The year 2024 was a big year for Decree. In terms of content, Decree remains the biggest and most comprehensive database of English-translated Omani legislation ever created, and this year alone, we added more than 500 new and old legislative items to our catalogue, including essentially every single new royal decree and ministerial decision published in the Official Gazette in 2024.
Not only is our database the most comprehensive, but Decree is now unquestionably recognised by the hundreds of users paying for our service for providing the highest quality legislation translations available anywhere with an unmatched availability speed as the majority of items were uploaded to Decree within a matter of hours of the release of the Official Gazette.
Even though Decree is a paid service, the spillover benefits of our service cannot be disregarded. The success of Decree allows us to keep Qanoon a free resource of critical importance to the Omani legal system that hundreds of thousands of Omani people use to access the law. Decree’s own paid subscription is also only required to view the attachments of royal decrees, and not the royal decrees themselves, and given that 75% of royal decrees have no attachments that require translation, this means that 75% of our content is free and is in fact used by thousands of users in Oman who are not paying members of Decree.
We have set our goals on transforming the way legislation is accessed beyond Oman, and for this reason, earlier this year, we launched Qanoon Saudi and Decree Saudi. Even though it has only been a few months since we launched these two new websites, thousands of users in Saudi have already used our websites to locate Arabic and English texts of new Saudi legislation. Similar to our operation model in Oman, Qanoon Saudi will continue to remain as a free resource, while Decree Saudi will now be available through a paid subscription service starting from today.
We have also redefined the scope of what Decree offers in Oman to go beyond legislation and Intel by introducing Decree Risk, a solution we built based on the needs of our existing customer base who engage with Omani businesses and want to manage potential risks that arise from such engagements. By providing timely updates on liquidation, capital reduction, legal form transformation, and other pertinent incidents, Decree Risk has become an invaluable tool for our customers in the telecom and banking sectors who need to swiftly respond to risk incidents relating to their customers.
2025: What’s Next for Decree
Our vision for the year 2025 is to create new specific solutions by addressing specific challenges facing legal professionals in Oman beyond the need to have basic access to the law. Our first project in this area will target governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) professionals in Oman that will initially provide a curated collection of toolkits that streamline the process of complying with new Omani legislation, with a view of expanding the scope and nature of these toolkits as we develop this product in consultation with our users. Our toolkits will be developed in-house by our highly qualified team of Omani lawyers.
We have been lucky to work with some of the biggest names in the Omani legal industry to deliver public engagement activities and we are delighted to announce that DecreeCon is coming back this year on the 22nd of January with more than double the number of sessions of DecreeCon2024. If you are a member of Decree, make sure to mark your calendar to attend the biggest legal event in the country.
Thanks to Our Members
We would not be able to continue our mission without the support of our members, and we hope that we are able to continue to serve them by providing the best solutions for empowering society with legal knowledge.