Dubai · Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates

One practice, five jurisdictions.

Kings Maxim is a boutique full-service law firm. We advise family offices, select sovereign funds and private clients on the holding and succession of wealth, and on establishing substantial businesses in the Emirates - most often for capital arriving from the United Kingdom, India, the United States and Singapore.

Speak with us

About us

We work at a high level of confidentiality.

Confidentiality is paramount for many of the people we act for, and it has become harder to hold. Registers of beneficial ownership have widened, reporting obligations have multiplied, and information now moves between jurisdictions almost as a matter of course. In that climate a client's entirely legitimate wish for privacy is easily mistaken for something else.

We have spent years learning precisely where that line falls. What we have built is an ecosystem in which confidentiality and compliance hold together rather than pull against one another: a structure that discloses fully what it must, and keeps private what it may.

We are a boutique full-service practice. Our clients are family offices, select sovereign funds, and high net worth individuals planning the holding and succession of wealth and estates. We also establish large capital businesses in the UAE for founders and investors arriving from the United Kingdom, India, the United States and Singapore, and for those already resident in the Emirates.

We choose our clients carefully, and having chosen them we stay to the end of the journey. In many engagements that means becoming in-house counsel in all but name - on hand for the legal, structuring, regulatory and compliance questions that arrive as a business grows, rather than being called in once they have hardened into problems.

Discretion is not the opposite of compliance. Holding both at once is the work.

What we do

Work that begins with a structure, and rarely ends there.

Most matters reach us as a single question: how to move a family, a business or a balance sheet into the United Arab Emirates. The answer is a structure, and everything that follows flows down from it. The entity we incorporate is the one we then license. The contracts we draft at the outset are the ones we maintain as circumstances change. The disputes we run years later are usually about agreements we already know intimately. That continuity is deliberate - by year five we are answering questions with the whole history in view, rather than reconstructing it.

01

Where it starts

Structuring and establishment

The choice between mainland, free zone and offshore is rarely obvious at the outset, and it governs what the business is permitted to do for years afterwards. We make that choice on the facts of the actual venture, not the template.

Corporate structures for UAE operations across mainland, free zone and offshore
Holding structures for cross-border capital and inbound investment
Residency and relocation for founders, investors and their families
Licensing, permitted activity scope and regulatory permissions
Family office formation and governance

02

Private client

Wealth and estate planning

UAE law applies its own default rules of succession to assets held here, and those defaults rarely match what a family intends. Planning in advance replaces them with the client's own instructions, and spares the people left behind a process they should never have to run.

Succession planning for high net worth individuals and families
DIFC wills, and civil wills registered with the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department
Asset holding, protection and intergenerational transfer
Coordination with advisers in the client's home jurisdiction

03

Year on year

Ongoing counsel

Documents drafted once and left alone stop matching the business that grew around them. We keep them current, and we are close enough to the operation to notice when something has drifted before it matters.

Contracts drafted at the outset, then maintained and updated as the business moves
Shareholder, board and governance documentation
Regulatory and compliance advice, including DFSA-regulated activity
Data protection under the UAE PDPL and the DIFC Data Protection Law
Commercial agreements: distribution, franchise, agency, supply and construction

04

When it is contested

Litigation and arbitration

Where a matter is contested, the forum shapes the outcome as much as the merits do. Much of the value here was created earlier, in the dispute resolution clause nobody read closely at signing.

Civil and commercial claims through the UAE courts, from first instance to Cassation
Proceedings in the DIFC Courts
Arbitration under DIAC, ICC and ad hoc rules
Representation directly, or through established local counsel where that serves the client better
Enforcement of judgments and awards

Our network

Introductions, on request.

Our clients sit across most of the sectors that carry weight in the Emirates, and they are frequently useful to one another - a developer who needs manpower at short notice, an investor looking for a counterparty who has already been diligenced, a family office assessing a sector it has not entered before.

Where an introduction genuinely serves a client, and only when they ask for it, we make it.

Real estate & construction Labour & manpower Jewellery & diamonds Crypto & fintech Commercial investments Insurance Education Food & beverage

The team

Fourteen people. Five jurisdictions.

Our team brings together lawyers and corporate services professionals qualified to practise and advise on the laws of the United Arab Emirates, the United States, the United Kingdom, India and Singapore.

That spread is deliberate. A client relocating from London or Mumbai rarely has a question that stops neatly at one border, and a structure built here usually has to answer to a regulator, a revenue authority or a family somewhere else. Keeping those perspectives inside one firm means a matter runs end to end without being handed around - and it means the people who built a structure are still here when questions arise about it years later.

14

Lawyers and corporate services professionals

5

Jurisdictions of qualification

2

UAE offices

1

Point of contact, from first meeting onward

United Arab Emirates

Onshore courts, DIFC, free zones

United Kingdom

England & Wales

United States

Corporate and investment

India

Inbound and outbound capital

Singapore

Regional structuring

Please read before you continue.