The noisy building site outside my hotel window last week gave me direct experience of Dubai's steady revival from the economic crash of 2009. The record attendance at Legal Week's Corporate Counsel Forum Middle East and a very lively awards ceremony the following day added to a picture of a legal market that may not be booming, but is certainly finding its feet again after the devastating collapse in confidence following Dubai World's debt restructuring. 

At the awards, I was struck by the enthusiastic participation of the in-house legal teams who were keen to celebrate a busy year of achievements. The story Emirates Group's legal department told in their entry of a motivated team working hard to provide good advice and value for money for an expanding business was compelling. 

Meanwhile, former Clifford Chance lawyer Afshan Akhtar, who was hired by Aluminium Bahrain in 2011 to set up a legal department befitting of one of the Middle East's largest companies, was a deserving winner of the General Counsel of the Year award, with the impression of a community growing in maturity completed by the choice for the recipient of the achievement award. Angel Wesley, general counsel and corporate secretary at Al Dhabi Investment, has founded a charity that works to improve the quality of life of labourers in Abu Dhabi. 

There is an understanding within Dubai and the wider region that a key ingredient for a sustained revival from the downturn is greater legal certainty for investors. This has provided general counsel with the opportunity to grow stronger and more influential teams. 

And this trend is not exclusive to the Middle East. The importance of the emerging markets for GE, for example, was underlined when it based its non-US global operations, including the legal department, in Hong Kong. That means that GE's army of European in-house lawyers report into Hong Kong – which says a lot about the global giant's priorities. 

It is easy to fall into the trap of analysing the wave of law firm mergers and alliances the international legal market is currently experiencing, including the much talked about discussions between SJ Berwin and King & Wood Mallesons, from the point of view of the law firms. But these deals would not be happening if it wasn't for the parallel spread of good practice within in-house legal teams across the world.

It is not a given that large international law firms can best provide the quality of service leading in-house legal departments require. But the establishment of efficient internal processes within well-run company legal teams operating at a regional and global level clearly favours law firms with similar footprints, cultures and processes.