LAWYERING IN THE TIME OF PANDEMICS: THE MENA WOMEN IN LAW INITIATIVE
I am Susan Karamanian, Dean of the College of Law at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to a special event that has been a number of months in the making and is due to the vision and dedication of a group of women lawyers, all with ties to Qatar. The women came together to establish the MENA Women in Law Initiative. Why is this important to our College of Law? We have seen a marked increase in the number of women students since our founding in 2015, growing from 40% to 70%. Throughout the MENA, women lawyers are playing an increasing influential role, whether as advocates in court, in-house counsel, judges, prosecutors and legal advisors to ministries.
At today’s launch, the MENA Women in Law Initiative will be examining a topic relevant to the entirety of the legal profession, one that looks at challenges and opportunities, namely, Lawyering in the Time of Pandemics. HBKU Law seeks to be at the forefront of ensuring the thorough examination of all issues facing the legal profession, and clearly the effect of the pandemic is one of these.
All of our speakers today are founders of the Women’s Law Initiative.
To start the program, we will first hear from Francoise Mouly, co-founder of the Innovation Centre for Education, a non-profit entity licensed by the Qatar Financial Centre Authority, focusing on driving innovative transformations in areas ranging from legal technologies to interactive art. We will then hear from Asma Al Khulaifi, a trade lawyer with Qatar’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and a member of the first JD graduating class of HBKU Law. Francoise and Asma will introduce us to the Initiative.
Thereafter, the floor will be passed to Dr. Julie Boisard-Petrissans, a French qualified lawyer and founder of ParteM Advisory, where she advises on legal and other issues relevant to innovation in a multi-cultural environment. Julie was previously at LexisNexis, where she focused on the MENA region as business development manager and head of operations in Qatar. Then we will hear from Dr. Oriane Ginies, Senior Legal Counsel at BeIN Sports here in Doha. Oriane is an international lawyer with 14 years’ experience in the government and private sectors, specializing in cybersecurity, data protection and telecommunication regulation. Both Julie and Oriane will discuss the substantive theme.
To our audience, we hope to hear from you during the session. Feel free to send your questions or comments via the chat function to All Panelists.
Possible questions:
1. Has the pandemic been liberating in terms of efficiency? If so, how? If not, how?
2. Is the golden era of international lawyering over due to the pandemic? In a similar vein, has the profession become more locally-focused?
3. For Oriane, given her DP expertise, we have built trust in security of computers. Confidentiality is critical to the work of lawyers. Are we naïve in this trust?