Principal and founding partner of Haya Rashed Al Khalifa Law Firm

Shaikha Haya was the First Bahraini Woman Ambassador, as an Ambassador to France and its nonresident Ambassador to Belgium, Switzerland, and Spain. She is also Bahrain’s permanent delegate to UNESCO.She was elected as President of the 61st Session of the U.N. in 2006/2007. General Assembly, becoming the third woman to hold the position. She received several notable awards, including the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Special Award, the Path to Peace Award, and the Social Creativity Award from the Arab Thought Foundation.

Shaikha Haya was a member of various international organizations.

Head of Rule of Law Business, LexisNexis Middle East 

Sarah Haddadi is the Head of Rule of Law and Deputy Head of the LexisNexis Middle East office. She studied Law at Paris La Sorbonne University and Assas University, where she completed a Master’s degree in Rule of Law and Lobbying. Before joining LexisNexis, Sarah worked in a prominent law firm in Paris, specialising in private law. She joined the LexisNexis team in 2015 and has been based in Dubai since 2016, where she manages the LexisNexis Rule of Law activity in the MENA region.

Chair of the International Arbitration Practice Group, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP

Gary Born, Chair of the International Arbitration Practice Group at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, is one of the world’s preeminent authorities on international commercial arbitration and international litigation. He has served as counsel in over 650 arbitrations, including several of the most prominent arbitrations in ICC and ad hoc history. He has sat as an arbitrator in over 200 institutional and ad hoc arbitrations. Mr Born is President of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) Court of Arbitration and serves in an advisory capacity in other institutions worldwide. He is a member of the American Law Institute and of the Board of Trustees of the British Institute for International and Comparative Law. He has served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, the Advisory Committee of the ALI’s Restatement of US International Arbitration Law, the Advisory Committee of the ALI Restatement of US Foreign Relation Law (Fourth) and as co-chair of the ABA International Section, Committee on International Aspects of Litigation.

Advisor to the Minister of Justice, Bahrain

Dr. Aseel Zimmo is an advisor to Bahrain’s Chief Justice as well as the Minister of Justice. She advises judicial reform, in particular developing commercial courts, and arbitration procedures. She also led the team on the digital transformation project.
She served as an arbitrator in 13 proceedings both institutional and ad hoc proceedings and issued awards in Arabic and in English. She also worked as an arbitrator.

Dr. Zimmo is experienced in both Civil and Common law jurisdictions as she graduated with a Ph.D. from the LSE in international commercial arbitration and with an LLM from Kings College, London. She is also a qualified lawyer in New York and Jordan. She taught civil and commercial law at the University of Bahrain, the Royal University for Women, and the American University of Bahrain.

Co-Head of Real Estate and Hospitality Middle East, Baker Mckenzie

Khaled is a Partner and co-heads the Middle East real estate and hotels team at Baker McKenzie. Khaled specializes in real estate development and hotel management negotiations in the Saudi Arabian and Bahraini markets, and has acted on over 100 hotels, for most of the largest regional developers.

Khaled holds a Masters in Real Estate University from the University of Cambridge and an LLB from Newcastle University and is admitted as an Attorney and Counsellor at Law in all courts of the State of New York and at the Court of Cassation in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

CEO of SOL International and International Disputes Counsel

Sarah Malik is an award-winning lawyer who achieved Litigator of the Year (2022) at the first GCC Women in Law Awards and received an honourable mention in the ‘Law Firm Leader of the Year’ category at the same awards.

In March 2022, SOL was named by Legal 500 EMEA as a ‘Firm to Watch in Dispute Resolution: Arbitration and International Litigation’. Sarah and SOL have been further nominated as Women Lawyer of the Year and Rising Law Firm of the Year. She is a member of the SIAC Users Council in the Middle East and is appointed to the Lagos Panel of Arbitration Neutrals. Sarah is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and accepts appointments to sit as an Arbitrator. She undertakes international commercial arbitrations as Counsel (DIAC, ADCCAC, DIFC-LCIA, ICC) and practices commercial litigation at the DIFC and ADGM Courts.

At the end of 2019, she authored “A Guide to GCC Arbitration”, published by LexisNexis and in 2018, she authored “The UAE Chapter on Arbitration in the International Comparative Legal Guide”. Sarah is regularly invited to speak worldwide on arbitration, including for the ICC, CIArb and IBA.