In short: most legal AI checklists are written for buyers in New York or London. A firm in Riyadh, Dubai or Doha needs four more answers before the demo ends. Is the interface in Arabic? Is Sharia covered? Is the gazette current? Where are prompts processed? Ask each vendor in writing, check each answer against the vendor's own public pages, and run the same test on every tool on your list, ours included.
Why the usual checklist misses the Gulf
A standard legal AI evaluation asks about security reports, integrations, accuracy and price. Those questions matter, and our 45 red flags for vendor evaluation covers them. But they were written for markets where the working language is English, the legal system is common law, and the default cloud region is the one the buyer already sits in.
None of those three holds by default in the GCC. Arabic is the official language, and on the UAE's federal legislation portal the English texts note that the Arabic prevails if the two conflict. Most of the region's legal systems are codified civil law with Islamic Sharia named as a source of legislation. And where a prompt is processed is a question each firm's clients and regulators may ask. Four questions cover the gap.
1. Is the interface in Arabic?
Answering in Arabic is not the same as working in Arabic. Plenty of tools will translate a document or reply to an Arabic prompt. Fewer let an associate run the whole product in Arabic: menus, prompts, drafts and review, right to left, with numbered clauses and mixed Arabic and English text laid out correctly.
The difference shows up on day one. A team that has to switch to English to find a setting, or that drafts in a left-to-right editor and fixes the layout in Word afterwards, will stop using the tool for Arabic work. Then the firm is paying for a tool that covers half its matters.
- Ask: can every user switch the whole interface to Arabic, and is that on a public page?
- Ask: does drafting run right to left, including bilingual documents and numbered clauses?
- Ask: when you prompt in Arabic, is the answer written in Arabic or translated from an English draft?
- Test: give it a bilingual contract where the Arabic text prevails, and ask it to flag where the two versions differ.
2. Is Sharia covered?
In the Gulf, Sharia is not a niche practice area. It is written into the founding texts. Article 7 of the UAE Constitution says Islamic Sharia is a main source of legislation. Article 1 of Qatar's Constitution calls Islamic law the main source of its legislation. Article 2 of Kuwait's Constitution says Islamic law shall be a main source of legislation. Article 48 of Saudi Arabia's Basic Law of Governance tells the courts to apply the provisions of Islamic Sharia.
So Sharia questions turn up well beyond the family court: in inheritance and endowments, in Islamic finance, in how a contract term is read. A tool whose reasoning was built on common-law precedent and then localised will often answer in the wrong frame, citing cases where a code governs, or missing the rule that applies.
- Ask: are civil-law and Sharia-influenced systems the default, or a module added later?
- Ask: which GCC jurisdictions does the vendor name, on its own site, as covered?
- Test: ask an inheritance or personal-status question you already know the answer to, in the jurisdiction you practise in, and check every article it cites.
3. Is the gazette current?
Gulf law moves by gazette. A new statute has a gazette number, an issue date, an effective date and, later, amendments. An answer can cite a real article and still be wrong because it read last year's text.
One example from the official record: Saudi Arabia's official gazette, Umm Al-Qura, published a new Enforcement Law on 1 May 2026. Its Article 65 says it takes effect 180 days after publication and replaces the old Enforcement Law. By our count that is 28 October 2026. An answer quoting the new text as current law in September was early; an answer quoting the old text will be late from that date. Our post on primary sources in legal AI walks through this and two more cases.
- Ask: does research read the official gazettes and legislation portals, or commentary about them?
- Ask: does each answer show which version of a law it read, and its effective date?
- Ask: are amendments flagged, or folded silently into the answer?
- Test: ask about a law that changed in the last three months and check the answer against the official portal.
4. Where are prompts processed?
Every prompt a lawyer writes carries client facts. Where that prompt is processed and stored is a question clients and regulators can ask, and one data protection rules in the region speak to. In the DIFC, for example, Regulation 10 of the Data Protection Regulations covers personal data processed through autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, which includes AI. Our post on AI and client confidentiality covers the wider picture.
Most vendors publish a short list of hosting or processing regions on their security page. Read it. If the region you need is not on that list, the page has answered the question for you, whatever the sales deck says.
- Ask: which regions can process and store our data, and is a Middle East region on that list?
- Ask: is the region written into the contract, or only promised in a call?
- Ask: is private cloud or on-premise deployment available if a client requires it?
- Check: compare the answer with the vendor's own public security page, and keep a copy with the date you read it.
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The checklist on one page
| Question | Ask for | Quick test |
|---|---|---|
| Is the interface in Arabic? | The whole product in Arabic, right to left, on a public page | Run a bilingual contract where the Arabic prevails |
| Is Sharia covered? | Civil-law and Sharia-influenced systems as the default, GCC jurisdictions named | An inheritance or personal-status question you know |
| Is the gazette current? | Official gazettes as a source, version and effective date on each answer | A law changed in the last three months |
| Where are prompts processed? | A Middle East region, in the contract; private cloud or on-premise if needed | Read the vendor's public security page |
Put the four questions in your request for proposal, ask for written answers, and score each vendor on what it shows you rather than what it says.
How HAQQ answers the four
We would rather you checked than took our word, so here are our answers as they already appear on haqq.ai.
- Interface: HAQQ works in seven languages, English, Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese, with full right-to-left Arabic.
- Sharia: civil-law and Sharia-influenced systems are the baseline, not an add-on, with jurisdiction-aware answers across the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa.
- Gazette: research draws on statutes, case law and gazettes, with inline citations you can open, and recent amendments are surfaced rather than smoothed over.
- Processing: firms choose EU, US or Middle East hosting; where residency is a contract term it goes in the order form, and HAQQ also runs as private cloud or on-premise. Details are on our security page.
We also publish our MENA tests in full. In our Lebanese family endowment benchmark, nine AI systems answered one real Arabic client instruction, and every answer was scored article by article against the governing 1947 statute; HAQQ's current engine scored 83 out of 100. HAQQ Legal Benchmark, which we open-sourced in May 2026, tests whether a legal agent sticks to the law that governs a matter, across 16 tasks in six MENA jurisdictions.
Run the four tests on HAQQ as well. If an answer does not hold up on your own matters, that tells you more than any page we could write.
Key takeaways
- A generic legal AI checklist skips four questions that decide fit in the GCC.
- Working in Arabic means the whole interface in Arabic, right to left, not only translated answers.
- Sharia is written into the founding texts of GCC states, so a tool needs civil-law and Sharia-influenced reasoning by default.
- Gulf law moves by gazette: ask which version and effective date every answer read.
- Read each vendor's public list of processing regions, and get the region you need into the contract.
Sources and further reading
- UAE Constitution (1971, rev. 2009), Constitute Project
- Qatar Constitution (2003), Constitute Project
- Kuwait Constitution (1962, reinstated 1992), Constitute Project
- Saudi Arabia Basic Law of Governance (1992, rev. 2013), Constitute Project
- Saudi Enforcement Law, Umm Al-Qura
- Umm Al-Qura, official entry-into-force tracker
- DIFC Commissioner of Data Protection, Regulation 10
- HAQQ: Primary sources decide whether lawyers trust legal AI
- HAQQ: AI and client confidentiality
- HAQQ: 45 red flags when evaluating a legal AI vendor
