du's in-house legal department bags Legal Team of the Year Award

Beating off stiff competition, du’s legal team takes top honours at the inaugural Oath Middle East Legal Awards

UAE, Dubai, 28 December 2015 – du has beaten off stiff competition from regional and multi-national organisations’ in-house teams to win the Legal Team of the Year award at the inaugural Oath Middle East Legal Awards which was held at the Conrad Dubai recently.

The du Legal Affairs Department was shortlisted alongside HP, Batelco, Fly Dubai and Dry Docks World for the only in-house legal team category – the company’s legal strategy and teamwork, innovative ideas and best practice methods, training and development and workforce diversity were the reason behind its resounding win.

A key theme of du Legal Department’s strategy is to ‘enhance customer experience’, and a key strategic value is ‘quality’. Although not a direct end-customer facing function, du’s Legal Department believes that by maintaining a strong focus on providing quality support to its internal customers, legal in turn directly supports du’s customer-facing staff in their quest to ‘add life to life’ to each and every one of du’s strong customer base.

Anneliese Reinhold, General Counsel and Senior Vice President Legal and Regulatory Affairs at du, said: “This win is testament to our entire organisation’s overarching vision to add life to life, which permeates every business unit – customer facing or otherwise. We understand and value the importance of adopting innovative legal solutions, and securing this prestigious accreditation sends a message to all our stakeholders that we invest in high standards of legal services based on internationally-recognised best practices. At a holistic level, we are certain that the positive effects of this recognition have been beneficial not only to the legal department but to the wider organisation that the Department sits within.”

In 2015, for the second year running, the du Legal Department received the Law Society of England and Wales’ prestigious ‘Lexcel’ practice management accreditation, building on 2014’s success as the first legal department of a locally owned MENA company to achieve this. The Corporate Counsel Middle East Legal Awards 2014 lauded du as the ‘Legal Department of the Year – Large Team’. The team is comprised of 10 nationalities with experience ranging from top law firms, to multi-national and telcos’ in-house departments, and is recognised as one of MENA’s most respected in-house functions by the Legal 500’s GC Powerlist 2015.