Brian Fix

Brian D. Fix is an international lawyer, now based in New York after spending much of his career overseas as a partner of two international law firms — Salans (a Paris-based firm now combined with Dentons) and Surrey & Morse, which merged into Jones Day.   He has principally represented foreign governments, multinational companies and international financial institutions in structuring and negotiating joint ventures, acquisitions, project finance, public-private partnerships (PPPs), and foreign direct investment both in emerging markets (particularly Africa and Eastern Europe) and in France.

A graduate of Columbia College and Columbia Law School and qualified to practice law both in New York and in France, he began his career in in Washington D.C. and practiced successively in Paris, the Middle East, New York, London, and again Paris.  He opened and initially managed Salans offices in Warsaw, Poland and Kyiv, Ukraine, in the early 1990s and handled the first six Ukrainian project financings for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.  Once those offices matured, and after several years as a French transactional lawyer, he has again concentrated on the African continent, where he had spent much of his early career, particularly in Senegal, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, and Kenya, advising clients on industrial, agro-business and tourism projects.  In the 1980s, he served as part of a UN mission examining the 50 largest government-owned companies in Kenya.  For the past three years, he served as the “PPP Hotline” for the Government of Senegal and for the three prior years, as legal advisor to the Office of the President of Sierra Leone, reviewing and renegotiating mining contracts.

Mr. Fix remains an adjunct professor at Sciences Po in Paris, teaching a masters’ seminar on the negotiation of international development projects in Africa. He works in both English and in French.