Case study: Watch out, here she comes!

Cynthia Trench – Principal, Trench and Associates legal consultants – is witty, vivacious, charming, confident, quirky, intelligent, and not someone you mess with. There’s a reason she’s nicknamed “The Rottweiler”. Ketaki Banga chats with the first female expatriate licensed legal consultant in Dubai.

The diminutive Cynthia Trench is a force to be reckoned with. You can love her or hate her, but you definitely can’t ignore her. Depending on which side you’re on, she’s a woman who is just as comfortable making grown men quake in their boots, as she is entertaining you with the most outrageous comments that have you laughing your head off in a combination of amusement and shock – “Oh my goodness, did she really say that!”

But under the humour is a woman who knows how to get her point across. Having spent her formative years in Hong Kong, Cynthia completed her degree at the University of Hong Kong and was admitted and qualified as a solicitor in Hong Kong in 1986. Her first language is English but she also speaks Cantonese and French. She arrived in Dubai in 1989 and obtained her licence in 1996 from the Rulers Office of the Government of Dubai as the first female expatriate licensed legal consultant.

Connecting the dots
That journey had its share of twists and turns. Back in 1993, when South Africa had just opened up, the South African Foreign Trade Organisation (SAFTO) appointed her as their exclusive advisor for the Middle East. “What a wonderful title,” she quips, “and they even shipped me over to SA to look at their oranges and what not. I had a huge portfolio of products from avocados, to make up, jewellery and even helicopters, but you cannot be a Jill-of-all-trades. You’ve got to concentrate on something that you know and you know best.”

Cynthia realised she was losing around AED 10,000 a month on faxing and telephone costs alone, and she pretty much had had enough. That’s when one of her old clients advised her to do what she did best, which is law, and that’s how she got back into it.

What was the market like at that time?

“There were lots of expatriate lawyers, and definitely female expatriates, but to have their own license is a different thing,” she reminisces. “There were a fairly small number of firms so, for somebody like me coming from a city like Hong Kong, where it’s extremely competitive, I found it much easier.”

Cynthia fondly remembers how 20 years ago, you could walk up to the offices of Al Abbar and the like and they would invite you in warmly and ask what they could do for you. “These days you’d be lucky to get a phone call returned from smaller companies!” she observes sardonically. “It was fantastic back then; you could get right up to the front of the queue, especially if you’re a woman, and especially because I was not the usual mould – I am not English – so they were a little bit more curious.”

When she got her license, she says her existing client base was jubilant: “One of them is Ali Al Bawardi, the owner of Spinneys, and he did a lot of campaigning and introductions for me and I am very grateful to him.” She was also referred by other really strategic clients and this word-of-mouth publicity set the ball rolling.

Hurdles along the way
Cynthia makes it sound almost too easy. Surely, she must have faced more challenges!

“My office was basically a residential apartment in Safa Tower. I’d already opened it by the time I resigned from my previous job. It was a small place with one assistant, one secretary, and a gopher and that was how I started. It was tough in that sense because, when you start, you don’t know when your next cheque will come along and you don’t know how you will pay salaries. But my motto from the beginning has been to never ever miss paying salaries on time.”

Of course there were tough times, she concedes. She remembers how, twice in her entire life, she had to go to people other than family and borrow money to make sure she paid salaries on time. One of them is a very good friend of hers and another is a client and, to this day, he reminds her about it.

“So it’s tough when you are the sole proprietor and have to start a business. But once you have a reputation and your business is rolling, that’s fantastic!” she beams as she remembers the good old days when she had a team of five. “Having five people is so easy to manage! I used to throw a stapler [not a staple, she clarifies] at one of my girls for chatting too long on the phone. Things were lots of fun [of course!], but the moment it became big it was very difficult, and I am speaking as a business person, not as a woman.”

She mentions grappling with issues like getting an overdraft from the bank, or HR concerns with a larger team. She also admits that she tends to get very involved. “That’s the way I do business, sometimes to my own detriment, because all my staff know that I work till midnight, most nights.”

Perceptions and Rottweilers
While she mentions these general problems that most entrepreneurs face at some point or the other, she does admit that in some ways being a woman helps: “In terms of networking, meeting clients, getting to know people, being a woman is definitely an advantage – although any person with charisma can handle it. But make sure that you garner respect rather than gain a bad reputation in the market. I like the fact that, when I first started, my nickname was ‘The Rottweiler’. So that was nice, though I’ve mellowed down over the years.”

What led to that name, I ask, though I can somewhat guess.

Cynthia laughs as she remembers this time, when she was in a meeting with eight very traditional and formal Kuwaiti men, and she went in and thumped the table on an issue and all of them jumped. “One of them is a very good client of mine to this day,” she grins. “At one stage I was also known as ‘The Ice Queen’. But now I train other people to be Rottweilers.”

Besides being called many interesting names, lawyers are also expected to be magicians and perform miracles, feels Cynthia. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, I have this really troublesome debt – AED 300,000 – not much.’ So I’ll ask them about the documents they have, to which they’ll reply, ‘Well, not much.’ Then in the end you find out they have no documents and they have given the other party a few bounced cheques, and they expect you to extricate them from such a problem! So, it’s also about educating the market.”

Knowledge is power
Education is an area where Cynthia is quite active, especially with regard to inheritance, labour law and property. Cynthia has spoken at several seminars, including the Brand Protection Forum for the Automotive Group, International Women’s Group, workshops at Sheikh Mohammed’s Establishment for Young Entrepreneurs (SME) dealing with the establishment of entities and franchising, and workshops with banks on estate planning. In 2004, she was awarded the Best Service Provider by H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum on behalf of SME.  

“For me it’s CSR driven because I mostly don’t charge for these events. It’s all my outlay of time and at a recent symposium we actually paid out a lot of the costs as well, which is really important for me because of what I could achieve out of it. One is recognition, secondly, education of the public and, thirdly, we try to convey feedback to the government so changes can be made, which is more important than the first two points,” explains Cynthia.

One area that could do with change is the insolvency law. “Fortunately the government is looking at this extremely hard and the Dubai Economic Council (DEC) is now looking at a nearly final draft of the new insolvency act that would basically facilitate people in declaring themselves bankrupt, which doesn’t really exist here yet. You can, but you can’t – mainly because of bounced cheques which just force you to be in prison or abscond. There’s no real choice, especially when you’re dealing with a bank that refuses to listen and we’ve known of many such cases. So the DEC is looking at allowing the issue of bounced cheques to be reviewed. The second part is to allow individuals to declare bankruptcy,” she explains.  

Cynthia has worked in many countries, so how does the UAE compare in terms of being conducive to starting a business?

“I’ve just started doing business in China. In the five years I’ve been there, I can’t tell you how much has changed; the people are polite, the civic sense is better, you’re allowed to criticise them with regard to their service – within reason. I was in Hong Kong and had to get a China travel pass and was panicking. In the old days you’d have to deal with guys digging their ears and other places, who don’t want to listen to you. Now it’s fantastic. You go in there, it’s all pre-booked online and very streamlined. So the mentality is that you’ve got to change for the better, you’ve got to be open to criticism,” she emphasises, “because that would allow people to come back to you rather than harbour a lot of dissention and anger. One way to facilitate feedback would be to have proper consultants reviewing the system and gathering feedback – whether it’s reviewing free zones or even something like why can’t people share a flat! Gone are the days when salaries were at a peak!”

Another area she’d like to highlight is inheritance laws for expatriates. “Right now there are many unscrupulous will writers, including lawyers, who don’t know what they are doing – and I am very open about the subject. They are abusing the Shariya system and making people believe there is a UAE compliant will when there’s no such thing.”

Cynthia explains that if you’re a foreigner, as is the case with a huge percentage of business owners and employees here, and if you want everything to go to your spouse, it doesn’t work that way because suddenly your entire family comes into play according to Shariya. “And when there’s complicated family structure it gets quite difficult. We are handling two cases right now; they’ve been conned by this outfit to draft an unenforceable will and of course they didn’t know it!

“So what can be done in the meantime? There are ways of circumventing it by simply understanding Shariya, and it’s not scary for people with a fairly simple family structure. For instance a man who has a brother but wants his wife to inherit can plan this in advance. You need a power of attorney from the brother saying the wife is entitled to his share of the estate, because the brother is entitled as a Koranic heir. Have everything clear and plan ahead.”

Cynthia advises this same clarity in the housing market: “Get the investors to come back into the market, address their concerns by clarifying the law and reassure them that there’s no fear.”

So what lies ahead for Cynthia, and Trench and Associates?

Currently her firm has 21 employees. “I am definitely going to grow but not in a huge way. A couple of years ago I had delusions of grandeur, as did everyone at that time, and I decided to have a partner but the formula for the partnership was wrong. Fortunately for me it didn’t happen because he found out I was a Rottweiler,” she laughs.

“Right now I am looking at another formula where somebody can come in right from the beginning with an injection for capital expansion, and then we join forces to grow – but we are talking about relatively organic growth here,” she concludes.

Well, not quite. Being Cynthia she went on to startle, shock, amuse and impress me with a bunch of other (unfortunately) unprintable stuff.