About

General counsel Gemma Neylon leads a team of five lawyers at OpenJaw Technologies, a market-leading travel retail technology development company based in Dublin which provides online and big data solutions and products to airline operators and travel companies around the world. In 2014, the legal team supported OpenJaw’s US$41.2m acquisition by Canadian company GuestLogix, which saw the OpenJaw legal team merge with GuestLogix’s legal department. Two years later in 2016, the legal team worked on OpenJaw’s acquisition by TravelSky Technology, a state-owned Chinese company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. This process included liaising with the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) in Ireland and working to integrate OpenJaw’s legal affairs seamlessly with those of TravelSky. With the resultant boost to its global business, the structure of the team has changed and the scale and complexity of OpenJaw’s legal work has swollen considerably. Since then, the team has successfully licensed OpenJaw software to several Chinese airlines including China United Airlines, Tibet Airlines, Hong Kong Airlines, Sichuan Airlines, Shenzhen Airlines, and has successfully incorporated new subsidiary companies in Dalian, China as well as Hong Kong. Neylon praises her team’s spirit and tenacity in light of all the new regulations and obligations coming through in the past few years. In particular, she names Georgina Murray, who joined OpenJaw in March 2018 as legal counsel, as having helped the company to reach full GDPR compliance. In addition to negotiating and updating each contract with customers, suppliers and third parties, GDPR training was rolled out to all staff members, who were given insight into the key changes of data protection law in the context of OpenJaw acting as both a data controller to its staff and a data processor to its airline customers. A multitude of new policies and procedures were drafted and Murray also collaborated with all departments across the company in order to identify the processes needed to ensure GDPR compliance. She also carried out in-depth data privacy impact assessments for each OpenJaw software product. Neylon says that, ‘GDPR was not only a paperwork exercise, but also a challenge in shifting the mind-sets of staff members. [Murray], as the legal department’s newest member, has not only helped change that mind-set but also introduced a privacy-focused corporate culture’.