Mohammed Ashbah
Legal Consultant
Commercial · PPP
Legal Tech
Mohammed Ashbah is a legal consultant, partner and Chief Executive Officer of THAT. His practice combines legal advisory work and legal management for organisations, with experience in contracts, administrative cases, governance, privatisation and public-private partnerships. He works with government bodies and private organisations on legal studies, contractual relationships and the legal preparations needed to implement projects and decisions.
Professional background
His government and regulatory work includes legal studies and advice, contributions to legislation, and the development of organisational arrangements into formal regulations. He has prepared policies and procedures, developed governance models and worked on their implementation for different organisations. He also prepares training workshops to help teams understand these documents and apply them in their day-to-day work.
His contract work covers preparation, review and detailed drafting of contracts and agreements, including framework agreements and memoranda of understanding. This spans relationships between government bodies, their partnerships and contracts with the private sector, and agreements between private organisations. Examples include service-level agreements between the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture and the National Agricultural Services Company, and government agreements with regional and international research centres.
On agricultural services privatisation, he led the legal workstream within a multidisciplinary advisory team, coordinating with Strategy&, KPMG and Korn Ferry. The work addressed preparations for transferring operations, technology and the workforce to the operating entity, together with the legal framework supporting that transfer. The project connected legal work with its operational, technical and workforce requirements.
He also led the legal workstream on Weqaya’s transformation into the Public Health Authority. His work included supporting Cabinet approval requirements, developing the cost-effectiveness case and preparing the legal path for private-sector participation. This forms part of his experience in government transformation and projects with interrelated regulatory, financial and operational requirements.
His experience also includes administrative cases and civil advisory matters. This aspect of his practice draws on his work with government bodies, contracts and regulatory frameworks, and their effect on the parties’ legal positions. His advisory approach focuses on explaining the issue, the available options and their implications so that clients can make decisions suited to their work.
In legal management, he has designed standards for evaluating the quality of legal work and developed a model for large legal projects that defines scope, responsibilities and review criteria. He brings this experience to organising ongoing legal support for organisations, connecting contract review, advice and matter follow-up with management needs and decisions.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in Sharia with honours from Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University, Saudi professional accreditation for legal practitioners and a train-the-trainer qualification. He is pursuing an LL.M. through the University of London’s Queen Mary programme. His published contributions include ICLG cybersecurity and employment laws in 2021 and Saudi foreign investment law in 2024, alongside his interest in training and professional knowledge.
