

Maybe if someone feels that there’s value in this, they can reach out directly to you. And by time we kept posting articles, posting articles until I started to get feedback from my colleagues that they got clients and some of them got new jobs and change their jobs. And then I realized, wow, this is really effective and it’s working very well. Let me enhance it a bit.

did the rebranding and I started to add into it until we landed the idea of starting the podcast, which was waiting for a while. And instead of having just a podcast where I am ⁓ interviewing myself or I’m talking about all my profession and all my successes, like we all do on LinkedIn, I started to invite the same

lawyers and we talk about legal topics and talk about them. So I was probably the only one doing this in UE at that time. Everybody else was doing video content about their firm or their profession because they felt that this is a very good way of marketing, which is true. ⁓ However, the jurists, by introducing other lawyers and by introducing other ⁓ stakeholders in the market,

we actually developed a very wide audience and it’s actually one of the things that I enjoy the most in my week and in my work is that I interview my friends and my colleagues, the lawyers, brilliant ones that I get introduced to, brilliant media guys and recruitment agencies like yourself from the UAE from abroad. I learned something new every day and now became one of the

be best legal resources of video content in the UAE. And it’s incredible what you’ve built. It’s hugely, hugely successful. You have a massive reach. And yes, I was very honored to feature on the Juris actually when I was out in Dubai earlier this year, and I was sort of exploring why lawyers can’t be the best kept secret anymore. Talked around personal brand, AI, legal careers. We’d love your thoughts on that because I think you’ve built a tremendous personal brand and any sort of takeaways you took from that particular episode.

I enjoyed our episode a lot. I enjoyed this topic particularly a lot. mean, the personal branding and talking about what the lawyers can do and cannot do, what they should do to show off their skills and their knowledge. ⁓ It’s exactly the mission that I had from the very early beginning and the results that showed the ⁓ lawyers and their expertise that is driving this

To be very honest, I’m very happy I’m able to help a lot of people. think this changed the life, not just for me, honestly changed my life. This ⁓ podcast and this idea of understanding the power of the personal brand, like you said on the episode, understanding the power of positioning, understanding what really thought leadership means, what is a personal brand in general, what does it mean and

the value of it and how it is an economic asset and how strong you can benefit from how every lawyer doesn’t really matter if you work for a big law or a big consultancy that you can build your own brand and build your own image. I’m at the moment writing the book and hopefully it comes out this year very soon and it’s all about that topic. It’s not a legal topic. It talks about

the legal industry, I saw it in the 80s, I saw it in the 90s, I saw it now and I’m practicing it, I understand the power of network, the power of positioning and branding yourself and I’m putting all my info in this book and hopefully someone reads it and enjoy it and that’s exactly what I’m trying to give which is the value that ultimately is going to position me as well.

Absolutely. And you do an incredible job of giving back and talking of networking that leads nicely onto where I wanted to go next, which is the Emirates legal network. Cause you’re the proud founder and president of that. What was the moment you realized the UAE legal community needed a platform like this and tell us a bit more about it. This is something that is really very close to my heart as well. I’m a very avid networker guy. been a business, ⁓ a member of.

The Swiss Business Council, I’m not Swiss. And the Spanish Business Council, I’m not Spanish. I don’t even speak both languages. I ⁓ was a member of Business Network International. This is a BNI. It’s a very famous networking group. I’ve been attending every single event of the DIFC networking and so on. I like to meet people and I like to connect. I understand very well the name and the picture on the LinkedIn and on the email.

absolutely no sense without shaking hands so I realized that we need to talk to each other to know each other that’s what my dad always tell me and he told it to many people speak so I can see you he doesn’t see you unless you actually talk so we go out and shake hands and we build the network and then with this network you realize that you make friends

relevant friends, people who understand you are at the same level intellectually and maybe socially and help you and they care about you and they care about your profession. So being part of a society was the whole thing. It did not exist. We had to create it and by creating it we started at a very small group and by time it compounds and by time people started to invite each other and

And by time I realized that people are congratulating each other for joining Emirates Legal Network, which is really a great success for it. And now it’s growing and growing every day. So I’m very proud of it. I’m very happy of it because of it. just I want to say something to everyone. I’m the biggest winner. mean, Emirates Legal Network really is the best market entry for anybody who wants to come and do legal work in the UAE. But me being the first member.

I’m the biggest winner because the more you stay, the more you network, the more you know of this network, you reap a lot of benefit out of it. Absolutely. The wisdom, the expertise, the friendship, the fun, the education, all of it, I think is great. And I even had the pleasure of attending one of your legal networks events whilst I was out in Dubai and the caliber of the people there, the energy, just the information exchanging was brilliant. I think what you’re doing is fantastic. So

How do you envisage the Emirates Legal Network shaping the next generation of legal professionals in the UAE? It’s brilliant how all the newcomers, whether senior or junior, they come to join Emirates Legal Network. Like, for example, one of the big airlines, big European airlines, just hired the new legal counsel. And the first thing she did is to Google legal associations in the UAE. And she jumped into one of the events and became a member. And in few…

weeks she is already ⁓ in a network of 20 lawyers and she knows and made some friends in the profession as well getting easier for her to hire people and so on. So what I see Emirates League Network is becoming the reference for everything ⁓ legal ⁓ in the UAE where everybody who wants to come in and to start learning about the UAE come and join Emirates League Network.

network with the right people, with relevant people so that you don’t do mistakes, to accelerate actually ⁓ joining this profession in this jurisdiction. So you don’t really have to wait years and years and say, ⁓ two years in UAE and I already do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, 10 things instead of spending two or three years, four years to reach out what people do with MRS Leaguer Network as one. So it’s an accelerator.

And I wanted to grow in that. Absolutely. You know, it’s the access, isn’t it? To great people, like-minded, well-spirited. I think it’s fantastic what you’re building and absolutely would encourage people to check it out. Ahmed, you’ve done lots of interviews. You’ve met lots of people. You’re a real good networker. You get yourself out there. What’s something that maybe people don’t know about you that you would like to share?

with our audience or something that drives you that you perhaps haven’t shared or don’t think has had enough airtime attached to your personal brand. I’m curious. Maybe it’s funny to say that, but ⁓ it’s hard. Reaching what you want to do is hard. Staying in the same lane where you know what you want. mean, it’s just not that easy. It doesn’t…

I mean, what you see online for my successes is not true because every time I have an achievement, I have 10 failures. So this is probably the thing that a lot of people don’t know about me or maybe don’t see. I fail much, much, much more than I gain. It’s just that I try a lot. And you fail forward and you refuse to give up. And the reality is the more that you keep going, the more failures you’ll have.

but you’ll be able to, always use the acronym LOOSE, life offering some experience. We lose a lot. And in entrepreneurship, if you have 50 good days in a year, you’ve had a tremendous year. Cause the reality is there is a lot of things that you’re going through, but I think your energy, your general demeanor carries you through as well on top of obviously your incredible legal expertise, the network you’ve built, but it’s built in you as well, that internal drive. And with that, before I let you go, just a final question around advice. What advice would you give to aspiring lawyers then?

who are looking to start their legal career within the UAE. I don’t want to sound cliche to be very honest. ⁓ It’s hard. It’s really hard. It’s not a playground. It’s not a tax haven and it’s not a place where you are coming to ⁓ enjoy your time and so on. Dubai in the UAE, it’s very competitive, very hard to find your place if you’re not serious enough.

about this job in this jurisdiction, you’re not going to make it. If you don’t love the job, if you don’t really love what you’re doing, you’re not going to stand because it’s really stressful and it’s a lot of work. if you don’t love labor law, don’t work in labor law. Switch. If you don’t love succession planning, don’t do it. Switch to something else. If courts is not your thing, switch because

you will only excel if you really love what you do because if you love it, you’re going to spend tremendous amount of time and effort and hard work in it. And only then you’ll be able to be relaxed enough to dedicate one hour with a brilliant, brilliant Rob Hanna to talk because otherwise you’d be working on your desk day in day out.

to have the luxury to actually define your own time on your own pace is a privilege that only the people who actually work hard for many years and create something and make a huge success have. So you need to come here loving what you do very much and work hard, you make it. But it’s not for the easy.

really appreciate the candidness of that as well because you have to be intentional about your career, curate your career, you have to be focused, you have to be committed. And I think if you have all of those traits and you surround yourself and you network and meet great people, then the world is absolutely your oyster, but it’s right to point out that.

The work needs to be put in. with that, Ahmed, I appreciate you being authentic, open and generous with your time and all the great things that you’re doing for the global legal community. And also of course, particularly within the UAE. If our listeners want to follow you, learn more about your career or indeed your law firm or potentially interested in joining the Emirates Legal Network or following your show, The Jurist, where can they go? Feel free to share any websites, any social media handles. We’ll also share them in this episode for you too.

Thank you so much. Yes, you can log into my emirateleagueinetwork.com or thejurist.com or enagorlegal.com or go to Instagram. write down, the easiest thing is to write down my name and Dubai next to it and you’ll find everything. Absolutely. And that is the power of a personal brand and putting content that’s really good out there. You become very discoverable and you come up. Ahmed, I’m thrilled that we managed to make this episode.

happen. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show and I was honored to feature on your show as well. But from all of us on the legally speaking podcast sponsored by Clio wishing you lots of continued success with your career, the firm Emirates Legal Network, the jurist and other things that no doubt you’ll continue to do. But for now, over and out. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. If you like the content here, why not check out our world leading content and collaboration of the Legally Speaking Club over on Discord.

Go to our website www.legallyspeakingpodcast.com There’s a link to join our community there. Over and out.