Baker McKenzie Habib Al Mulla – Bakers’ United Arab Emirates business – has made a trio of senior hires from King & Spalding and Linklaters to bolster its corporate practice in Dubai.

The three new arrivals include Osama Audi and Adnan Doha from King & Spalding and Abeer Jarrar from Linklaters, who will all join as partners in August. Audi and Doha specialise in private equity, M&A, joint ventures, venture capital and corporate finance more broadly, while Jarrar’s practice focuses on capital markets and public M&A.

Habib Al Mulla, executive chairman of Bakers’ UAE operations, said: “Osama, Adnan and Abeer have worked on some of the UAE’s most complex and award-winning transactions. They bring a wealth of top tier transactional experience in M&A, capital markets and private equity.”

Audi had been at King & Spalding for roughly six-and-a-half years, becoming partner in 2017. Doha, meantime, had been at King & Spalding in Dubai as a senior associate for just shy of three years, having joined from Clifford Chance in London where he spent more than a decade. Jarrar was at Linklaters for four years as a managing associate in the UAE, joining from Clifford Chance. She also previously worked at the Jordanian Embassy in Washington, as well as spending a year as regional director of the International Bar Association for the Middle East in the UAE.

Omar Momany, the firm’s UAE corporate and M&A head, said: “This team hire will build on our successes and will play a key role in continuing to strengthen our strategic growth of M&A and private equity capabilities in the UAE, GCC and the wider Middle East region.”

The hires raise Bakers’ UAE partner count to 16 across banking and finance, corporate, dispute resolution and other areas such as tax, maritime and real estate.

Karen Guch, Bakers’ global chair of private equity, said: “With this impressive team hire we have now added 74 lateral transactional partners globally in the past three years. We will continue to accelerate growth in the key money markets whilst also embarking on the next stage of our transactional strategy to grow our transactional teams in a number of our other most important markets, including the UAE.”

The firm also announced at the end of last month that it was extending its partnership with AI specialists SparkBeyond through the firm’s Reinvent innovation programme following a successful pilot of the technology. The partnership is focusing on AI-powered legal services, boosting the firm’s pro bono social impact initiatives through machine learning-driven analysis and using data insights to improve the firm’s own internal operations.