Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton — United Arab Emirates

About

- Firm Details - Managing Partner: Jeffrey Karpf - Number of partners worldwide: 220+ - Number of lawyers worldwide: Approximately 1,200 - Languages: Multilingual; the firm’s lawyers speak 60 different languages ### Firm Overview Cleary Gottlieb is a pioneer in globalizing the legal profession. Since 1946, the firm’s lawyers and staff have worked across practices, industries, jurisdictions, and continents to provide clients with simple, actionable approaches to their most complex legal and business challenges. The firm has 14 offices in major financial centers around the world. Cleary, however, operates as a single, integrated global partnership, not a U.S. firm with a network of overseas locations. The firm is fluent in the many languages of local and global business, and Cleary’s consistent success in multiple jurisdictions continuously earns Cleary “International law Firms of the Year” awards by Chambers and Partners. The firm employs approximately 1,200 lawyers from more than 50 countries and diverse backgrounds who are admitted to practice in numerous jurisdictions. Cleary was among the first international law firms to hire and promote non-U.S. lawyers as equal partners around the world. The firm’s international platform bolsters its inclusion and culture – something that is central to Cleary’s founding principles and ongoing identity. Cleary believes that its lawyers benefit from interacting with the creativity, talents, and perspectives of people from different backgrounds and experiences, and that its efforts to nurture perspectives from all backgrounds better serves its clients. Cleary offers clients robust experience in more than 70 practice areas. All of Cleary’s clients enjoy access to the full resources of its offices and lawyers worldwide, and many of the firm’s attorneys have served in one or more of its offices. ### Main Practice Areas ### Corporate Cleary Gottlieb advises clients on a broad range of transactional matters that protect and advance their strategic goals. Its lawyers have crafted solutions resulting in numerous first-of-its-kind deals, as well as some of the largest, most complex transactions involving cross-border issues. Cleary’s transactional practice spans mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures; capital markets, derivatives, structured finance, and debt finance; private equity transactions, private fund formation, privatizations, project finance, banking, bankruptcy and restructuring, real estate, energy, financial technology, infrastructure, sovereign governments, sustainability, global crisis management, international trade, and more. Additionally, the firm’s lawyers have robust knowledge of the myriad corporate governance, intellectual property, and related issues that companies and their boards face. ### Dispute Resolution With the increasingly global nature of disputes, Cleary Gottlieb helps clients navigate through their most challenging adversarial issues. Cleary’s engagements frequently involve complex legal issues that require novel solutions and cross-border coordination of the firm’s varied resources, allowing Cleary to pair its renowned corporate, regulatory, and financial experience with its litigation prowess. Cleary handles litigation and arbitration involving a wide range of matters, including securities, M&A, shareholder derivative claims, general commercial disputes, intellectual property, antitrust, bankruptcy, white-collar crime, anticorruption, sovereign debt, investment treaties, and public international law. ### Regulatory The global regulatory landscape is ever-changing. Cleary Gottlieb lawyers bring a wealth of experience to proactively advise clients on emerging issues and navigate increasing regulatory scrutiny. This includes matters related to transactions and potential risks that can lead to litigation or enforcement action. The firm has significant experience in such areas as antitrust, issues unique to financial institutions, cybersecurity and privacy, environmental law, foreign direct investment and sanctions, tax, and compliance. In Europe, the firm’s lawyers include former officials of the European Court of Justice, the General Court, and the European Commission. The U.S. team includes former senior officials of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. ### Offices - USA New York, Bay Area, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. - EUROPE & THE MIDDLE EAST - Abu Dhabi, Brussels, Cologne, London, Milan, Paris, Rome - ASIA PACIFIC - Hong Kong, Seoul - LATIN AMERICA - São Paulo

Office locations

Practice areas

Lawyers in this office

Chris Macbeth

Chris is a partner and co-head of our global sovereign wealth fund client group. He is a skilled M&A and private equity/funds lawyer who has established an exceptionally strong reputation among sovereign wealth funds, institutional investors, and corporate clients, which have consistently turned to him for their most complex, highest profile matters in the Middle East and beyond. Chris has advised on investments in a variety of sectors, cross-border M&A and JVs and private equity and funds matters, including LP fund investments, co-investments, and direct investments (including VC deals and infrastructure investments), across a wide range of geographies (particularly the US, LatAm, Europe as well as almost all MENA countries). Chris joined the firm in 2006 and has been focused on deals for MENA clients and in the MENA region throughout the past two decades, initially from London and then from the UAE, having relocated to help found Cleary’s Abu Dhabi office (the hub of our MENA practice) in 2012. · M&A

Gamal Abouali

Gamal Abouali is a well-respected lawyer who co-founded the firm's Abu Dhabi office. He has a strong track record in cross-border M&A transactions, most regularly acting for clients in the oil and gas sector. Gamal M. Abouali’s practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions, capital markets transactions, and projects. He has extensive experience in cross-border transactions, and throughout his career has had a truly global practice. Gamal joined the firm in 1997, became partner in 2006, and senior counsel in 2026. Before opening the Abu Dhabi office in 2012, he was resident in the New York and Paris offices · Mergers and Acquisitions

Micheal Taylor

Mike Taylor’s practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, public takeovers, and equity capital markets transactions. He has advised on some of the highest profile and innovative M&A and ECM transactions in the Middle East, in particular in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. He has notable experience in the healthcare, infrastructure, real estate, and telecoms sectors. · Mergers and Acquisitions

Mohamed Taha

Mohamed Taha is a UK and U.S. qualified, and Egyptian law trained, capital markets lawyer and a native Arabic speaker - experience which is almost second to none in the region. He covers both U.S., European and UAE securities laws and is experienced in complex debt and equity offerings. He is able to provide regional cultural nuance to multifaceted capital markets transactions, providing international clients with strong reassurance on MENA deals that not only is the legal advice technically correct, but it can also be applied to, and is compliant with, the local regulatory frameworks. Mohamed is a Partner in our Abu Dhabi office but often works as a lead or co-lead partner on complex cross-border transactions due to his education and training, qualifications and experience across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. He has strong working relationships with the SCA and its counterparts in the U.S., the SEC, and UK, the FCA, which helps us when a transaction raises challenging or novel issues, requiring lengthy discussions with the regulators as to the interpretation of their rulesMohamed is also an experienced M&A lawyer and therefore can provide clients with end-to-end advice on complex corporate finance transactions with combined underlying M&A and ECM or DCM elements. Mohamed is also a co-founder of 10BE5. After seeing a gap in the market to address the way that capital markets lawyers handled the financial aspects of their disclosure work, the 10BE5 team looked at ways of automating the drafting of financial results analysis, a key component of capital markets disclosure documents, which is currently done manually by capital markets lawyers and/or in-house disclosure teams. The N2N product’s goals are to reduce mistakes, standardize work products, free up capacity, and achieve time and cost savings. The technology is used by several Magic Circle and top 10 Am Law firms. · Capital Markets

Timofey Neklyudov

Timofey’s practice focuses on cross-border M&A, joint ventures and private equity. In particular, he has extensive experience advising sovereign wealth funds, multinational corporates and other private clients on direct investments, co-investments and fund commitments across diverse sectors and jurisdictions. Timofey joined the firm in 2020. Prior to joining Cleary, he worked in the Moscow office of another international law firm from 2013 to 2019. Timofey is ranked as a Rising Star for Corporate and M&A in IFLR1000 (UAE) 2025 and was named Senior Associate of the Year at the LexisNexis Middle East Legal Awards 2025. · Cross-Border M&A