Of the two telecoms operators in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), du – officially Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company – is the youngest. A publicly listed company, du has a market capitalisation of $7.5bn, revenues of $3.4bn, over 2,000 employees and a customer base of nine million. In addition to the usual telecoms fare – both B2B and B2C communications services and broadcasting – it also offers a suite of peripheral services and technologies that encompass blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and the broad array of digital services required to meet the UAE’s smart city ambitions.
Anneliese Reinhold is general counsel and senior vice president of legal and regulatory affairs at du and, having been with the company since the beginning, has seen it grow into the emerging giant of today.
‘I set up the legal department from nothing,’ she says. ‘I had a blank sheet of paper and a desk when I started. We built our profile as one of the leading teams in the region.’
Today, the legal department numbers 12, and a diverse 12 at that: it is comprised of nine different nationalities and over ten languages, 85% female (compared to the company average of 38%) and one disabled employee.
Consisting of ten lawyers and two support staff, the team provides legal support to the entire business, and is responsible for a diverse portfolio and a high volume of work. In 2018, the team was instructed on 1,580 new matters and projects, including 900 contracts, by a total of 327 internal business customers across 31 separate business units.
Serving a company as dynamic as du means that the team’s work goes from the purely legal through to advising on any number of the business’ broader commercial projects, and anything in between.
For example, in 2018, as a part of the company’s ‘Customer First’ customer experience transformation programme, du became the first and only telco in the region to receive the Crystal Mark certification, a standard awarded for clarity and simplicity in the language of the terms and conditions offered by du to its customers. The conditions themselves were written by legal, with the push towards applying for the Crystal Mark certification also driven by legal.
There are also a number of digital initiatives, which flow down from company-level priorities of efficiency and digitalisation. These range from process automation to replace manual data entry and methodologies, through to the implementation of a contract self-service tool for generating standard non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and the trial use of AI tools to capture contract metadata.
‘In common with many other legal departments around the world, the difficulty can be getting yourself on to the priority list to have access to these tools,’ she says.
‘But I managed to convince our internal team that while we’re only a small team of ten people, if we can save half a person’s time a month, that’s a massive benefit for us that can then benefit our 327 other internal customers.’
The value proposition
Legal’s approach to NDAs – often an unnecessary burden on teams around the world – is an illustration of how a legal-backed initiative has been spun into an asset for the business.
Targeted at standard NDAs, Reinhold implemented a self-service tool for the business that would allow internal customers to have complete control over the process. Last year, the tool generated 260 NDAs, each of which represents one item of work off the desk of the legal team and completed at a faster rate than would have otherwise been achievable.
For more bespoke NDAs, Reinhold accepts these as an inevitability. But what she has done is outsource these to one of du’s panel law firms – something that, while admittedly requiring an initial leap of faith, she says has been worth doing. ‘It’s a bit scary, but we outsourced it to somebody who had been here on secondment, so we were comfortable that he understood what was required.’
Being able to streamline and automate a necessary but time-intensive task has had numerous knock-on benefits for the company. For one, the quicker turnaround for standard NDAs has encouraged the group’s commercial personnel to see it is worth convincing clients to sign up to the standard terms, something that Reinhold has seen borne out in the split between standard and non-standard NDAs since the overhaul.
It has also freed up time on the legal team itself. Whereas these would occupy between 30% and 40% of one team member’s time, they are now largely off the plate of the legal function.
‘I’ve been here since the beginning and set up the legal department from nothing.’
Anneliese Reinhold, du
One project currently underway is the development of a new contract life-cycle management system. While this is a company-wide project, Reinhold is the executive sponsor. Currently still in development, it is hoped the project will result in a roll out of an enhanced contract governance framework, with integrated analytics and reporting capabilities.
‘It will be end to end, from “I have an idea and I need a contract”, to the contract signing, to managing the contract in-life, to the end of the contract. The company will be able, for the first time, to look into that life cycle and see where something has gotten stuck,’ she says.
External validation
Starting a legal team from a blank slate – especially in a business as varied and regulated as du’s – was a challenge for Reinhold. The legal team at du took a number of practical steps to stick to Reinhold’s aims.
‘At that stage, there was no in-house community so it was important, I felt, to get some kind of external validation for how I set up the department,’ says Reinhold. ‘We organised ourselves and, since 2014, we have been accredited by the Law Society of England and Wales with their Lexcel legal practice management accreditation.’
‘The company uses the Harvard Balanced Scorecard strategic planning methodology and I thought: “Let’s try this for ourselves and give our department focus,”’ she notes.
‘That, plus the Lexcel accreditation, has really helped us, and everything positive that we have achieved in terms of awards and recognition came after we made those changes.’
Reinhold says these formal initiatives have had positive ripple effects throughout the department and business. ‘It helps with engagement and has assisted massively with internal customer satisfaction. It’s had a lot of positive effects, in particular performance of the team and morale, because people need to understand why we are here and what we are trying to achieve. Also the strategy process: the whole point of it is to force us to rationalise strategic projects during the year.’
Retention is an issue Reinhold cites as a struggle, given that the company is operating in a market with a transient workforce and it has a flat organisational structure, which means it can be a struggle to offer employees places to go. Addressing that, Reinhold sees it as important that the entire legal team is involved in strategic corporate projects, beyond the day-to-day legal work.
‘I hope the strategic initiatives the team members do give people on the team something more meaty than the routine operational work, so they are still able to feel a sense of career development.’
As one of two telecoms companies in Dubai, du falls under the ambit of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. The agency’s stated goal is to ensure the UAE is an international leader in communications technology and infrastructure.
‘You have to show that you can do things to move the needle for customers and the business directly.’
Anneliese Reinhold, du
The state of telecoms in the UAE is already positive, with one of the highest rates of telecoms penetration in the world: fibre fixed networks reach more than 94% of UAE households and 4G LTE mobile indoor coverage reaches 95% of the population. Earlier this year the UAE became only the fourth country in the world to launch 5G mobile services, while the du mobile network ranks in the top 20 in the world according to benchmarking done by P3, a network tester and certifier.
In-house in Dubai
Being with du from the beginning has also meant that Reinhold has seen the in-house community in the UAE grow from small beginnings to what is now a thriving community. With Reinhold also serving as chair of the global board of directors of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), her perspective on the development of the UAE’s in-house community holds weight in a global context.
‘When I arrived in the region, there was a more traditional view of in-house lawyers and there weren’t very many of them. Now, there are very many more, and the mindset has moved from this traditional modus operandi to progressive and in-line with international best practice.’
A manifestation of this is ACC’s ‘Seat at the Table’ initiative, which aims to encourage business leaders to ensure they are involving their GCs in executive decision-making, particularly regarding legal cornerstones such as corporate ethics and culture, risk management, compliance and governance.
‘It’s very relevant to this region, because the in-house function is still developing here. I’m a strong supporter of the initiative, because lawyers have to ensure they don’t get sidelined. Good corporate governance requires diversity of thought at the highest levels of organisations.’
Reinhold circles this discussion around the in-house team not being sidelined back to her own team’s work at du, a big focus of which is on showing value to internal stakeholders.
‘You need to be more on the front foot to demonstrate your value. You have to be able to show that you can do things to move the needle for customers and the business directly.’ LB
Alex Speirs is editor in chief of GC
Greg Hall is managing editor of GC
Catherine Wycherley is features writer at GC