Associate - Legal Assistant

ADSS is a successful retail and institutional brokerage based in Abu Dhabi.

We are seeking an experienced and technically minded Legal Assistant to join our legal team in our Head Office. This is a hands-on, execution-focused role designed to relieve the legal team of high-volume administrative and operational burdens.

This role sits at the intersection of legal administration, technology implementation, and workflow optimization. You will be the engine room of the legal and compliance function — building systems, driving efficiency, and solving operational problems so that our lawyers can focus on legal work.

Key Responsibilities

Corporate Governance & Legal Administration

• Assisting with drafting, managing, and maintaining corporate governance documents including board resolutions, minutes, and written consents.
• Coordinating board and committee meetings end-to-end: scheduling, agenda preparation, quorum tracking, and distribution of materials.
• Managing the corporate secretarial calendar and ensuring deadlines for regulatory filings, renewals, and statutory obligations are met.
• Maintaining and organising the legal document repository, including execution versions, certified copies, and regulatory correspondence.
• Assisting with payment approvals and internal authorization workflows, including liaising with finance on legal-related disbursements.
• Drafting and managing routine legal correspondence and internal communications on behalf of the legal team.

AI & Technology Implementation

• Researching, evaluating, and implementing AI-powered tools to automate repetitive legal and compliance workflows — including document drafting, review triage, filing, and template management.
• Owning the rollout of legal operations technology from scoping and vendor assessment through to deployment, training, and adoption tracking.
• Building and maintaining automated workflows using no-code and low-code platforms (e.g. Zapier, Make, Power Automate, or equivalent) to streamline document routing, approvals, and notifications.
• Developing and managing a matter management or contract lifecycle management (CLM) system appropriate to the team's size and complexity.
• Acting as the internal subject matter expert on legal technology and AI applications, staying current with industry developments and proactively identifying opportunities for efficiency gains.
• Producing clear documentation, playbooks, and training materials to support adoption of new tools across the legal and compliance function.

Compliance Workflow Support

• Collaborating with the compliance team to identify, map, and improve operational workflows — including onboarding documentation, regulatory reporting checklists, and exception management processes.
• Assisting with the organization and tracking of regulatory submissions, audit responses, and policy review cycles.
• Supporting the maintenance of compliance registers, obligation trackers, and policy libraries.
• Identifying bottlenecks and friction points in cross-functional processes and proposing practical, technology-enabled solutions.

Operational Problem-Solving

• Proactively identifying inefficiencies across the legal and compliance function and taking initiative to fix them — not waiting to be asked.
• Building out scalable processes and templates to handle recurring tasks so the team is not reinventing the wheel.
• Acting as a central point of coordination between the legal team, compliance, finance, and external service providers.
• Producing clear and accurate reporting on legal operations metrics, spend, workload volumes, and project status for the General Counsel.

Experience & Qualifications

Essential

• Minimum 5 years of experience in a legal operations, legal administration, or paralegal operations role — with a clear focus on process and technology rather than legal practice.
• Demonstrated, hands-on experience implementing technology solutions in a legal or compliance environment (CLM systems, AI document tools, workflow automation, matter management platforms, or similar).
• Proven track record of owning and delivering operational improvement projects from idea through to implementation.
• Strong working knowledge of corporate governance mechanics: resolutions, minutes, entity management, and statutory filing obligations.
• Experience working within a regulated financial services environment, or a genuine understanding of the governance and compliance demands of such organisations.
• Exceptional organisational skills with the ability to manage a high volume of concurrent tasks with precision and without close supervision.
• Strong written communication skills — able to draft clearly and professionally in English across correspondence, templates, and internal documentation.

Desirable

• Working in a high performance in-house financial services legal and compliance team, ideally retail brokerage.
• Experience with AI-native legal tools (e.g. Harvey, Ironclad, ContractPodAi, Luminance, or equivalent).
• Exposure to no-code/low-code workflow automation tools.
• Prior experience supporting a compliance team as well as a legal function.
• Formal qualification or certification in legal operations (e.g. CLOC, ACC LegalOps, or similar) — welcomed but not required.
• Ideal candidates are fluent in Arabic and English, enabling effective communication and accurate handling of legal documents and correspondence in both languages.

What We Are Looking For

Beyond technical experience, the right person for this role will bring:

• A genuine passion for legal operations as a career — someone who finds deep satisfaction in building systems that work and in making a team more effective.
• A problem-solver's mindset: you see a broken process and you want to fix it. You are resourceful, practical, and solutions-oriented.
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to operate independently in an environment where not everything is defined yet — and an eagerness to be the person who defines it.
• A collaborative and low-ego working style. You will work closely with lawyers, compliance professionals, and external parties, and you will need to earn trust quickly.
• High standards and attention to detail — in a regulated financial services environment, precision is not optional.
• Curiosity about AI and legal technology — not as a buzzword, but as a genuine tool for making things better.

What This Role Is Not

We want to be direct: this is not a role for someone looking to qualify as a lawyer or to gain legal work experience on the way to another career. The legal team has no capacity to supervise legal development or provide career mentorship toward legal practice. We need someone who is committed to legal operations as their profession and who sees this as a role in which they can grow and make a lasting impact — not a waypoint to something else.