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The ranking’s arrival in the Gulf tracks a larger shift in where the world’s wealthiest couples now choose to divorce.
Spear’s, the London title that has ranked private-client advisers for two decades, published its first family law index dedicated to the Middle East on 24 June. Dr Hassan Elhais, a legal consultant at Amal Alrashedi Lawyers & Legal Consultants in Dubai, was placed in the Top Recommended tier and was one of four practitioners the magazine profiled by name. The index was built from submissions, nominations, peer review and interviews with the lawyers advising high-net-worth and international families on matrimonial finance and child arrangements.
The launch of the index is the more consequential development. Spear’s says the deepest field in the region sits in the UAE, and it is explicit about why it went looking: the long-standing assumption that London is where wealthy international couples divorce is now being tested.
The numbers behind the shift
The wealth has already moved. Dubai now holds 81,200 resident millionaires, 237 centi-millionaires and 20 billionaires, a 102 percent increase over the decade to 2024, according to Henley & Partners’ World’s Wealthiest Cities Report 2025. The city climbed from 21st to 18th globally in a single year. London fell to sixth and was one of only two cities in the global top 50 whose millionaire population contracted over the same decade. Henley’s 2025 migration report put the UAE’s net inflow at 9,800 millionaires carrying roughly USD 63 billion in investable wealth, the largest of any country, against a UK net outflow of 16,500, the biggest the firm had then recorded.
Populations of that composition generate matrimonial work. Dubai Courts registered 1,036 divorce cases in the first eight months of 2025 alongside 4,782 marriage contracts in the first nine, per Dubai Data and Statistics Establishment figures reported by Al Bayan, an average of about four divorces a day.
A system rebuilt in five years
Abu Dhabi Law No. 14 of 2021 created the country’s first civil personal status regime for non-Muslims and a dedicated court to hear it. Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2022 extended the model nationwide from February 2023, introducing unilateral no-fault divorce, joint custody to the age of 18, and the option to apply home-country law instead. Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2024 consolidated the framework and took effect in April 2025, repealing the 2005 statute.
Speed is the practical difference. Byron James of Expatriate Law, ranked Top Flight in the same Spear’s index, told the magazine that a financial and custody dispute taking most of a year in England can conclude in the UAE within weeks, and that an Abu Dhabi court can run the same set of allegations start to finish in four.
Where Elhais sits
Chambers and Partners ranks him Band 1 for Family/Matrimonial: High Net Worth in the UAE, a placing held for four years. The guide’s editorial notes that his work is primarily custody and child abduction disputes, alongside divorce and matrimonial finance. He moved to Dubai in 2006, co-chairs the International Academy of Family Lawyers’ relocation of children committee, and co-wrote the UAE chapters of the Chambers Family Law 2026 practice guide with Awatif Al Khouri, also named in the Spear’s index.
The specialism matters because the money side of the new framework is settling faster than the children side. The Dubai Court of Cassation ruled earlier this year on how compensation claims operate under Article 9 of the 2022 decree-law for non-Muslim couples, separating personal harm, which belongs in the civil courts, from damages arising from the divorce itself. This month the same court held that a settlement recorded in a hearing and given executive force cannot be reopened on appeal, a judgment Elhais was asked to interpret by Gulf News and Khaleej Times.
The constraint is jurisdictional and it is real. The UAE is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, and the US State Department records no bilateral agreement with Washington on parental abduction either, so the return mechanisms available between Hague states do not apply and foreign custody orders carry no automatic recognition. Where a child or an asset sits outside the Emirates, a fast Dubai order still has to be made to land elsewhere. Four weeks at the front end does not answer enforcement at the back.
That gap is what the index is really measuring. The UAE now has a family law bar worth surveying, and the practitioners inside it are writing the case law as they go.
