Client profile: Carolyn Jameson, Skyscanner

Skyscanner is truly a business of the digital age. Officially launched in 2003, the travel search site, which provides instant online comparisons for over 1,000 airlines, as well as car hire and hotels, has grown to become the number-one flight search engine in Europe and now operates worldwide with offices in eight countries and travel searches in more than 30 languages.

For senior director and general counsel (GC) Carolyn Jameson, this was just one of the factors which encouraged her to join the team as its first legal head two years ago.

‘About four years ago [Skyscanner] started to experience really significant growth – it has been growing at over 100% year-on-year in revenue and headcount in recent years,’ says Jameson. ‘A couple of years ago it decided that the time had come for it to have a legal team. What stood out for me was the ability to start something from scratch – those opportunities don’t come up very much.’

Jameson first fell into the tech world when she joined Novell Software Company in 2002. With original aspirations to be a barrister, she studied at the Inns of Court School of Law before deciding to go in-house after being offered a pupillage in family law, which she ‘didn’t fancy really’.

‘I’d also done some work experience at Panasonic and I’d really enjoyed that – seeing a team ingrained in the business and seeing it applying law in real life,’ she says. Having been told that in-house work had huge potential and was ‘the way to go’, she decided to go straight in-house.

At Novell, Jameson spent nine months working on the sales side of the business to develop commercial awareness, at the same time as studying for her Qualified Lawyers Transfer Test at BPP Law School. ‘I have always found that sales experience invaluable and different to the route that quite a lot of lawyers would take. I also did my exam to qualify as a solicitor. At that point, the status of an in-house barrister was a bit unclear with the Bar Council, and so I thought to avoid any uncertainly I would qualify as a solicitor.’

After stints at software and database companies Cognos UK, Business Objects and Ingres, Jameson spent five years as head of legal at Wolfson Microelectronics before joining Edinburgh-based Skyscanner in June 2013.

Jameson now heads up a team of seven lawyers, with one lawyer in Singapore and another in China, but notes that the rapidly changing nature of the business makes forward planning for the legal department a constant challenge.

‘The company has changed so much that even in the time I’ve been there you have to adapt your plan quite often. I spend a lot of time thinking about the team structure, where it should go next and how it should grow. I feel very strongly that you need to be a team the business trusts so they can come to you. I recruited people who were very commercial in their outlook and didn’t come across as lawyers in the traditional sense.’

Jameson is just about to change the structure of her legal team again to a model other well-known internet companies use called ‘squadification’ – arranging cross-discipline teams around specific issues.

‘Companies like Spotify worked like this, and it has become quite well known,’ she says. ‘For instance, we might have a group who work on price accuracy as an issue and now my team will work alongside that squad. As another example, there is to be an “industry guru” squad because the legal department is also responsible for public affairs – wider industry issues that need to be monitored such as the Digital Single Market (DSM) agenda.’

The DSM strategy is a ‘Europe 2020’ initiative led by the European Commission, where the free movement of persons, services and capital is ensured and where individuals and businesses can access and exercise online activities under conditions of fair competition, with a high level of consumer and personal data protection, irrespective of their nationality or place of residence. The Commission has identified its completion as one of its ten political priorities and is welcomed by Jameson as a way to create more clarity in an industry in which regulation has yet to settle.

‘I spend a lot of time thinking about the team structure, where it should go next and how it should grow.’

‘The law is a bit grey so you will see cases that have been brought to court around Europe, but different conclusions have been reached. This obviously creates the problem of a lack of clarity. I’m sure that with all this focus on the DSM, people will start to look at some of these issues and try to create a bit more coherence across the marketplace.’

She continues: ‘It is an industry in which there is not a lot of existing regulation, but there is a lot of discussion around proposed regulation – whether there should be more regulation or issues that you need to monitor where existing law is being applied but doesn’t fit neatly. One example of this is around travel data, and what rights apply to the different sorts of data – whether it is captured by database rights or online terms and conditions.’

As for the regulation of online-based businesses, according to Jameson the US is generally more advanced than Europe and more structured in its approach, especially as regards consumer regulations.

‘In the US, the Department of Transportation (DoT) includes online travel within its remit so for that reason it tends to be more active,’ she comments. ‘In Europe, there’s overlap between a variety of bodies that might have an effect. It’s not quite as coherent. We don’t really have a specific responsible body in the same way, nor in Asia.’

One of the initiatives proposed by the DoT is the display of ancillary fare information, such as baggage fees and card charges, to provide customers with a more accurate picture of the cost of a flight. The team at Skyscanner was involved in a group that responded on behalf of metasearch companies and is backing the initiative, which could see some movement by the end of the year.

This is not the only time Skyscanner has lobbied a regulator on behalf of metasearch companies. Last year, it won an appeal to quash a decision made by the Competition & Markets Authority that enabled online travel agencies Booking.com and Expedia and the InterContinental Hotels Group to offer discounts to consumers joining a closed membership scheme. As this prevented discounts from being publicised outside the membership group, Skyscanner protested that this removed transparency and would mean that metasearch companies were no longer able to display the lowest available rates across the market.

‘Over time it would have meant that it would become harder for consumers to go to one place and compare, and that lack of transparency and pricing would have effectively reduced competition,’ argues Jameson. ‘We didn’t feel that metasearch had been considered in the market at that point and there had been confusion around the different roles of the metasearch sites and online travel agents. It was a novel situation in that we appealed a decision although we hadn’t been a party to the investigation. I believe that was the first time that had ever been done.’

Another personal highlight was Skyscanner’s purchase of Chinese metasearch company Youbibi in June 2014 – a clear indication of the acquisitive nature of a company that also acquired door-to-door travel site Zoombu in 2011 and Budapest-based mobile app developer Distinction towards the end of last year.

‘We decided to acquire a company because culturally China is so different. We didn’t want to discover further down the line that culturally we weren’t the best people to make the decisions.’

‘As a market, China is so huge in terms of the volume of people and the amount of travel – and this is only likely to increase in future,’ says Jameson. ‘We decided to acquire a company instead of setting up an office from scratch because culturally China is so different. We didn’t want to discover further down the line that culturally we weren’t the best people to make the decisions about how things should be done.’

Skyscanner may operate in 45 different markets around the world but Jameson prefers to rely on law firms with an office or base near to the company’s headquarters in Scotland. The company does not run a formal panel, but Jameson has established strong relationships with several firms.

DLA Piper, Pinsent Masons, Maclay Murray & Spens and Shepherd and Wedderburn are all regularly called upon, however when it comes to setting up shop in new jurisdictions, sometimes there is no alternative but to use a local firm. Although she works with DLA Piper, which covers the main markets, she still needs to use a local firm in places such as Bulgaria and China.

‘It is an additional hurdle,’ she says. ‘It tends to be quite small pieces of advice in particular jurisdictions and it can be quite hard to find somebody suitable to work with.’

She says she is not against a formal panel arrangement as it would simplify things from an administrative perspective but it is not top of her agenda and it is easy to see how something as permanent as a formal panel arrangement could be challenging for a business and an industry which is so in flux. A key challenge for Jameson and her legal team is simply keeping up with a company which is expanding so rapidly in an industry that the law is struggling to keep up with.

‘Looking to the future, a key challenge is the continued growth of Skyscanner and how my team adapt to that really,’ she says. ‘And to monitor regulation and to keep pace with an industry that is growing so fast and is the subject of such a high level of attention. Sometimes it means there isn’t a black and white answer to things and it may be a case of “be careful what you wish for”, but clarity would certainly be very helpful.’

kathryn.mccann@legalease.co.uk