About

After training at Mathesons and starting his legal career in private practice, Gareth Byrne moved in-house with a position at Bord Gais Energy, where he managed the sale of the company by the Irish state for €1.1bn to a consortium, one of the largest M&A transactions in Ireland in 2014. In 2017, Byrne moved to WhatsApp as the first placement of a senior lawyer outside of its Menlo Park headquarters in the US. Byrne leads the WhatsApp legal team in Europe and counsels the business on the portion of the company’s users who are based in Europe. He leads all aspects of legal compliance with a particular focus on privacy and corporate governance. On the privacy side, Byrne has championed WhatsApp’s European privacy compliance programmes and also leads engagement with European supervisory authorities. The privacy issues which Byrne deals with on a regular basis are frequently on the cutting edge of the technological and regulatory landscape. On the corporate governance side, he sits on the board of WhatsApp and counsels the business on all aspects of its day-to-day governance and operations. Over the last 18 months Byrne has led WhatsApp’s GDPR compliance programme, including regular engagement with the Irish Data Protection Commission and other EU regulators, and managed a number of regulatory investigations taken by EU regulators against WhatsApp and has built out a EMEA legal team of three lawyers, and two law enforcement analysts. Byrne appeared in front of the Article 29 Working Party (which consists of all 28 EU Data Protection Commissioners) where he represented WhatsApp in oral hearings into the investigation of WhatsApp and Facebook data sharing. He identifies that, ‘whilst this was a very challenging time for me personally and for WhatsApp, it was not lost on me that not many practising lawyers get the opportunity of representing their company in front of all 28 Data Protection Commissioners’. He has also represented WhatsApp at a formal hearing at the CNIL, the French Data Protection Regulator, investigating WhatsApp’s alleged breach of the EU Data Protection Directive, pre-GDPR. Byrne highlights that, ‘before I joined WhatsApp, the company had no employees outside of its headquarters. I have managed to make the company think and function on a global level now which has included changing our ways to conducting meetings and driven efficiencies in the way we carry out our day-to-day legal advice to our clients. This has manifested in WhatsApp hiring more lawyers, and other personnel, outside of headquarters with two additional lawyers in Dublin and lawyers due to start soon in India and Brazil’. In the words of a nominator, ‘Byrne is a thoughtful and perceptive lawyer. He draws on his significant experience of working in multi-jurisdictional multi-stakeholder teams to guide the European WhatsApp business. He frequently draws praise for being able to get to the bottom of technical issues quickly and for bring stakeholder along with him. Under his leadership, the Irish legal team has grown with a number of new key appointments’.