UAE businesses urged to strengthen legal and risk systems

Dubai: UAE businesses exposed to shipping, energy and logistics are being urged to strengthen legal and risk-management systems as continuing maritime uncertainty raises the prospect of higher insurance costs, contractual disputes and complex cross-border claims.

Legal and maritime risk experts say companies should establish their contractual obligations before a dispute reaches arbitration or court. They should identify force majeure, hardship and war-risk provisions, maintain close contact with insurers and protection and indemnity (P & I) clubs, and keep a clear record of decisions made during a crisis.

“Governments and businesses should prepare for the legal and commercial risks long before a dispute reaches a courtroom or a tribunal,” said Jessica Zakhour, Founding Partner of Legaline Platform and Founder and Managing Partner of CMZ Law Group, LLP.

“The first step we recommend is a full mapping exercise across every contract, policy, and relationship that touches Gulf shipping, energy, or logistics, so that force majeure, hardship, and war risk clauses are identified rather than assumed.”

Zakhour said companies should maintain an ongoing relationship with insurers and P & I clubs because war-risk coverage is being reviewed more frequently.

According to her, war-risk premiums have risen from roughly 0.25 per cent of a vessel’s value before the crisis to between 3 and 10 per cent since the conflict began.

Governments have also been coordinating alternative routing, naval escort arrangements and reinsurance mechanisms, but documentation remains a common requirement across the public and private sectors.

“Every decision about routing, insurance, and risk tolerance should be recorded as it is made, because that record becomes the evidence a court or arbitrator will later rely on to judge whether a party acted reasonably,” Zakhour said.

The growing volume and speed of information surrounding maritime disruption is also creating a role for artificial intelligence and contract intelligence tools.

Dmitry Grinik, Founder and CEO of Legaline Platform, said legal departments could use contract intelligence software to scan large portfolios of charter parties, insurance policies and supply agreements and identify provisions that could be triggered by a specific event.

“We recommend that legal departments adopt a contract intelligence software that can scan an entire portfolio of charter parties, insurance policies, and supply agreements in minutes rather than weeks, flagging every force majeure, war risk, or notice clause that could be triggered by a specific event,” he said.

Such systems can also be connected to sanctions lists, government advisories and vessel-tracking information, allowing legal and compliance teams to identify exposed contracts and notification deadlines more quickly.

“The Judgment about what a flagged clause actually means for a client still belongs to a lawyer, and we do not see that changing soon,” Grinik said.

He said the next step could be real-time risk intelligence dashboards combining maritime activity, sanctions alerts, vessel-tracking data, contractual obligations, government advisories and insurance notifications.

Many of these individual data sources already exist, but the challenge is creating an integration layer that allows them to be used together in real time.

The legal consequences of a prolonged maritime crisis can extend well beyond the immediate disruption.

According to Zakhour, arbitration following a major crisis often centres on notices sent and received, voyage instructions, navigation and tracking records, insurance correspondence and evidence showing the steps taken by a company to limit its losses.

Dubai’s arbitration infrastructure has already moved towards digital case management. The Dubai International Arbitration Centre introduced DANA, a unified case-management platform developed with Opus 2, which centralises e-filing and documentation for parties and tribunals.

Experts say a similar approach could be applied during a live crisis through a structured and timestamped repository for evidence. This would allow companies to preserve records as events unfold rather than attempting to reconstruct decisions months later from emails and individual recollections.

The legal issues can become particularly complicated when a single maritime incident involves several contracts and jurisdictions.

“Liability, jurisdiction, and enforcement are each their own puzzle here, and they interact,” Zakhour said.

She noted that the first question in many insurance claims is whether a loss falls under a standard marine policy or the separate war-risk market. Charter parties, insurance policies and cargo contracts relating to the same voyage can also specify different governing laws and dispute forums, potentially resulting in parallel proceedings in multiple countries.

Zakhour said the private insurance market had faced significant pressure from the scale of the risk, prompting the US government to establish a reinsurance facility that grew to $40 billion, shared between the government and major insurers.

“On claims management, the practical difficulty is proving which policy responds, since standard hull and cargo policies exclude war perils by design, and establishing that a loss was in fact caused by a war peril, rather than an ordinary marine one, is often the whole dispute,” she said.

The UAE’s legal and technology infrastructure could provide a foundation for further development of these systems.

The country launched its National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence in 2018 and established a dedicated AI Office. Dubai’s Legal Affairs Department’s 2026-2028 strategic plan identifies artificial intelligence and alternative dispute resolution among its priorities.

The Dubai International Arbitration Centre has also partnered with Jus Mundi to introduce AI research tools into its case-management environment.

Against this backdrop, experts see scope for UAE-based technology platforms to develop integrated tools covering contract monitoring, maritime risk intelligence and evidence management.

“Given that pace, I would expect the UAE to be the first place in the region where the tools we have discussed here, contract monitoring, risk dashboards, and evidence repositories, get built into an actual product rather than staying a proposal,” Grinik said.

“AI-native legal services platforms like Legaline Platform operating in this market have a real opportunity to help design that layer specifically for maritime and energy risk, since the general infrastructure and the institutional appetite are both already there,” he said.