About

John Lee assumed his current position as managing director of Macquarie Group’s infrastructure and real assets funds for Asia in 2008. A year after he joined he was deeply involved in establishing the Macquarie SBI infrastructure fund, a $1bn fund launched with State Bank of India (SBI) to assist infrastructure projects. This was Lee’s first experience of establishing a fund in-house, throwing him in at the deep end of structuring wholesale funds and balancing the relationship between investors and managers. Regulations surrounding the marketing and distribution of wholesale funds have tightened in recent years, but Lee has offset the challenge by devising internal systems to ensure that compliance across different regimes does not slow business. Prior to joining Macquarie, Lee worked in the projects and banking department of Freehills (now Herbert Smith Freehills) in Sydney from 2005 and at Linklaters in Hong Kong from 1996. This earlier role was Lee’s first significant introduction to the Asian market and gave him a good taste of the cultural dynamics that one must appreciate to become a skilled adviser. He advises other lawyers who may be interested in working in-house in the region to understand and accept what they don’t know. ‘You need to be flexible in providing internal legal advice [in the region] but knowing the boundaries to how flexible you can be is just as important. Knowing which areas of law you know and which you really don’t know is an important quality’.