Family Law and Ruling Families in UAE: Special Considerations

The instruction usually arrives late, and rarely from the client. A family office director, a private secretary or a long-standing adviser makes contact, the facts are given in outline, and the first question is not what the law provides but whether the matter can be concluded without a hearing.

That question shapes everything that follows. The substantive law governing a marriage, a divorce, a guardianship arrangement or an estate does not change according to who the parties are. What changes is the forum, the pace, the number of people who may properly be told, and the range of interests that any settlement has to accommodate. Advising members of ruling families in the UAE is, in practice, the work of managing those four variables without losing sight of the legal position underneath them.

Related Services: Our foundation and trust structuring practice advises family offices on holding and succession arrangements.

The framework, and what sits alongside it

Personal status matters in the UAE are governed by the federal Personal Status Law, applied by the courts of each emirate. That is the same starting point for any family, and it is the point most often skipped in discussions of this subject. Marriage, divorce, maintenance, guardianship and inheritance all have a statutory and Sharia-based answer, and a client is entitled to know what that answer is before deciding whether to pursue it.

What is distinctive is the material that sits alongside the statutory position. Long-standing arrangements within the family, understandings recorded in private agreements, the constitutional documents of holding companies and foundations through which assets are held, and the practice of resolving matters through family councils and senior mediators all bear on the outcome. Advice that describes the court position and stops there is only half an answer, because the court position is frequently not the route the family will take.

Differences between the emirates

Each emirate operates its own judicial bodies and its own procedural practice, and Abu Dhabi and Dubai differ from one another in ways that matter to timing, filing and the conduct of hearings. Establish which court would have jurisdiction over the matter, and what that court's practice actually is, before offering any view on likely outcomes or duration. A generalised statement about UAE family procedure is of limited use to a client whose case will be heard in one specific place.

Discretion as a working constraint

Confidentiality in these matters is not a preference to be accommodated where convenient. It is a condition of the instruction, and it has to be planned for from the first conversation rather than imposed after something has already circulated.

What can be controlled

A good deal, in fact. The number of people with the complete picture can be kept small and fixed. Documents can be circulated on a restricted basis and held on separate files with limited access. Settlement terms can be recorded in agreements containing confidentiality undertakings. Where the rules of the relevant court permit it, applications can be made for hearings to be held in private. Correspondence can be routed through a single named contact rather than a general office address. None of this is exotic; it simply has to be decided at the outset, because it cannot be applied retrospectively.

What cannot

Clients are better served by candour about the limits. Where a matter is filed, a record of it exists. Where assets or family members are located abroad, foreign proceedings follow foreign rules on publicity, and those rules are not within anyone's control here. Banks, registrars, regulators and counterparties will require disclosure of certain information as a condition of acting, and refusing it usually stops the transaction rather than protecting the information. Setting these expectations early prevents a much harder conversation later.

Identifying the client

Where instructions come through an intermediary, establish in writing who the client is, who may give instructions on their behalf, who is entitled to receive the advice, and who is paying. These are often three or four different people, and the assumption that they are aligned is the source of a large proportion of the professional difficulties that arise in this work. The same exercise should identify conflicts across the wider family, since firms are frequently approached by more than one branch of it.

Marriage and financial arrangements made in advance

Marriage contracts and accompanying financial agreements are the most useful documents in this area, because they are drafted at a point when everyone is willing to be reasonable. They can address dowry and maintenance, the treatment of assets held through corporate or foundation structures, provision for children, and the mechanism by which any disagreement will be resolved.

The recurring defect is inconsistency. A marital agreement promises an interest in a family business that the shareholders' agreement does not permit to be transferred; or provides for a payment from an entity whose governing documents do not allow distributions of that kind; or names a forum that conflicts with the dispute clause in the structure holding the asset. Whoever drafts the family documents must read the corporate ones, and the reverse. This is not a detail. It is the difference between an agreement that performs and an agreement that becomes the subject of the dispute it was meant to prevent.

Related: Our contract drafting team works with our family practice to keep marital and corporate documents consistent.

Divorce, children and the practical questions

The legal steps in a divorce are the ordinary ones. The difficulties are practical, and they are largely about assets and information.

Financial issues

Where wealth is held in operating businesses, real estate and long-term investments rather than in cash, the exercise is one of valuation and structuring rather than division. Interests may be illiquid, subject to transfer restrictions, or held through entities whose directors and trustees are not parties to the marriage and cannot be ordered about by agreement between the spouses. A settlement that overlooks this produces obligations nobody has the power to perform. The workable answer is usually a structured arrangement over time, agreed with the people who actually control the assets, rather than a single transfer on paper.

Children

Custody, guardianship, schooling, travel and passports are the questions that occupy families in practice, and they benefit from being settled in detail rather than in principle. Where children hold more than one nationality or spend time in more than one country, an arrangement recorded only in a UAE document may need to be recognised elsewhere to be of use. That is a drafting question to be dealt with at the time, in consultation with counsel in the relevant country, not a problem to be discovered when a school term or a travel arrangement is disrupted.

Related: We advise on personal status matters, including maintenance, custody and financial claims.

Succession and the assets behind it

Inheritance under Sharia principles allocates fixed shares among defined heirs. Applied to a portfolio of listed investments, that produces a division. Applied to a family holding company, an operating business or a jointly used property, it can fragment control among a dozen people who are not required to agree with each other about anything.

The response, where families take advice in time, is to separate ownership from control before the event rather than after it. Shareholders' agreements with transfer restrictions and pre-emption rights, holding vehicles and foundations, defined governance for the operating businesses, and documented mechanics for valuing and buying out an interest all reduce the number of questions that have to be answered under pressure. None of this displaces the entitlement of heirs; it determines how that entitlement is delivered.

Records before structures

Extended families with several marriages and children of different generations require accuracy before they require sophistication. Who is the registered holder of each shareholding, which entity owns which property, who is named as a beneficiary, which agreements are still in force, and where the originals are kept. Contested estates almost always begin in an inconsistency between a register, a document and a recollection. Reconciling those while everyone concerned is available to explain them is cheaper than reconstructing them afterwards, and considerably more likely to produce a result the family accepts. Where documents are missing, say so in writing at the time and record what was done to look for them.

Assets in more than one jurisdiction

Real estate is governed by the law of the place where it sits, and shares by the law of the company's jurisdiction, regardless of where the family is based or where a will was signed. A succession plan drawn up only against UAE law may leave a material part of the estate governed by rules nobody considered. The remedy is coordination: instruct counsel in each jurisdiction where assets are held, and make sure the documents they produce refer to each other rather than each purporting to deal with everything.

Related: Our corporate practice handles the shareholding, governance and buy-out mechanics that sit underneath family succession planning.

When a matter is contested

Disagreements arise even where the planning was careful. Succession, the terms of a marriage settlement and the control of a family business are the three that most often reach that point, and they tend to arrive together rather than separately, because the same asset is usually at the centre of all three.

The sequence matters more than the merits at this stage. A dispute that starts in a family forum can move to arbitration or to court if it has to; one that starts with a filing very rarely moves back. That the traffic runs only one way is the strongest practical argument for exhausting the private routes first, even where a client is confident of the legal position and impatient with the delay.

Reconciliation and mediation first

Family councils, senior relatives and appointed mediators resolve a large share of these matters, and they do so for a reason: they can deal with things a court cannot. Recognition, roles within the family, an acknowledgement, a continuing relationship between people who will still be at the same gatherings next year. A lawyer's contribution to that process is preparation — a clear statement of the legal entitlements, a valuation that can be relied on, and a written record of what is agreed so it does not have to be relitigated in a year.

Arbitration for the commercial elements

Where a private and binding determination is required, arbitration under Federal Law No. 6 of 2018, as amended in 2023, is available for the commercial parts of a family dispute: shareholder disagreements, valuation, the operation of holding structures, contractual claims between family entities. Personal status questions remain with the courts. Splitting a dispute along that line is often the practical route, keeping the financial issues private while the family law questions follow their own course.

Related: Our arbitration and dispute resolution team handles shareholder and valuation disputes within family structures.

Litigation

If proceedings become unavoidable, prepare them properly: valuations, forensic accounting, corporate records and a coherent account of the facts. Prepare the client as well. Filing changes the relationship between the parties in a way that a settlement offer does not, and it is worth being explicit that the step is difficult to reverse before it is taken rather than afterwards.

Practical guidance

For advisers

• Establish the client relationship in writing. Who instructs, who receives advice, who pays, and what happens if their interests diverge.
• Agree an information protocol at the outset. Who holds the file, how documents circulate, and what is said if an enquiry arrives.
• Read the existing structures before advising. The company and foundation documents usually decide more of the outcome than the correspondence does.
• Check jurisdiction asset by asset. Not once for the family as a whole.
• Bring in corporate, trust and tax counsel early. Late coordination produces documents that contradict each other.

For family members

• Take advice before the event. Before a marriage, before a transfer, before a succession plan is announced within the family.
• Record agreements even within the family. Understandings that everyone accepted at the time are recalled differently by the next generation.
• Keep the registers accurate. Shareholdings, title, beneficiary designations and the location of original documents.
• Use private resolution first. Mediation and family councils resolve more of these matters than courts do, and on better terms.
• Review the plan when circumstances change. A marriage, a birth, a sale or a new jurisdiction is a reason to look at the documents again.

A note on expectations

Nothing in this area is served by treating the family's position as a substitute for legal analysis, and nothing is served by ignoring it either. The clients who are best advised are those who know exactly what the law would give them, what the family process is likely to give them, and how far apart those two figures are before anyone has to choose between them.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should seek professional legal advice tailored to their specific circumstances before making any decisions or taking any action based on the content of this article.

Nour Attorneys Team

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