WindTalker Blog

At a recent meeting of lawyers at a local bar association, the topic of discussion was cyber and information security.

Sue Reisinger reported in Corporate Counsel that, “As Cyberattacks on Business Grow, General Counsel Are 'Thirsty' for More Details.” This is great news! When a profession is thirsty for details – for knowledge - solutions follow, and in the typhoon of cybercrime happening today, thirst for solutions is exactly what is needed.

Today, security is top of mind for many in the legal profession. The EU’s GDPR, now one-year-old, certainly grabbed our attention and California’s similar CPPA, set to take effect early next year, has increased awareness. While the news has extensively covered major data breaches, it is easy for lawyers, law firms, in-house counsel, and their staffs to dismiss exposure to those occurrences because we typically do not collect large volumes of data in our day-to-day practices.

In his 3/8/17 article, “Rising cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion by 2019…” Luke Irwin of IT Governance ominously wrote: “[We] found an astounding figure of 3.1 billion records leaked in 2016, conservatively. We also discovered an infiltration of law firms’ email worth $4 million stolen [and] data breaches anticipated to be at 2.1 trillion by 2019, in less than 2 years from now.”