About

‘Brian M. Dunn is the leading in-house counsel in the UAE on issues of legal tech, and he is on the cutting edge of introducing tech solutions to the general counsel’s office to improve productivity and boost efficiency. There is no other lawyer in the GCC that spends as much time thinking about what the general counsel’s office is going to look like in five to ten years. Brian doesn’t just think about the future; he is implementing it at Property Finder’. These words, from a nominating source, give an indication into the esteem into which Dunn is held by the Middle East in-house legal community. Responsible for building the legal department at Property Finder since early 2017, prior to which he was involved in private practice in Dubai and New York, Dunn considers his creation and establishment of the company’s legal team as a major career highlight, alongside his work on the process of the acquisition of one of Property Finder’s long-time competitors, JRD Group, and his work towards the closing of a US$120m investment round for the company. His achievement in creating and moulding the company’s legal team to its current level of proficiency is similarly impressive. ‘The team did not have a day-to-day presence before I started in the company, and still did not truly exist in the company consciousness until the legal function started to take on more and more responsibility within the business. Some of the ways in which I have changed the department during my time include turning the department from a purely legal function into a business partner, the development and implementation of automation solutions for standard form contracts and standard operating procedures for contracts and collections’. His impact on the company is borne out by the fact that he has been involved in creating finance, corporate governance, compliance and data protection policies for the group over the past two and a half years.