The firms are hiring like it is 2022 again, and this time the sovereign side is feeding them.
Julia Snyder has returned to Hourani & Partners in Dubai as a corporate and M&A partner after three years as SVP Legal at the Public Investment Fund. Congratulations to her. I mention it for what it says about the market, not about her.
For five years the traffic has run one way: private practice into the sovereign funds, and almost nobody back. A senior return from the biggest fund of them all to a Dubai firm tells you the firms are competing again, on the work and on the terms. I expected to write that sentence in 2027, not September.
Akin hired three partners in three days: Andrea Dougall and Marie-Sophie Bandeira Vieira into its investment management practice in Abu Dhabi and Dubai on 8 September, and Andrej Kormuth as a project development partner in Dubai on 10 September. Charles Russell Speechlys made Philip O'Riordan partner and head of corporate for the Middle East. Watson Farley & Williams took Guillaume Hess from K&L Gates for construction and infrastructure disputes in Dubai. Hogan Lovells Cadwalader hired Dr Yazid Almasoud from Greenberg Traurig for public policy and regulatory work in Riyadh. Galadari made Darren Bradshaw a corporate partner, and BonelliErede moved arbitration partner Giovanni Minuto from Milan to Dubai.
Nine partners between Monday and Thursday. Funds, projects, disputes, Saudi regulatory. Nobody hires nine partners into a market they think is slowing. The full list, each move with its source, is on the Legal Route moves tracker at legal-route.com/gulf-legal-moves.
Sabic Agri-Nutrients awarded Samsung E&A a USD 3.47 billion EPC contract for an ammonia and urea complex. Ammonia is the molecule the energy transition runs on, and this is the largest single process-plant award I have seen in the Kingdom this year. The lawyers who can read a construction contract and a hydrogen sales contract in the same sitting are about to be very busy.
PIF lent LIV Golf USD 49.6 million after it filed for Chapter 11, the emergency kind of loan a US court has to approve. A Saudi sovereign fund standing in a US bankruptcy court as a lender is not a sentence I expected to write this year. Restructuring has been the quiet practice in the Gulf for a decade. It is not going to stay quiet.
Saudi Arabia went back to the dollar market with a USD 16.5 billion sukuk, DP World priced EUR 750 million of green notes alongside USD 750 million of conventional ones, and Mashreq placed a USD 500 million five-year bond, all in one week. The debt desks never had their August.
The Boring Company raised USD 3 billion in a round led by UAE investors. Abu Dhabi money is now behind the tunnelling company as well as the data centres.
Oman approved its rail accord with the UAE by royal decree, a passenger and freight line from Al-Wathba to Sohar. The same week Oman issued a request for proposals for a 500 megawatt solar plant at Sinaw, and Nama Power and Water Procurement Company put out a tender for legal advisers on three one-gigawatt solar projects. A government tendering for lawyers is the clearest demand signal there is. Muscat has been the market everyone forgets. Stop forgetting it.
Saudi Arabia reformed its Government Tenders and Procurement Law, letting officials sign off bigger contracts without going up the chain, buy more directly, and wait less for the Ministry of Finance. Faster procurement means faster contracts, and faster contracts mean the in-house teams at every contractor in Riyadh need another pair of hands.
DP World is hiring a Group Senior Vice President Legal for global logistics in the UAE, a proper seat at one of the few Gulf groups that is genuinely global. Qiddiya is hiring an Associate General Counsel for regulatory and employee advisory in Saudi Arabia. And TotalEnergies has an E&P Senior Legal Counsel seat open in the UAE, which is the kind of job that only comes up when someone retires.
DataVolt is racing to build a USD 1 billion data centre at NEOM, Semafor reports, as Saudi Arabia positions itself to export compute. Every one of those campuses needs a power deal, a construction contract, rules on where the data lives and a structure the foreign investor can live with. The lawyer who has done two of the four is rare. The one who has done all four can name a number.
In-house senior counsel in Riyadh, six to eight years' experience: SAR 70,000 to 95,000 a month. A general counsel in the Kingdom: SAR 90,000 to 180,000, and the top of that range is real for the right sovereign or listed seat. Riyadh runs fifteen to twenty percent above Dubai at associate level once you add the Saudisation premium and the sign-on bonuses, with housing on top. Directional figures from the Legal Route 2026 benchmark. The full bands, by market and level, are in the free Gulf legal salary guide 2026 at legal-route.com/gulf-legal-salary-guide-2026.
Three briefs this week, none of them narrow. A venture and private credit investor in Abu Dhabi wants a senior legal counsel who can run a fund's ADGM regulatory book and its deal flow at once. An LNG business run out of Dubai wants finance, corporate and export credit agency experience in one lawyer, and has a short list of people who have actually sat inside an export credit agency to choose from, because there are not many. And a partner with a funded arbitration book is negotiating his move. The common thread is range. Nobody asked me for a specialist.
Nine partners in four days. Ring your best senior associate before Akin does.
Nigel Byrne is Managing Director of Legal Route, a Gulf legal search and market intelligence firm in Dubai. Legal Route places general counsel, heads of legal, in-house counsel and law firm partners across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, and publishes the Gulf legal salary guide, the Gulf legal moves tracker and this weekly brief.
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Nigel Byrne
Legal Route, Dubai