While data breach incidents affecting the entertainment, retail, healthcare, and financial industries have garnered more attention in past years, the data breach spotlight recently shifted to law firms.

This shift was triggered by media coverage of the breach and leak of the Panama Papers, and by reports that, in 2015, hackers breached the networks

Last month, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner signed into law a number of amendments to the State’s Personal Information Protection Act (“PIPA”) that expand the definition of protected personal information and increase certain data breach notification requirements.  The amendments, highlighted below, take effect January 1, 2017.

Currently, “personal information” is limited to an individual’s first name

On March 24, 2016, Tennessee’s breach notification statute was amended when Governor Bill Haslam signed into law S.B. 2005.

Under the amendment, notification of a data breach must now be provided to any affected Tennessee resident within 45-days after discovery of the breach (absent a delay request from law enforcement).  Previously, and like the

In the face of seemingly daily news reports of company data breaches and the mounting legislative concern and efforts on both the state and federal level to enact laws safeguarding personal information maintained by companies, employers should be questioning whether they should implement privacy policies to address the protection of personal information they maintain on

In honor of Data Privacy Day, we provide the following “Top 10 for 2016.”  While the list is by no means exhaustive, it does provide some hot topics for organizations to consider in 2016.

  1. EU/U.S. Data Transfer (status of Safe Harbor).  On October 6, 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled

Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued draft guidance outlining important steps medical device manufacturers should take to address cybersecurity risks to keep patients safe and better protect the public health. The draft guidance, which details the agency’s recommendations for monitoring, identifying, and addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in medical devices after they have

Demonstrating its continued commitment to data security enforcement, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently announced Cox Communications Inc., the nation’s third largest cable operator, agreed to pay $595,000 to resolve an investigation into whether the company failed to properly protect its customers’ personal information.  The agreement ends the first data security enforcement action brought by

UPDATE:  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has reached a settlement with two telecom companies in connection with allegations the telecom companies violated the law regarding the privacy of phone customers’ personal information.

As we previously reported and discussed, in October 2014 the FCC initiated its first data security case against TerraCom, Inc. and