About

Felicity Smith started her career as a litigation lawyer in private practice, gaining experience across a wide range of types of litigation in both smaller firms and the Big 5 at A&L Goodbody. She moved in-house to Tesco Ireland in 2008, becoming the third lawyer to join that recently established team. She spent seven years at Tesco, and over that time extended her range of expertise into a much wider range of areas and responsibilities including employment law, data protection, consumer and advertising law, regulatory investigations, contracts, and compliance. Smith joined Airbnb in the autumn of 2015 to head up the Dublin Legal team that’s responsible for managing all legal matters relating to Airbnb Ireland, the company which provides the Airbnb platform to roughly two thirds of our global customers. Along with strengthening and deepening her experience in data protection and privacy laws globally, she identifies that working at Airbnb has given her, ‘exposure to a whole new range of areas including amongst others, tax law, regulatory matters, M&A due diligence and managing legal issues relating to the eCommerce Directive such as platform immunity’. Smith lead Airbnb’s GDPR compliance project for the legal department, ensuring Airbnb was well prepared for the May 2018 deadline, and continued to lead on Airbnb’s EMEA privacy work since then. She says that, ‘leading this project was a great learning experience in terms of collaborative, cross functional and cross time zone leadership. It was also something that really helped me hone my skills on translation of complex legal issues into understandable, actionable plans for the business, while also maintaining a bird’s eye view of our progress versus our deadline’. She also acted as the main legal advisor in respect of the launch of Airbnb Experiences in Ireland in 2017. This was her first experience of, as she says, ‘really being at the coal face of advising on a totally new way of offering and delivering a service’, in this case trips and experiences to locals and travelers to Ireland. She adds that, ‘this stretched and challenged my legal risk assessment skills in ways I hadn’t previously experienced but ultimately made me a better lawyer; much better equipped for managing the stresses of advising on novel and diverse areas in a hyper growth environment.’ Since Smith started at Airbnb she’s continued to drive focus on a process started before her time which the company calls “De-Lawyering.” This involves continuously looking for areas in which there are opportunities to empower and enable other teams to deal with commonly occurring legal issues through processes, workflows and template responses; enabling the company to extract lawyers out of the mix for run of the mill legal issues. In the words of a nominator, ‘many of the issues that Airbnb deal with are novel and unprecedented. This requires creative thinking on Smith’s part, which often has to take place within the constraints of national policy and regulations. Smith is innovative and proactive in her approach. She has a razor-sharp grasp on the entire business and is solutions-driven’.