Digital Risk Strategies

Archive for the ‘Law Firm’ Category

NJ Court Rules No Privacy Tort Exists for Location Tracking

Icon July 9, 2011 – 8:22 am

In what may be a case of first impression, the New Jersey Appellate Division ruled, on July 7, 2011, that the tort of invasion of privacy does not necessarily exist whenever a plaintiff alleges surreptitious location tracking by a defendant.  Specifically, the court ruled: We hold that the placement of a GPS device in plaintiff’s [...]



Law Firm Sues to Have Non-Lawyer Ownership

Icon May 20, 2011 – 7:59 am

On May 18, 2011, Jacoby & Meyers Law Offices LLP filed lawsuits challenging state professional rules in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut that prohibit non-lawyers from having an ownership interest in law firms.  The New York lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and alleges that Rule 5.4 of [...]



CNIL Goes Easy With Google Fine

Icon March 21, 2011 – 9:53 pm

On March 17, 2011, CNIL fined Google €100,000 for improperly gathering and storing data for its Street View application.   Founded over thirty years ago, CNIL is an independent administrative authority that protects the privacy and personal data of French citizens. Although this is the largest penalty ever awarded by CNIL, it certainly does not begin [...]



Plaintiffs’ Class Action Counsel Running on Empty: “Fear of ID Theft” and “Lost Time and Effort” Damages Theories Just Don’t Cut It

Icon January 31, 2011 – 6:10 pm

While some data breach victims will eventually sustain an ID theft, it is generally acknowledged that the vast majority will not.  Accordingly, the direct damages sustained by ID theft victims are not very helpful in a class action — there are just not enough plaintiffs.  Over the years, plaintiffs’ class action counsel have spent many [...]



NJ Supreme Court: Fired Employee Can Use Stolen Confidential Documents

Icon December 17, 2010 – 7:33 am

In a decision that might have significant ramifications in future discrimination and whistle-blower lawsuits, the New Jersey Supreme Court  ruled in Quinlan v. Curtiss-Wright Corp., No. A-51-09 (N.J. Sup. Ct. Dec. 2, 2010) that an employee who copied 1,800 of pages of documents that she came upon during the normal course of her work — many with [...]



The Red Flag Program Clarification Act of 2010 Passes House and Senate

Icon December 8, 2010 – 7:38 am

Looking to beat the end of the year enforcement deadline, the Senate (on November 30, 2010) and the House (on December 7, 2010) have now both voted to pass a law that would limit the scope of the FTC’s Red Flags regulations.  Although the ABA lawsuit seeking to exempt lawyers from the scope of these regulations is on [...]



Ponemon Institute: Lost Laptops Cost Billions

Icon December 3, 2010 – 7:10 am

The Ponemon Institute’s latest report, “The Billion Dollar Laptop Study,” shows that 329 organizations surveyed lost more than 86,000 laptops over the course of a year.  Based on these findings and an earlier survey that put the average cost of lost laptop data at $49,246, the total cost amounts to more than $2.1 billion or $6.4 million per organization. [...]



IW: CIOs See Smartphones As Data Breach Time Bomb

Icon November 24, 2010 – 7:05 am

As recently reported by InformationWeek, a study conducted by market researcher Ovum and the European Association for e-Identity and Security found that eight out of 10 CIOs believe using smartphones in the workplace increases their firm’s vulnerability to attack.  Although these CIOs rank data breaches as their top related security concern, half of the organizations acknowledge that they [...]



NLJ: Smaller Law Firms Have Digital Advantage

Icon November 19, 2010 – 7:37 am

In a recent National Law Journal article, Adrian Dayton argues that smaller law firms have been much better at jockeying for online positioning and expanding their digital footprint.  Driven by the ultimate goal of search engine optimization (SEO), these firms have been using blogs, FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn to get noticed in ways the largest firms are not.  As pointed out [...]



ABA: Law firms are Likely Targets for Attacks Seeking to Steal Information off Computer Systems

Icon November 2, 2010 – 7:37 am

According to a recent ABA Journal article, the global digital infrastructure is under siege and law firms are to some extent on the front lines given the vast amounts of sensitive data they process and maintain.  Bradford A. Bleier, unit chief to the Cyber National Security Section in the FBI’s Cyber Division, is quoted in [...]