A guide to the leading regional commercial law companies has named Clyde & Co as top ranking law firm in the UAE.

For the fourth consecutive year, Clyde & Co has secured the top tier rankings in practice areas for the UAE in the Legal 500 law firm directory (Europe Middle East & Africa (EMEA) edition), the company said in a statement.

Legal 500 (EMEA) is produced annually by UK-headquartered publisher Legalease and is based on independent research among lawyers and their clients.

The just-released 2008 edition awards Clyde & Co top ranking in five of the nine practice areas it features, including dispute resolution, TMT (technology, media & communications), insurance, real estate & construction and shipping. 

The firm is also recognised for its expertise in corporate and M&A, banking & finance, projects & energy and intellectual property. This is a level of recognition not achieved by any other law firm in the region. The firm’s work in Qatar and India is also recognised by the directory, the company said.

“It’s gratifying to see our progress acknowledged in independent surveys such as this as legal directory results, alongside direct client feedback, are one of a number of ways we can benchmark performance against the market,” said Dubai based corporate partner Phil O’Riordan.

“Clyde & Co has a huge presence throughout the Middle East and has put, and is continuing to put, considerable investment into its people and operations here. While results like this are pleasing, it is safe to say that we are absolutely focused on improving even further in terms of our reach, resource and quality expectations in the upcoming year,” said Niall O’Toole, a corporate partner who heads up Clyde & Co’s Abu Dhabi office.

This current recognition by Legal 500 reaffirms a string of recent recognition for the firm, with Clyde & Co being listed as having more leading lawyers than any other law firm in the UAE in the 2008 edition of the prestigious Chambers Global legal directory as well as, on analysis, achieving the top overall firm ranking.

The firm’s intellectual property practice was in March ranked as the top overall IP practice in the UAE by Managing Intellectual Property (MIP) magazine for the second year in a row, while the firm was also lauded recently as ‘firm of the year’ in the areas of Real Estate and Litigation respectively by Asian Counsel magazine. – TradeArabia News Service