About

Team size: 35
Major law firms used: Baker McKenzie, Lewis Silkin, Osborne Clarke, RPC

‘Kenny is well known in the legal world and a true specialist in the digital market,’ comments Oliver Bray, partner and head of commercial at RPC. As associate GC for Facebook’s media products line, her job is unique for a number of reasons, not least the extremely fast-paced nature of the work, which requires her to move quickly with Facebook’s services as they evolve onto the market.

‘I need to be mindful of how products are received by the world and the reputational risks they pose to the company. We continue to fight fake news and misinformation on Facebook, and we recently announced a $300m investment in news programmes over the next three years to support local news providers to grow their online business models,’ she says. As she points out, 2018 was a tough year for Facebook following a sweep of privacy breach scandals and increased scrutiny on the organisation’s regulatory compliance.

The cross-global reach of Facebook’s services, Kenny adds, throws up continual regulatory challenges for a company that services some two billion users. ‘I do a lot of user-experience stuff to ensure Facebook’s media products are compliant with local market regulations and that users are protected,’ she says.

But Facebook has pioneered a lot of new concepts in the digital space since its birth in 2004, often leaving Kenny to navigate previously unexplored regulatory landscapes from scratch.

She was one of the first few lawyers Facebook hired in London when she joined the company three years ago. Before that, she was a solicitor in RPC’s commercial, intellectual property and technology team, and was previously legal counsel for The Financial Times and Google. Her team of around 20 are based in London but report into the US.

She spends a lot of her working day on video calls with her US colleagues, a method of communication she says is the norm at Facebook. And she thinks Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google have the potential to spark cultural changes in legal departments outside the tech world. ‘The move away from bums on seats in a legal office has been hugely apparent in recent years, but the profession as a whole still has so far to go. Lawyers in firms are the only people I still talk to at work on a telephone rather than via a video call,’ she comments.

The best advice Kenny has received is that tech-sector clients do not appreciate long pieces of legal advice. ‘I am always surprised by how many lawyers there still are in the City who can’t simplify their advice. Clients these days use law firms as partners or as an extension to the in-house team, but we need outside counsel to really understand how we work and the language we speak – the days of heavily caveated legal advice are long gone.’