Cross-border legal counsel. Twenty years of practice across Germany, the Gulf, and the common law world.
Steffen Feike read law at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, completing both his First and Second State Examinations with a focus on corporate, intellectual property, and competition law. He qualified as a Rechtsanwalt and began his career in commercial law in Dubai in 2005 at Rodl & Partner, advising European corporates on Gulf market entry. He later qualified as a Solicitor of England & Wales through Kaplan Law School and holds an active SRA practising certificate.
At Airbus Defence & Space, he became the first lawyer permanently seconded by the company to the Middle East, spending nearly seven years negotiating high-value contracts across the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Those transactions involved security systems, intelligence technology, sensors, and aircraft. He was promoted to Senior Legal Counsel and built Airbus's legal presence in the region from the ground up.
He then moved into technology, leading the legal function at Presight.ai, an AI and analytics company operating in the UAE's intelligence and government sector. He guided the company through its IPO on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, taking Presight to a market capitalisation of approximately $4 billion. Concurrently, as Legal Director at G42, he advised the Analytics division on commercial strategy, partnerships, and transactions across established and emerging markets.
Across those two decades, he has negotiated contracts in the defence, security, space, AI, cloud, and infrastructure sectors with a combined value exceeding $30 billion. The transactions range from government system integration programmes to technology platform agreements, consistently at the intersection of legal complexity, geopolitical sensitivity, and commercial consequence.
Most internationally mobile individuals have spent decades building wealth across jurisdictions. Few have built the legal architecture to match.
In 2024, he founded Autark Advisory FZ LLC, a RAKEZ-licensed law firm, to address that gap directly. He also advises, in a separate capacity, on matters at the intersection of applied AI, sovereign data, and export control in the defence and intelligence industry.
He holds a Certified Enterprise Risk Manager (CERM) designation from the Asia Risk Management Institute. His engagement with digital assets is practitioner-level: he has completed blockchain strategy programmes at both MIT Sloan School of Management and Oxford Said Business School, and advises on the legal dimensions of Bitcoin custody and digital asset architecture.
His practice is conducted primarily in English law. He holds a thorough working knowledge of German law, built through qualification as a Rechtsanwalt and years of advising German-connected clients and structures, but does not advise on German tax. Twenty years of continuous practice in the UAE have produced an equally grounded familiarity with UAE commercial law across onshore, free zone, DIFC, and ADGM frameworks.
The world's legal and financial infrastructure was built on assumptions that are no longer reliable. Residency is more contingent than it appears. Custody is more fragile. Inheritance more contested. And the systems designed to protect wealth are, for many, the primary source of risk.
A book about building structures that hold. Not tax schemes. Not offshore secrecy. Architecture that functions when governments change, currencies debase, and courts extend their reach across borders.
Drawing on two decades of cross-border advisory work at the intersection of European civil law and Gulf commercial reality, it offers a framework that is analytical, candid, and deliberately unsentimental.
// PUBLICATION DATE TO BE ANNOUNCED
REGISTER INTERESTAutark Advisory FZ LLC is a RAKEZ-licensed law firm advising internationally mobile families and asset owners on jurisdictional risk, structural resilience, and cross-border wealth architecture. The practice is grounded in English law, informed by twenty years of UAE commercial practice, and draws on a working knowledge of German law for clients whose structures or backgrounds intersect with German-speaking jurisdictions.