Privacy and Data Protection Issues

Protecting confidential information, such as trade secrets, personnel records and customer data, is a constantly evolving challenge for businesses, universities and other organizations.

Laws like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which applies to financial institutions, and HIPAA, which regulates health care information, put considerable pressure on companies to safeguard personally identifiable information. In addition, regulatory bodies like the Federal Trade Commission and state agencies have become more aggressive in asserting and enforcing privacy and data protection duties.

Companies are required to take steps to safeguard trade secrets to obtain legal trade secret protection. In addition, companies often have contractual obligations to protect confidential and trade secret information of customers, vendors and business partners.

Why our clients care about privacy and data protection

Every year, American companies lose billions of dollars to intellectual property theft. Those stolen trade secrets often find their way to competitors and foreign governments, who use them to undercut their rightful owner.

The loss of sensitive employee and customer information can be just as damaging. Lose trust and you lose your customer. The media and the public are paying increased attention to privacy breaches, meaning companies risk public embarrassment—not to mention potential litigation or prosecution—if they fail to safeguard private and confidential information. Courts are taking an increasingly dim view of companies that fail to take reasonable efforts to protect sensitive employee and customer data. 

But it’s not just about compliance and risk. A well-designed and well-run privacy and data protection program improves a company's bottom line. A culture of privacy and trade secret protection is simply good business. Business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies are seeing sales directly driven by their privacy reputation and performance.

How Womble Carlyle helps clients with privacy and data protection issues

In addition to providing privacy general counsel services, Womble Carlyle’s Privacy and Data Protection Team assists clients with managed privacy services. We work with clients to assess their privacy and data security obligations and current risk management programs and jointly develop a plan and controls to meet our clients’ needs and add synergistic value. This includes privacy and security assessments; drafting and reviewing policies and procedures; providing training to employees; managing privacy risks in contracts and mergers and acquisitions; and providing dedicated staffing for client privacy projects and ongoing privacy management. Our team does not operate in a vacuum—our goal is to help clients avoid pitfalls in privacy and data protection so they can focus on their core business.

The firm also assists clients regarding monitoring and affecting privacy and data protection legislation and regulations. Should the need arise, we aggressively represent our clients in litigation and in agency or law enforcement matters.