Work Update
Today is the first day of our Eid break, we are getting 9 days in total if you count the weekends. About a month passed since I started working at the MOLA. I think that I need to write a post on how work has been going.
I am employed at the Ministry of Legal Affairs as a legal researcher, my job involves revising commercial contracts that impose monetary obligations upon the government with a value more than half a million. These could be anything starting from making roads, schools, hospitals, and all the way to tourism projects and oil deals. There are various types of contracts under all those categories, I think that the main ones are official government standard contracts, unofficial ministry-specific standard contract, and non-standard contracts.
The government has official standard contracts for most of the generic projects such as civil engineering and mechanical works, the contract for these come in a standard form that the other party merely has to fill certain blanks to complete, e.g. the parties’ names, value of contracts, penalty values, etc. Revising these involves checking that the values are correct and that all the relevant forms have been supplied, e.g. the registration form with the chamber of commerce, tender board acceptance letter, etc. The ministry-specific standard contracts are those that have been constantly used by the same ministry to do a repetitive sort of work and dealing with them is similar to the official standard ones.
Non-standard contracts are those that have been written specifically by the two parties for the deal in question, these could be on a topic that has not been covered by a standard contract, or could be a special set of terms and conditions imposed in addition to the standard ones. Our involvement with these varies, at times it could be the mere approval before the final signature by the Minister in question, at other times we join in the negotiations process by drafting the contract term by term between the two parties. In theory, we have the power to request the Ministry in question to remove or add whatever clauses as we find appropriate.
Also, due to the fact that our department is the only one with English speakers in the Ministry, we get the occasional random letter to be translated into Arabic.
There are currently five people in our department, three advisers and only one other legal researcher in addition to me. There were two legal researchers that have been sent to do their Masters. Although we have been short on employees, Ramadhan was not too bad as barely any work gets done during Ramadhan short working hours, I hope that the upcoming months do not get too hectic.
