Architects Of Trust: Amr Bajamal

Amr Bajamal, Partner at NHB Legal and Founder of B Legal Knowledge, is turning his conviction that lawyers grow through curiosity across disciplines into a practical way of training them.

Amr Bajamal, Partner at NHB Legal and Founder of B Legal Knowledge, has spent about two decades practicing in the UAE, combining complex dispute resolution work with ongoing advisory roles for clients. His public professional profile also takes in work as counsel, arbitrator and expert.

The range is deliberate. In his written responses for Architects of Trust, Bajamal describes himself as a generalist who values transferable skills and the widest possible knowledge base. “I don’t believe that lawyers should restrict themselves to one area of the law,” he says. For him, a varied practice creates opportunities to understand businesses, industries and problems that do not fit neatly within a single legal discipline.

Hitting the Same Nerve

B Legal Knowledge grew partly from that professional outlook, and partly from a more personal search. Bajamal wanted interests and achievements beyond his identity as a lawyer. Learning gave him a sense of accomplishment, and teaching, he found, could offer a similar satisfaction through someone else’s progress. “I soon discovered that giving people that sense of accomplishment also hits the same nerve,” he explains.

The practical starting point was close at hand. Members of his team would bring him questions arising from their work, including litigation with financial or accounting dimensions. He could help them examine those issues and assess expert work because he had learned from clients and accumulated experience on the job. Other lawyers had not necessarily had the same opportunities.

That observation gave his teaching a purpose. Useful knowledge was being acquired unevenly, depending on the matters a lawyer encountered and the people available to explain them. Bajamal began developing courses for his team, refining the material before deciding to offer it more widely. In other words, the platform emerged from questions he was already being asked in practice.

The example also explains his interest in breadth. Financial information can be central to understanding a legal dispute, even when a lawyer’s formal training has offered little preparation for it. Bajamal’s response was to make that knowledge more accessible, so that colleagues could develop enough understanding to engage with the issue, rather than allow its unfamiliarity to become a barrier.

“My experience is the core of everything,” Bajamal says. The courses contain substantive material, but their emphasis is on applying knowledge and developing skills. The matters he handles, and the questions they generate, continue to inform what he teaches.

From Law Students to Partners

Bajamal’s intended audience stretches from law students to partners. He describes four ways of reaching them: recorded online courses, in-person teaching, programs tailored to law firms and companies, and individual mentoring. Those formats give him room to address different stages of professional development while keeping practical learning at the center.

His aim is specific. A short course will not turn someone into a deep specialist in every subject. Instead, he wants participants to build what he calls “pockets of knowledge” across different areas. That accumulated understanding becomes a foundation for approaching a wider range of work with greater confidence.

The approach is closely connected to his experience of the UAE. Keeping up with legislation is essential, he says, but so is understanding how courts apply it. He regards active involvement in dispute resolution as central to the relevance of his material, and his teaching draws on current practice alongside the experience accumulated over his career, bringing the discussion back to how legal instruments operate in actual matters.

He also pays attention to the parts of professional life that technical training can leave out. Emotional intelligence, charisma and even what a lawyer wears feature in his account of the curriculum (the practitioner, in his view, is a person whose effectiveness depends on how they interact with others as well as on what they know).

The same personal emphasis shapes his advice to lawyers considering ventures of their own. For starters, they should be realistic about the time available alongside a demanding practice. Then they should invest in original material. Outsourcing the substance may produce content, he argues, but it risks losing the experience and individuality that give an educator a reason to be heard.

That belief runs through B Legal Knowledge, although Bajamal does not intend the platform to carry only his own voice. He invites other legal professionals to develop and offer courses through it, extending the opportunity to people with different experience to share. Dispute resolution remains his passion; education gives the knowledge acquired through that work another use. And his reasoning for putting the educator front and center is simple. “People are naturally attracted to the personality and story,” he says.