Legal Advisory · Morocco
Legal advisory for foreign companies entering Morocco
Independent legal counsel for companies establishing or expanding operations in Morocco — from choosing a corporate form and clearing investment formalities to meeting Moroccan data protection obligations and understanding how European technology regulation reaches your Moroccan entity.
Scope. This is an advisory practice: structuring, compliance, contracts, and regulatory guidance.
Areas of work
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01 Market entry & foreign investment
Choosing how to enter — subsidiary, branch, or representative office — and what that choice commits you to. Guidance through the investment framework introduced by the 2022 Investment Charter, dealings with the Regional Investment Centre (CRI), foreign exchange formalities with the Office des Changes, and whether a status such as Casablanca Finance City fits your operation.
Loi-cadre 03-22 (charte de l’investissement) · dahir 1-22-76 -
02 Corporate & commercial
Formation and governance of Moroccan companies, principally the SARL and the SA, and the trade-offs between them for a foreign parent. Shareholder arrangements, management powers, board formalities, and commercial contracts governed by Moroccan law — including the conversion of bearer shares to registered shares required of sociétés anonymes since 2023.
Loi 5-96 (SARL) · loi 17-95 (SA) · loi 96-21 -
03 Data protection & CNDP
Moroccan personal data law applies to processing carried out in Morocco, including by a local subsidiary of a foreign group. Mapping what you process, handling the declaration and authorisation formalities before the CNDP, and reconciling a group-wide GDPR programme with Moroccan requirements — they overlap, but they are not the same instrument and compliance with one does not discharge the other.
Loi 09-08 · dahir 1-09-15 du 18 février 2009 -
04 AI governance & technology regulation
Where technology regulation drafted elsewhere lands on operations here. If you build or deploy AI systems from Morocco for European users, or run Moroccan engineering for a European product, the EU AI Act may reach you regardless of where your servers sit. Classifying systems, allocating provider and deployer duties across a group, and building governance that survives an audit. This is also my research field.
EU AI Act · extraterritorial reach · cross-border governance
How I work
Most engagements begin with a scoping conversation, at no charge, to establish whether your question is actually one I should answer. If it is not, I would rather tell you in the first call than in the first invoice.
I work in English, French, and Arabic, which matters more than it sounds: Moroccan statutes and administrative practice run in French and Arabic, while your board, your investors, and your group counsel work in English. A large part of the value here is carrying meaning accurately across that gap rather than handing you a translation and wishing you luck.
I am a juriste. In practice this means I advise, structure, draft, and guide you through regulators, but I do not represent you in court. For foreign clients this is usually the right shape: the overwhelming majority of what a company entering Morocco needs is advisory, and for the rest you want a specialist litigator, not a generalist who does a little of both.
Background
I am a legal counsel and researcher working where technology, law, and business meet. I am completing a doctorate in international law at Université Hassan II de Casablanca, where I also read law as an undergraduate.
My postgraduate training is European as much as Moroccan: an LL.M. in International and European Trade and Investment Law from the University of Szeged in Hungary, a Master 2 in business law from Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, and a master’s in business law from Université Mundiapolis in Casablanca. That combination is the substance of the offer rather than decoration on it: the questions foreign companies bring me sit precisely where European regulation meets Moroccan practice, and I was trained on both sides of that seam.
My research centres on AI governance and the global reach of technology regulation, and is published on Google Scholar. I am the founder and editor-in-chief of the Moroccan Law Review, where I write on how Moroccan law is structured and where its texts come from.
Get in touch
Scoping conversations are free and without obligation
Contact meThe material on this page is general information about Moroccan law, not legal advice, and does not create a client relationship. Statutes and administrative practice change; nothing here should be relied on without advice on your own facts.