Ahmed Elnaggar is the founder and managing partner of Elnaggar & Partners, a boutique corporate and commercial law firm with offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and an affiliation with the Elnaggar family firm in Cairo - a practice his father founded in 1982.
His firm provides bespoke legal services to individuals, small and medium enterprises, and multinational companies, with a multilingual team fluent in more than five languages. He is also the founder of Emirates Legal Network, a nonprofit that grew from a WhatsApp group into a community of more than 600 legal professionals across the UAE and the 2024 UAE Business Award winner for Lawyer Network of the Year. Additionally, he founded The Jurist, a media platform bridging law and enlightenment.
I asked Ahmed what led him to start his own firm.
"My dad is a lawyer. My three elder sisters are lawyers," he told me. "I was amazed by everything in the profession. I enjoyed seeing my dad with his influence and knowledge and how smart he is. Somehow it was in the DNA."
After training in his father's Cairo office and graduating from Cairo University, Ahmed made a deliberate choice to chart his own course. He moved to Dubai and spent six years at a Swiss law firm, building deep expertise in corporate transactions, M&A, and corporate structuring. In 2013, he launched Elnaggar & Partners from scratch. The early years were humbling.
"The transformation from being just a lawyer who was doing his legal work and delivering the billable hours is completely different from running a firm," he reflected. "I thought I understood everything from watching my dad and watching my family run the law firm, but practice is different. I had to divert a lot from the technical work into HR, into marketing, into branding, into business development and sales."
As the firm grew, so did Ahmed's understanding of what makes a team truly work. His early instinct was to hire for knowledge and skill. Over time, he came to a different conclusion.
"The values are much more important than knowledge, and the character is much more important than skills."
Today, Elnaggar & Partners operates with a global team spread across the UAE, Egypt, Europe, and Asia. Ahmed manages this distributed team through clear targets, transparent expectations, and a deep investment in the people themselves. That same philosophy shapes how he leads and how he recovers when things go wrong.
"When you make a mistake or make the wrong decision, please be kind to yourself and overcome your mistake very quickly. And be kind to the people around you. If you're kind to them, you don't burn bridges and you don't create enemies. At the end of the day, you find a lot of benefit in collaborations."
Beyond the firm, Ahmed's mission has always been larger than the practice of law. Through Emirates Legal Network, which he built from a single WhatsApp group into an award-winning community of legal professionals, and The Jurist - the first independent legal blog in the United Arab Emirates, which he founded to bridge law and enlightenment - he works to clear up misconceptions about how the law operates in the UAE and to make practical legal knowledge accessible to the broader public.
"Law is really connected to life," he said. "Everyone, whether they work in the law or not, needs to have a little bit of legal knowledge to understand how to go about their life."
Are you a business or individual in need of corporate, commercial, or estate planning legal services in the UAE? Connect with Ahmed Elnaggar and check out Elnaggar & Partners, The Jurist and Emirates Legal Network.