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A six-year professional exodus, a currency that lost 98 percent of its value, and now a first year of growth since the collapse: the Beirut lawyer running a corporate practice across the region shows what the professionals who stayed have to work with.
The defining export of Lebanon’s crisis years was its people. Research firm Information International, working from General Security data, counted 79,134 Lebanese leaving the country in 2021 alone and roughly 215,000 between 2017 and 2021, a wave in which doctors, engineers and lawyers were heavily represented. The World Bank, which ranks the collapse among the three most severe crisis episodes globally since the mid-1800s, warned as early as 2021 of “a dangerous depletion of resources, including human capital.” For six years, the rational career move in Beirut was the airport.
The Ones Who Stayed
The current has now turned, modestly. The World Bank’s latest Lebanon Economic Monitor recorded growth of 3.5 percent in 2025, the country’s first expansion since the collapse, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE both reopened to Lebanon within three weeks of each other in June. Reconnection of that kind runs on professionals who can stand on both shores at once, and the ones available to do it are, by definition, the ones who never left.
Among them is Cynthia Akiki, a Beirut lawyer who founded Cynthia Akiki Law Firm & Associates before turning 30 and has grown it into a corporate and commercial practice advising businesses and individuals across Lebanon and the GCC, according to a July profile by the UAE platform UAE Stories. The firm’s direction of travel is regional: expansion across the Gulf through partnerships built to give clients continuous coverage across jurisdictions.
The Clients Are Already Crossing Borders
The client evidence points the same way. In a post from Amman on her public Instagram, Akiki congratulates the Jordanian singer Siilawy, whom she describes as “my talented client,” on the opening of his restaurant, Sii Circle. The name is not a minor booking. His official Spotify biography describes one of MENA’s youngest stars, whose breakthrough single Aashanek passed 100 million YouTube views in 2021. An entertainer at that scale is a reputation business, and reputation businesses retain counsel on credibility rather than on rate cards. The geography matters as much as the marquee: a Beirut-founded practice whose publicly named client sits in Amman is already running the cross-border model it is selling.
Trust as the Product
Why credibility carries commercial weight in this market needs no explaining to anyone who lived through it. Lebanon’s collapse was administered through the instruments lawyers draft: deposits frozen behind contracts, savings destroyed inside a banking system whose restructuring Parliament is still legislating, a currency down 98 percent. What a lawyer sells in the aftermath is not access to the law but assurance about how it will be used, and Akiki has organised her practice around exactly that assurance, an approach the same profile records as treating integrity as the profession’s most valuable asset and declining work that does not fit the firm’s long-term direction.
There is a structural point beneath the individual one. Women make up almost 55 percent of interning lawyers at the Beirut Bar Association, yet held 17 percent of committee leadership positions and one of twelve council seats in the period mapped by Hivos. The pipeline is majority female and the top of the profession is not, and founding a firm outright, rather than waiting out a partnership track, is one rational answer to that arithmetic.
The Test of the Model
One honest caveat belongs in any serious account of a regional legal expansion. The Gulf market is not open ground: it is held by firms with decades of history and offices in every capital, and no young practice out-builds that footprint. Cross-border work carries a structural limit too, since rights of audience stop at each border, and a lawyer admitted in one jurisdiction pleads in another only through local counsel. The partnership model Akiki is pursuing is therefore not a shortcut but the only honest architecture available: lead counsel who knows the client, coordinating local lawyers who know the courtroom. Practices that fail that coordination test end up selling reach they do not have. The ones that pass it become what a reconnecting region runs on.
Lebanon’s institutions will be rebuilt by the people who remained inside them. The exodus was measured in the hundreds of thousands. The rebuild will be counted one practice at a time, and the practices already standing have a head start no returnee can buy.
