About

Philip Merrils-Dearn joined the global social media company Twitter in April 2016. In his role as associate general counsel and EMEA head of legal, Merrils-Dearn is responsible for providing a full legal and commercial service for the company’s businesses in the region, which cover 80 countries. A current focus of his is simplifying and accelerating Twitter’s contracting cycle to support broader growth and business development initiatives into new uses for the Twitter platforms. The biggest change Merrils-Dearn has initiated within his legal team is ‘making sure that the team focuses on complex items and removes unnecessary work by introducing LPO services’. He says: ‘One thing GCs are asked to do is provide more with less. Some of the innovations I have deployed over the years have given real change to the way in-house lawyering is done, by taking away the low end work, enabling the complex work to stay in house and providing career development. This includes tool development and strategic deployment of LPO services’. Before joining Twitter, Merrils-Dearn spent nearly 15 years with Hewlett-Packard: ‘I took part in a variety of roles starting as a junior and working my way to senior roles in EMEA. I led significant worldwide projects including negotiating a deal with the Bank of Ireland, which at the time was the largest IT outsourcing agreement in Ireland in terms of revenue and number of transferring employees’. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of London in 1992 and 1993 respectively. Currently providing advice to Twitter’s executive management on local, EU, US and global issues, Merrils-Dearn will continue to play an integral role in advising Twitter’s business on the impacts of new EU legislation and the implications of Brexit in the foreseeable future.