Selected work
Islamic P&I Club: modernizing an institution from its rulebook up
A Dubai-based marine liability insurer for shipowners and charterers
How INNOBASE is helping a Dubai-based marine liability insurer rebuild its Rules as a draft for legal review and sequence a transformation it has still to decide on.
The challenge
An established marine liability insurer based in Dubai provides protection and indemnity and related liability cover to shipowners and charterers. Its business rests on a single contract with those clients — the Rules — and on the documents and decisions that sit beneath it.
Those foundations had fallen behind the institution. The rulebook in force dated from 2013, and an internal attempt to update it in 2021 was never finished. At the same time the insurer’s leadership was already asking larger questions about its legal structure, its jurisdiction and its long-term positioning.
Three questions ran through everything that followed. What should a modern rulebook say, and how should it be structured so that underwriters, claims handlers, reinsurers and external counsel all read the same contract? Which decisions about legal form and governance have to be settled first, because everything else depends on them? And how should a small, specialist institution sequence operational and digital change, so that technology implements a sound foundation rather than covering an unfinished one?
Our approach
INNOBASE acted as transformation advisor and drafting partner. We researched, analysed, designed and drafted. We did not give legal advice, underwrite risk, act as broker, or sell a system. Every legal document we produced is framed as a draft for external counsel, and every strategic paper is framed for the insurer’s own decision.
The method matters more here than any single document. The analysis is grounded in the insurer’s own material rather than in generic market practice. It was corrected by the insurer’s own expert reviewer where the reviewer’s knowledge of the business was better than the documents showed. And the drafting is structured so that outside counsel can trace each policy choice back to the rule that gives it effect. Nothing here was meant to be adopted because we recommended it. It was meant to be decidable.
The result
What can be shown is concrete, and it is documentary rather than financial.
The insurer’s core contract now exists as one coherent, traceable draft — ninety-four rules with companion documents and a register linking every policy choice to the rule that carries it — written to replace a 2013 rulebook and an unfinished 2021 update and, as at September 2026, not yet in force. A brief now exists that puts sixteen specific questions to external counsel, so the legal review can be answered rather than reopened. The structural workstream has a first stage delivered. The correspondence tool is in development: one module has been verified against a single matter, and it is not in production.
One piece of evidence is worth naming on its own. The insurer’s own expert reviewer worked through the analysis and returned thirty-one comments, and those corrections were taken into the drafting. That is the clearest evidence in the engagement that the work was tested by someone with a direct stake in it being right.
What this page does not claim
No business outcome of this engagement has been measured, and this page claims none.
There is no before-and-after baseline for claims cost, processing time, error rate, premium income or member service, because none was captured. The rebuilt Rules are not in force. No regulatory approval, licence, rating or compliance status is claimed or implied. No software is in production use across the organization. There is no client endorsement or testimonial, and none is quoted here.
What this page records are outputs and their status. Where it says a document exists, the document exists. Where it says a decision is pending, the decision is pending.