The Firm
A small practice, deliberately.
The firm has been under Dr Samaha's management since 2000. It has stayed small on purpose: the person a client instructs is the person who reads the file, argues it, and answers the telephone. In a market where a matter can be passed down three levels before anyone senior sees it, that is the whole proposition.
Philosophy
The answer before the argument.
A great deal of legal work is spent defending positions that should never have been taken. The firm's preference is to spend the expensive hours early, on the drafting and the structure, so that the later hours are cheap or unnecessary. Clients are told when a matter does not need a lawyer.
The second commitment is legibility. A client who cannot explain their own position in their own words has not been advised, only represented. Every substantial piece of advice is given in writing, in the language the client actually thinks in.
Values
Four commitments
These are working rules rather than sentiments. Each of them can be checked against how a file is actually run.
- Scope, fee basis and expected timetable confirmed in writing before work begins.
- An honest assessment of the weak points of your own case, given early rather than at the hearing.
- A refusal of instructions the firm is not the right place for, with a reason and, where possible, a referral.
- Confidentiality treated as absolute, including in what appears on this website.
History
How the practice took its shape
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Paris, the late 1990s
Postgraduate study at Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris II, which set the civil law method the firm still works in and the French language it still works in.
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Beirut, 2000
The firm comes under his management, taking on its legal, financial and administrative running alongside the practice itself.
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The international decade
Contracts, joint ventures and acquisitions across France, Greece, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon, and five years as a legal expert working with the French Embassy in Lebanon.
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The faculty and the bar
A deanship of a faculty of law and political science, and the direction of the Beirut Bar Association's centre for the training of lawyers, which is where the firm's method of re-deriving rather than reciting the law comes from.
International approach
Built to be one half of a matter.
Much of the work arrives as one Lebanese limb of something larger, instructed by a firm or a company that is elsewhere. That is a specific discipline: knowing what foreign counsel actually needs from you, answering in their format, and not treating the Lebanese question as the whole question.
- Correspondence and advice in Arabic, English or French.
- Documents accepted electronically. No visit to Beirut is required to open a file.
- Comfortable with the civil law method and with common law counterparties expecting it explained.
Tell us what happened, and when.
Dates matter more than detail at the first contact. If a decision or a deadline has already been served on you, bring that date first.