Yasser Hashem, managing partner of Zaki Hashem: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Yasser Hashem (LinkedIn). Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Yasser Hashem and I’m currently the managing partner of Zaki Hashem, the oldest continuously operating law firm in Egypt. We were founded in 1953 by my father and celebrated 70 years last year. As of this year, we’ve shortened the name to Zaki Hashem, because everyone just says Zaki Hashem and because it’s apparently a trend internationally to shorten the name.

I think I wear two hats, one that I like more than the other. I’ll start with the one that I like. I’ve been practicing law for 35 years and started my career in corporate law. This grew into M&A and complex corporate transactions. Then came telecom. I was very much involved in telecom from the beginning — we’ve represented Vodafone Egypt since their inception, for example.

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While telecom has always been my passion, it became very routine and standard around ten years ago, which made us shift into technology. Now I’m leading the M&A, corporate, and telecom, media, and technology teams. From the corporate side, I am quite involved and passionate about restructuring and devising complex corporate transactions like mergers of multiple entities or split-ups of companies, or swapping shares of listed securities with non-listed securities. A lot of our transactions have become landmark deals.

I then started doing a lot of M&A, and I still oversee that department. We have maybe seven to eight partners who do M&A — we’re the largest group M&A team in Egypt by far. Each of these partners handle one or more transactions at a time, so at any one point we can manage at least 10 or 12 transactions simultaneously.

My second hat is the managing partner role. I manage the firm on a more or less daily basis. I’m trying to maintain the essence of the firm and uphold my father’s motto: we are a profession and not a business. We’ve seen law firms become businesses internationally — private equity invests in law firms now, and some firms are even listing shares. But we still consider this a profession and try to keep up those values.

I think we have a very positive, friendly environment at the firm that really doesn’t exist elsewhere. This has been confirmed to us by everybody who has either left and gone to another firm or who came from another firm. I do a lot of work to keep that alive, because it’s not easy.

The constant in my day is my early morning routine. I wake up at around eight or so and I typically start by reading and drinking a lot of liquids — no coffee, just water and tea. I’m addicted to a couple of papers, one government and one private. I don’t read them thoroughly, but I do go through them quite well. I then look at my phone and go through the international news. I follow economic news, markets, and political news internationally. This is also when I look at my emails and see all of Enterprise’s emails in my inbox.

I typically eat a huge breakfast, take a shower, get dressed, and leave around 10:30am. I like my mornings. I think the key to staying focused and organized is a good breakfast. I either go straight to the office or to a meeting, whatever time the meeting is, and then I have my coffee after I leave for the office.

Part of creating a nice environment at the firm is about catering to our people. We have a kitchen at the firm and serve healthy breakfasts and lunches. With all due respect to delivery, the food is an additional cost to our employees, and it’s also not as healthy. So when I have an early meeting and I don’t catch my breakfast at home, I compensate for it here.

A normal workday for me is typically 11 or 12 hours. I have meetings, I have calls, and I meet my colleagues and partners handling transactions. A lot of people want me to look over something or discuss a point here or there.

I never end my day before 11pm. I’ve worked long days since I was young. People wonder how I have the stamina, but when something is routine you can just do it without any issues. But recently, I’ve been growing a bit — I try not to miss out on events that I really used to pass on. I try to attend dinners and events that are interesting and allow me to leave a little bit earlier.

Being the managing partner of a large firm is a responsibility. It doesn’t allow me to just travel or go and do something that I like at any time. The balance in my life comes from my weekends, which I cherish. I rarely respond to business calls on the weekends.

What’s next for me? On a professional level, we are currently planning for our 75th anniversary by implementing some strategies that the executive committee and I are working on. We have big challenges with AI, and we’re really opening that door and looking at everything possible in that arena. We’re investing heavily in total upgrades of our systems. I can’t say too much now, but it will prepare us for another level of technology and work in the field.

We also want to make sure that we are always available in the new areas that are growing in Egypt. For example, the issuance of the new regulations on M&A will have a big impact on business going forward. Media is the next new area, and technology will obviously continue to grow. We’re also very big in capital markets — we have tons of startups that work in non-banking financial services and fintech companies that work under the auspices of the Financial Regulatory Authority and the Central Bank of Egypt. We’re very fortunate — we started with fintech very early and have been with Fawry since its inception, and were with e-Finance for its IPO.

On a personal level, I want to grow my plant nursery. I have a piece of land near Cairo, that I visit on the weekends, where I walk and grow plants. It’s something so trivial, but it cleanses your mind and allows you to become focused again after a very busy week. To me it’s heaven. I don’t exactly want it to become a business, but it has to try and finance at least some of its costs.

I’m also an extremely passionate art collector. I started very young and I have quite an important collection of modern Egyptian art. It’s becoming difficult because of the pricing now, as well as the fact that the market has a lot of unauthenticated — we can say — paintings.

The best advice I’ve ever received was from my father. My father was a very highly educated man — he spoke fluent Arabic, English, and French and was the first Egyptian to go to Harvard to do a PhD. He worked in the US in politics, representing Egypt at the United Nations, before coming back in 1953 to establish the firm. I was fortunate to overlap with him quite a lot.

He told me two things that I’ve never forgotten. First, maintain integrity in your work. This is the culture we’re trying to grow at the firm.

The second piece of advice? Keep the tax man happy. Don’t ever get in trouble with the tax man.

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