About

‘Changes create opportunities, even during the most difficult of times’, says Christopher Buay when recalling his move to in-house lawyering after eight years in private practice as a litigation specialist. Three years in-house gave him a skillset that was noticed by Johnson Controls and led to him being given the opportunity to join. Since then, he has risen to the rank of legal director of building technologies and solutions for Southeast Asia and Australia and New Zealand, previously being in charge of litigation, commercial and compliance matters across Asia. His time with the company has seen him achieve a number of career high points. On the personal side, these include ‘being appointed a board member of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC, Singapore Chapter) since 2014, obtaining the ACC In-house Counsel Certified (ICC) accreditation in May 2018 and graduating from the Johnson Controls Leadership Programme in September 2018’. On the project side, Buay lists ‘being the global lead of the company’s Project Recovery Programme, which contributed US$136M in recoveries to the company’ as being particularly successful. He has had similar success in improving capabilities of the legal team and creating more efficient internal processes. ‘As well as developing the use of on-line input for the submission, tracking and review of legal requests by the business in different jurisdictions, I have introduced a multi-tiered legal and risk assessment triage for contracts, depending on contract value or risk triggers, that has improved the responsiveness of the legal team in handling every increasing numbers of contracts’.