Publications by John (JD) Donboli
Two pieces on doing business in the Middle East, written in the mid-2000s for U.S. companies looking at the region.
Both articles date from the first years of my legal career and reflect the law and economies of that time; they are not current guidance and nothing here is legal advice. I keep them listed because they were real work, they are still cited, and they are the earliest version of a question I am still interested in: how a company from one country does business, carefully and legally, in another. Cabo360 is the same question pointed at Mexico.
Doing Business in the Middle East: A Primer for U.S. Companies
A practical primer written for American companies considering the region in the mid-2000s. It walks through the commercial, legal, and cultural ground a U.S. business had to cover before entering a Middle Eastern market: the forms a foreign business could take, the role of local partners and agents, how contracts, disputes, and intellectual property were handled, and the parts of Islamic commercial and financial law that shaped ordinary transactions. The aim was to give a general counsel or business owner a map of the questions to ask before the first trip, rather than country-by-country rules.
Doing Business in the Middle East: A Guide for U.S. Companies
The transcript of a San Diego panel on the same subject, held a year before the Cornell article. The discussion covers the practical experience of advising U.S. companies in the region, the legal and political conditions of the early 2000s, and the questions practitioners were hearing from clients at the time. It is a conversation rather than an article, and it reads that way.
Author profiles
Both works are listed on my Google Scholar profile and my ORCID record (0009-0002-4479-4458). The articles were published under “John H. Donboli” and “John Hooman Donboli”; they are the same person as the author of this site.
Current writing
What I write now is on the Writing page: the JDJDMBA series, notes on early-stage investing, and brand building. For what I do day to day, see Work.