What are some of the main projects you worked on over the past year?

As an organisation, we supported our finance team in raising, I think it was £6.2bn of financing capital. We continued with aircraft sale and leaseback transactions, and there has obviously been the work related to getting operations ramped back up.

In April, we launched a new partnership with a company called Sonata which provided a new way of reading our inflight retail product., which involved insourcing staff and setting up new partnership arrangements.

We launched new advertising and marketing materials, which had a really strong sustainability message and we announced our net zero by 2050. And of course, the team were heavily involved in advising on all of that, given the legal issues around sustainability marketing.

As was heavily reported, there were quite significant ecosystem issues with the whole of aviation, mainly related to lack of people in roles at various parts of the aviation journey, and easyJet was no exception to this. We were heavily involved with our recruitment teams, dealt with unions and supported the operational response to these issues.

All of that must have required a great deal of coordination with other teams at the company. How have you managed to build strong relationships with others at the easyJet?

I’ve been with EasyJet for eleven years, and we’ve been working on this constantly over that time; relationship-building has very much been a mantra to us. At all times, we remind ourselves that we are there to support and enable the business–we are not there to give a yes or no answer to something at the very end of the process.

Our team is there at the beginning of projects to help shape the end result. We make sure to do our best to get the outcome that the business wants and needs. Sometimes that involves having some quite tough conversations, but the fact that we always endeavour to do this means that our legal team and the individuals within it have a very good reputation in the business.

Also, we make sure our teams are set up so that people know who to speak to for a specific issue. As well as dividing along business areas, the senior lawyers can support across all areas. When colleagues come to our team, they get a similar experience whoever they speak to.

You’ve got a vision for the legal team going forward. Could you talk about that briefly?

We have a department called the General Counsel’s Office, which is wider than a traditional legal team. It has several different teams sitting inside it, including the digital safety team, company secretary team, regulatory and policy team legal team and claims handling team. The digital safety team is very high priority given the vast amounts of customer data we handle and how seriously we take data protection. By combining all these functions under one roof, we are looking to provide a one stop shop for business support.