Before Brian Salter set foot in a law firm, before he was wading through company regulations or weighing the value of annual general meetings, he was a student of archaeology at Australian National University.

“You could go almost anywhere back then and dig up ancient archaeological remains,” he says.

Brian was studying at ANU when the 40,000-year-old human remains known as Mungo Man were found. In the midst of the Aboriginal rights movement, the discovery doubled the known length of Aboriginal history in Australia.

“It was very exciting to go out to Mungo and see it,” he recalls, describing the fertility of the land and river systems at the time.

Growing up in the Canberra suburb of Griffith, Brian enjoyed a simple life. He got around on a bicycle and fished trout out of Lake Burley Griffin with a bit of bread on a line.

“It was a wonderful place to grow up – but you outgrow a city,” he says. In 1981, when he had finished his arts/law degree, he packed up his EK Holden and drove up the Hume Highway to Sydney.

Transformations

Brian soon arrived at the couple of levels of Australia Square that was home to Clayton Utz, just as the firm was starting its growth spurt.

“When I started there were 12 partners, when I left there were 220,” he says.

Like many graduate lawyers, he found those early years daunting.

“I really wanted to do managed investments; I did my honours on prescribed interest ... and [on rotation] the firm put me in banking and finance on a promise that one day I’d return to the corporate team to do managed investments.”

The firm never honoured that promise, says Brian, so he ended up shadowing partner Tony Gregg with clients News Corp and Macquarie Bank.

Fuelled by enormous borrowing in the early 1980s, Rupert Murdoch was buying London’s The Times and The Sunday Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and a stake in Twentieth Century Fox, among other entities.

“We’d work until late at night and fax our work off… a full 24-hour cycle through London and New York. It was very exciting for a young lawyer,” Brian says.

He took a year off to do his masters degree before returning to work with Tony Gregg on PUMA, Macquarie’s mortgage securitisation program.

Brian credits the friends he made during this time – especially former Macquarie Group head of banking and securitisation, Tony Gill, and ASIC’s Greg Medcraft (then Société Générale’s global head of securitisation) – with helping him evolve into a structured finance lawyer with an enviable securitisation practice across Australia.

A new challenge

After 25 years at Clutz, including in executive and management roles, Brian was searching for new challenges that he couldn’t find inside a law firm.
“I think that’s a familiar journey a lot of partners go on,” he says.

Going in-house represented a new way of thinking: business goals were suddenly top priority. Juggling this commercial focus with sound legal advice can be a challenge for in-house lawyers.

“Some say we can’t be independent; I just don’t agree with that,” Brian says.

With a sufficiently strong culture that recognises the value of dispassionate advice and brand trust in the marketplace, Brian says conflict issues can be dealt with.
“I say to the business, ‘that’s actually what you want us to do’,” he explains, admitting there is a need to “talk the talk” and be innovative in approach.

It’s his job to leverage the strength of the legal team and ensure it interacts well with the business.

“You see what their paying point is and it’s a really major issue from [the company] perspective. I was really pleased that, with one particular legal solution, they’ll be able to improve cash flow by $350 million,” he says.

Connection to country

When asked how he winds down from the pressure and pace of his role, Brian reflects on family life.

His Longueville home, where he lives with his “long-suffering” wife Brigit, is littered with three boys’ footy boots and study notes. The family’s last holiday was to Tokyo.

This year they will travel to India, where Brian hopes to gain insight into his ancestry in the old summer capital of British India, Simla.

His parents, both economists, came to Australia when India became independent in 1948, but they took Brian back for a few years when he was a child.

“I had lots of memories of the poverty and overcrowding and overwhelming attack on your senses that represents India,” he says.

Many professionals look to explore their creative side later in life. Brian has a hankering to understand the past and explore places a far cry from the halls of Australia’s biggest banks and law firms.

“I’d love to go and see some of the great cave paintings in Arnhem Land,” he says.

For now, though, he has a job to do.