About

Reporting in to overall legal director Gill Meller, general manager – legal (operations and growth business) Brian Downie is responsible for MTR’s operations and growth legal department. The company’s legal requirements are split between three sections, with Downie’s operations and growth team taking on the lion’s share of legal work which, at a company as complex as MTR, translates as a diverse workload. Downie explains that his work deals with ‘employment, IP, IT, prosecutions, statutory compliance, property, corporate finance and projects issues’ across the jurisdictions that MTR operates in. His 32-strong team is therefore made up of legal professionals with impressive knowledge bases to draw from, and Downie is no exception. His successful private practice career as a corporate and projects specialist culminated as a partner with Simmons & Simmons before Downie decided to take a position in-house with Leighton Asia, India & Offshore as General Counsel, where he spent two years in a ‘complex business covering 14-15 countries with numerous subsidiary companies’ to oversee. Downie moved from this role to MTR in September 2014, when they had ‘a huge amount of projects and construction work on and, as well as my being a good fit for the company, they realised specialist expertise in this area was required’, with his experience in this area making him an ideal choice. Downie believes that, while the department was ‘extremely well run’ at MTR before he took over the role, his greatest contribution to his team’s work has come in ‘reshaping the department to meet the challenges of a growing and changing business’ and in hiring specialists to deal with the changing workload. Downie is mindful of the fact that the transport sector is ‘almost always political’, and that he has to work very closely with local governments on their projects. This is challenging, he explains, because ‘governments are always looking to do more with less public money’, with the result that each subsequent deal results in the need to improve our offering. Ameliorating this effect requires excellent communicative and consensus-building abilities and Downie believes these are some of the key traits that an in-house counsel should display. Downie explains that ‘relationships are everything, particularly for in-house work. There are multiple stakeholders, both internal and external, who can have diverse perspectives and objectives which must be taken into account. It is critical to have a direct and positive relationship with all stakeholders in order to understand their needs and help them to meet their objectives’.