When a contract dispute lands on a managing partner’s desk in Kuwait City or Riyadh, it rarely arrives in one language. The underlying agreement may be drafted in Arabic, the correspondence conducted in English, the governing law rooted in a civil code with no direct common-law equivalent, and the filing due in Arabic before a court that will not accept anything else. Moving between those registers, accurately and under time pressure, is the daily work of legal practice across the Gulf.
It is also precisely the work that most legal artificial intelligence tools were never designed to do.
The dominant platforms in the global legal-technology market were built on English-language common law. Their training data, their assumptions about how a legal argument is structured, and the precedents they draw on all reflect the systems they were built for. Tools such as LexisNexis and Westlaw became indispensable to firms in London and New York for good reason. But practitioners in the MENA region have increasingly found that what works in those markets does not translate cleanly to theirs.
“The available tools were either outdated, or international platforms that don’t support our local and regional work in the best way possible,” says Khaled Al Rashed, founder and chief executive of Oqood AI, who spent 15 years in practice before building the company. “The Gulf runs on Arabic and on civil-code systems. Every contract, every pleading, every regulatory filing can move between Arabic and English without warning. A tool that can’t navigate that architecture isn’t just incomplete. It becomes a liability in front of a client.”
Al Rashed’s diagnosis comes from direct experience. As a managing partner at Taqneen, a regional law firm, he spent years scaling a team and its operations, and ran repeatedly into the same ceiling: there was no Arabic legal-technology platform designed and built for the way firms in the region actually work. The international options were powerful but ill-fitting. The local ones were dated. The gap between them was where his firm lost time, and where, he came to believe, the regional legal profession was being underserved.
A structural mismatch, not a translation problem
The instinct, when confronting a tool built for another language, is to treat the issue as one of translation. Add Arabic support, the thinking goes, and the problem is solved.
That underestimates the depth of the mismatch. Common-law systems reason from accumulated precedent, with each judgment building on those before it. Civil-law systems, which govern most of the MENA region, reason from codified statute, where the written code is the primary source and judicial decisions play a different and more constrained role. A legal AI trained to think in precedent does not simply need new vocabulary to work in a civil-code jurisdiction. It needs a different model of how legal authority is structured in the first place.
Layered on top of that is language, and not as an afterthought. Several jurisdictions in the region require Arabic for official transactions and filings, meaning the Arabic text is not a translation of the operative document but the operative document itself. A platform that treats Arabic as a secondary layer over an English-first core inverts the actual hierarchy of the work.
For Oqood, Al Rashed says, the response was to build for that reality from the ground up rather than adapt a tool designed for another one: an enterprise-grade platform architected for bilingual practice and for the civil-code systems of the region. The company is ISO and SOC 2 certified, maintaining all data-regulation requirements across the region through an agile and flexible architecture.
Why the gap has stayed open
If the need is this clear, the obvious question is why it has gone unmet for so long.
Part of the answer is market size and attention. The largest legal-technology companies have built their roadmaps around the markets that generate the most revenue, which has meant English-language common-law jurisdictions first. The MENA legal-AI opportunity, which Al Rashed places at around four billion dollars in addressable market, has not yet drawn the same concentration of capital or product focus from the global players.
That is beginning to change, which is part of what makes the current moment consequential for firms making technology decisions now. As international platforms turn toward the region, the question of who builds the Arabic legal-data layer, and who builds it in genuine partnership with the institutions that set regional standards, becomes a defining one for the category.
It is also where Oqood has staked its position, anchored by a strategic partnership with the Kuwait Bar Association that the company points to as evidence its approach is built with the region’s institutions rather than imported into the region from outside.
The decision in front of managing partners
For the managing partners and general counsel weighing these tools, Al Rashed frames the choice less as a comparison of features than as a question of fit.
“You can have the most sophisticated tool in the world,” he says, “but if it doesn’t understand the legal system you actually practice in, and the languages you actually work in, it’s solving someone else’s problem, not yours.”
For a profession that runs, every day, across two languages and a body of law written for neither London nor New York, that distinction is not academic. It is the difference between a tool that sits unused and one that earns its place in the practice.
