About

Major legal advisers: Osborne Clarke, RPC, White & Case, Covington

What are the most important transactions, litigations or other major projects that you have been involved in during the last year?

The pandemic did not slow down product development and launches although my team’s work over the past year has been focused on supporting the business to build products and features to help users manage the Covid outbreak. In March 2020, as the outbreak began, we sprinted with the business teams to launch the coronavirus information center, a hub where users could (and still can) get real-time updates from trusted health authorities, find resources on how to keep themselves and their families healthy, and offer and receive help from others in their communities. It was the first content aggregation of its kind on the platform and we partnered with authoritative sources like the WHO to provide access to accurate and timely information. We supported multiple other features like new tools for groups admin to manage information, local alerts, a new community help product, search improvements and profile frames and stickers to raise vaccine awareness to name a few.

Following the success of the Covid Info Centre, we leveraged the product work to launch the Voting Information Center which provided official information from election authorities to help people prepare for the US 2020 Election. 140 million people visited the Voting Information Center, including more than 33 million people on Election Day, it was pretty thrilling for my team to watch after all their hard work! On top of this, significant work went into high profile launches like the rollout of FB Dating across the EU.

For me personally, much of the past year was consumed with advising on the Australian News Bargaining Code, which required Facebook and Google to pay for News content carried on their platforms. Since news publishers post content to Facebook voluntarily, we didn’t agree that we should have to pay for such content which led to several months of tough negotiations with publishers and with the Australian Government and culminated in us removing all news from FB in Australia until a compromise could be reached. It was a fascinating matter to work on, albeit the challenging timezone!

What were the main difficulties your company faced during the initial Covid lockdown?

Because we work so internationally, the teams at FB were already well set up for working at home – we all work on laptops and video calls were one of our core methods of communication pre-pandemic. The most noticeable change was the shift in working hours – people in the US were coming online much earlier without their long commute and working later as they tried to fit in homeschooling. The same was happening in the EU and other regions which meant that the email traffic and meeting times in EU became around the clock. It has been a challenging and exhausting year for everyone but FB has done a lot for its employees and their families.