Рубрика: Finance & Banking

ABU DHABI — When Khaled Al Rasheed founded Oqood AI in 2024, the conventional wisdom in regional legaltech was that the GCC’s law firms would eventually adopt the same tools their counterparts in London and New York had been using for years. Eighteen months later, that assumption is being tested in real time.

Oqood AI, which closed a one-million-dollar seed round in October 2025 from a consortium of angel investors, has built its product on a contrarian premise: that Arabic-language legal AI is not a localisation problem to be solved later, but a core engineering challenge that determines whether a tool is usable in a GCC firm at all. The company’s platform offers bilingual contract drafting, document review, and access to regional laws and regulations — the latter being the piece global incumbents have struggled to match.

«This round reflects the growing investor interest in legal technology, a sector valued at more than thirty-one billion dollars in 2024 and projected to grow at an annual rate of 9.4 percent,» Khaled Al Rasheed said at the time of the raise. The company is now using the capital to expand commercial operations across the Gulf and to deepen its product around predictive analysis and workflow automation.

A market catching up, fast:
The timing is not accidental. Across the broader legal industry, adoption metrics have moved from gradual to vertical in a single calendar year.

The 2026 Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer Survey found that 92 percent of legal professionals now use at least one AI tool in their daily work, with 62 percent reporting weekly time savings of between six and twenty percent. A separate study released by FTI Consulting and Relativity in March 2026 reported that AI use among corporate general counsel had nearly doubled year-over-year, climbing from 44 percent in 2025 to 87 percent in 2026.

For GCC firms, those numbers describe a window that is closing. Regional law firms that had treated AI as a multi-year exploration are now finding their corporate clients — particularly in-house teams at banks, sovereign-linked entities, and family offices — arriving at meetings with their own AI workflows already operational. The pressure to match that cadence has become a commercial issue, not an aspirational one.

The bilingual problem:
The challenge for GCC firms adopting global tools has always been linguistic and jurisdictional rather than technical. A contract drafted in English under DIFC or ADGM law can be reviewed effectively by any frontier model. The same model, asked to interpret a notarised Arabic agreement governed by UAE federal civil code or Kuwaiti commercial law, has historically performed unevenly.

Oqood AI’s positioning — accessing laws, regulations, court rulings, and government documents from MENA jurisdictions in a single bilingual interface — is calibrated to that gap. The company has framed its product around the practical realities of GCC practice: matters that switch between Arabic and English mid-document, references to regional statutes that do not appear in Western training data, and counterparties who expect output in either language without quality loss.

Whether that approach scales depends on execution rather than thesis. Regional adoption of any legal tool tends to hinge on integration with existing firm software, willingness of senior partners to sign off on AI-assisted output, and the maturity of internal governance policies — an area where the GCC is still developing standards. A January 2026 analysis cited Clio data showing that 79 percent of legal professionals were using AI tools globally, while 44 percent of firms had yet to implement formal governance policies. The GCC figure is widely believed to be higher.

What comes next:
Oqood AI has indicated that it intends to use the next twelve to eighteen months to broaden its footprint beyond the UAE, with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait both flagged as priority markets. Strategic partnerships with regional legal associations and technology providers are also on the roadmap.

For the GCC’s legal sector, the more interesting question is structural. If a regional player can demonstrate that bilingual, jurisdiction-aware AI produces measurably better outcomes for Gulf firms than imported alternatives, the entire procurement conversation across the region shifts. Oqood AI is not the only company chasing that proof point — but it is, for now, among the most visible.

Six passengers from the MV Hondius arrived in Western Australia on Friday for a three-week quarantine after the Dutch-flagged vessel experienced a hantavirus outbreak during a voyage from Argentina to Antarctic waters and South Atlantic islands, according to Australian authorities. The group of five Australians and one New Zealander had tested negative for the virus before their chartered flight from the Netherlands, where many of the ship’s passengers were initially evacuated, and were transferred by bus from RAAF Base Pearce to the Bullsbrook Centre for National Resilience. Australian Health Minister Mark Butler said the government had chosen a stronger approach to quarantine than that taken by the United States and most European countries.

The World Health Organization reported a total of 11 cases associated with the ship as of May 13, including eight confirmed, one inconclusive and two probable, with three deaths. The outbreak was notified to the WHO on May 2 after a cluster of severe respiratory illnesses emerged aboard the vessel, which had departed Argentina on April 1 with passengers and crew from more than 20 countries. Argentine officials have suggested the initial infections may have been acquired through rodent exposure during a birdwatching excursion in Ushuaia before boarding, although the surrounding province had previously recorded no hantavirus cases.

Hantaviruses are mainly transmitted to people through contact with the urine, droppings or saliva of infected rodents, according to a WHO fact sheet. The Andes virus strain confirmed in this outbreak is the only hantavirus known to spread from person to person, health agencies have stated. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that hantavirus pulmonary syndrome carries a mortality rate of approximately 38 percent among those who develop respiratory symptoms.

The Bullsbrook Centre for National Resilience, where the six passengers and accompanying doctor will be housed, was completed in 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic at a cost of around 400 million Australian dollars but had remained largely unused until now, Western Australian government records show. The 500-bed facility includes specialized ventilation systems to prevent cross-contamination and will accommodate the group for the initial three-week period. A decision on precautions for the remainder of the 42-day potential incubation window identified by the WHO had not yet been finalized, Butler noted in remarks to reporters in Adelaide.

«We have taken the decision to take a stronger approach to quarantine arrangements than that because we are determined to ensure there is no risk at all of any transmission of this virus into the Australian community,» Butler said. Passengers who returned to the United States and most European countries faced only a few days in quarantine centers before being allowed to go home, he added. The minister described the Australian response as one of the world’s strongest to the outbreak.

With the evacuation of all passengers and many crew members now complete, the MV Hondius is sailing back to the Netherlands for cleaning and disinfection, the cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions has stated. No new cases have been reported since mid-May, according to an update from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Officials continue to monitor individuals who left the ship in its earlier ports of call.

The arrival of the passengers marks the first operational use of the Bullsbrook facility for a high-consequence infectious disease since its construction, federal and state authorities have confirmed. Preparations included specialized training for staff in infection control protocols. Australian health officials have emphasized that the overall risk to the general population remains low based on current assessments.