When Awatif Al Khouri began practicing law in Dubai in 1989, she entered a profession in which Emirati women were still rare in court. Trained and qualified locally, she built her career inside United Arab Emirates law firms before starting her own practice in 2003, now known as Awatif Mohammad Shoqi Advocates & Legal Consultancy.
Al Khouri is licensed to represent clients before all levels of the UAE judiciary, from the Courts of First Instance through the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court. That status allows her to carry family, civil, and commercial disputes through every procedural stage, rather than handing over files once they reach higher courts. Over the past two decades, her firm has represented corporate names such as Shell Petrol Ltd., Schlumberger, and Middlesex University, alongside a steady stream of individual litigants.Her docket spans contentious divorces, enforcement of financial orders, and disputes involving property and banking relationships. Colleagues describe her as a practitioner who remains actively involved in hearings despite managing a growing practice. Reflecting on the evolution of her work, she notes, “Cases have become more complex and more international, but the basic task is still to present the facts and the law clearly to the court.”
Embassy Listings and Cross-Border Trust
A key marker of Al Khouri’s profile is the confidence shown by foreign governments operating in the UAE. The French Embassy in Dubai and the British and American Embassies in the country list her for both consultancy and individual representation, directing their nationals to her in civil and family disputes. Such listings follow internal vetting and send a signal that she is familiar with both local procedure and the expectations of foreign nationals caught up in legal problems abroad.
Her name also appears in global professional networks. The International Academy of Family Lawyers, which brings together practitioners involved in cross-border family disputes, profiles her as owner of the firm and highlights her work on relocation, child abduction, and enforcement issues. The M&A Today Awards have recognized her as Family Lawyer of the Year, placing her among a small group of regional practitioners cited for family work with international dimensions.
This positioning reflects the demographics of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, where expatriates make up a large share of residents and legal conflicts often stretch across borders. For many foreign families, issues such as relocation, child contact, and financial orders cannot be resolved without addressing multiple jurisdictions. As Al Khouri puts it, “Clients who arrive from abroad are often trying to understand how a decision here will affect their lives in another country.”
Work Across Languages and Legal Cultures
Al Khouri works in Arabic, English, and French, a combination that enables her to move between local proceedings and the documentation and expectations of foreign clients and institutions. Her practice areas, as listed in international directories, cover appeals, divorce, child custody and visitation, domestic violence protection orders, pre- and post-nuptial agreements, and enforcement and modification of support and property division orders, including cases involving the Hague Convention on international child abduction.
Recent case summaries associated with her firm illustrate the range of issues reaching the UAE courts. One report describes a landowner granted permission to proceed with a development despite a mortgage dispute with a bank, while another details a criminal case against a teenager following a fatal sports incident. Other matters include extortion allegations tied to an extramarital relationship, and a family case in which a Dubai court applied Indian marriage law in a divorce, underscoring the extent to which foreign law can surface in local proceedings.
For Al Khouri, such cases point to the need for lawyers who can decode not only statutes but also the interactions between different legal systems. She notes that many disputes now involve documentary trails and family histories spread across multiple countries. “It is very common for one case to involve a marriage certificate from one jurisdiction, a property in another, and children who have lived in several places,” she says.
A Reference Point for New Generations
Regional media have portrayed Al Khouri as part of the first generation of Emirati women to build long-term careers as courtroom advocates. Over more than three decades, she has moved from associate roles in local firms to leading a practice that argues cases at every level of the national court system, while maintaining affiliations with international family-law bodies.
Her trajectory mirrors broader shifts in the UAE legal market, where demand for cross-border family and commercial work has increased alongside foreign investment and an expanding expatriate population. The cases that pass through her firm—from child relocation petitions to disputes over mortgaged developments—offer a detailed view of how those structural trends translate into individual conflicts before the courts.
For younger lawyers entering the profession, Al Khouri’s career presents an example of how sustained courtroom practice, multilingual capability, and embassy-recognized work can intersect. Asked how she measures the span since 1989, she replies, “The law has changed, the city has changed, and the clients have changed, but the obligation to give an honest assessment of a case has not.”