Context
The BRICS+ New Economy & Legal Infrastructure Center is a legal-economic development initiative that provides B2B analytical insight into the UAE legal sector for businesses entering the market. International investors had no reliable, structured way to evaluate and choose local legal counsel.
I led the Legal Market Ranking project as Head of Global Legal Research - a contract role running alongside my consulting work.
Problem
There was no existing dataset. No rankings to aggregate, no directory to clean up. To rank the market, we had to generate the primary data ourselves - and do it in a way firms would cooperate with and investors would trust.
What I did
- Designed the ranking methodology and interview structure from scratch.
- Personally conducted 40+ structured interviews with firm leadership - I didn't delegate the qualitative core of the research, because interviewer consistency was what made the data comparable.
- Coordinated participation of 200+ UAE law firms across the wider data collection.
- Synthesized the results into a top-30 ranking and launched the public analytics platform that delivers this market intelligence to international investors.
A note on honest framing: this was market research, not product discovery - the deliverable was intelligence, not software. But the muscle is the same one I use as a PM: go collect qualitative data from the market first-hand, then turn it into decisions others can act on.
Impact
- The first structured, interview-based ranking of the UAE legal market published by the center - live at neweconomy.expert.
- A repeatable methodology the organization can re-run for future editions and other jurisdictions.
Takeaways
- When the data doesn't exist, the ability to generate it credibly is the moat.
- Doing the interviews myself was slower but bought consistency - and the domain intuition that made the synthesis defensible.