New Data Breach, Privacy Bills in Congress

Richard Adhikari
One year after trying unsuccessfully to introduce legislation on data breaches and protection of individual privacy, California Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is trying again.
This week, she introduced Bills S.139, the Notification of Risk to Personal Data Act and S.141, the Social Security Number Misuse Prevention Act.
Bill S.139 would require federal agencies or businesses to [...]

Kill the Billable Hour? A British Response

As much as the legal sector experiences a change in momentum, such a change seems to be occurring now.
Last week, The Am Law Daily picked up on a piece penned by Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s Evan Chesler in the latest issue of Forbes magazine, entitled “Time to Kill the Billable Hour.” Cravath’s presiding partner, in [...]

A Mark to Market Rule for Lawsuits?

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has proposed a new standard for public disclosure of pending lawsuits. This raises interesting legal technology and management questions for general counsels.
Reporting Rights in the January 2009 issue of InsideCounsel reports on FASB Statements No. 5 and 141[R]. These now-delayed rules would lower
“the threshold for reporting the [...]

E-Discovery Trends in 2009 — New developments in e-discovery will affect enterprise general counsel and compliance officers, law firms serving corporate clients, and IT departments

By Christine Taylor, January 9, 2008, 12:10 PM
A few years ago, the Taneja Group coined the term “Information Classification and Management” (ICM) to describe the technology of locating and classifying data throughout the enterprise. ICM covered sub-technology sectors such as e-discovery, compliance, data security control, and data management. However, we saw the term “e-discovery” trump [...]

E-Discovery Requirements Are About to Hit Canadian Firms

As Canadian firms brace for new e-discovery rules, they can look to their U.S. counterparts for technology lessons.
By Anne Rawland Gabriel
Time is growing short for Canadian securities firms to prepare for the scheduled April enforcement of the new Canadian National Instrument 31-103 (NI 31-103), regulation that significantly expands record keeping requirements for electronic communications. [...]

Data breaches rose sharply in 2008, study says Most of the lost data was neither encrypted nor password-protected

By Jeremy Kirk

January 7, 2009 (IDG News Service)
More than 35 million data records were breached in 2008 in the U.S., a figure that underscores continuing difficulties in securing information, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC).
The majority of the lost data was neither encrypted nor protected by a password, according to the [...]

Networkers Beware: Fake LinkedIn profiles promise prurient pics, send patsies malware instead

Expect more attacks to come from social networking services, says security expert
By Gregg Keizer
Hackers have seeded LinkedIn Corp.’s business networking service with bogus celebrity profiles that link to malicious sites serving up attack code, a security researcher said today.
Unlike Twitter, which had nearly three-dozen legitimate accounts hijacked on Monday, LinkedIn was not compromised. Instead, criminals [...]

Obama Administration Could Mean More Compliance Regs

January 5, 2009
By Drew Robb

Just as accounting scandals earlier this decade led to new regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, last year’s global financial meltdown coupled with Democratic control of the White House and Congress seems like a recipe for a host of new compliance regulations — and thus more business for storage vendors [...]

Litigation: Lawsuits are only thing “up” on Wall Street in past year

From USA Today:

The worst bear market since the 1930s has left investors wanting to see Wall Street pay.  Investors filed 210 federal securities class-action lawsuits in 2008, up 19% from 176 in 2007, according to Stanford Law School’s Securities Class Action Clearinghouse (SCAC) and Cornerstone Research. Plaintiffs claim they’ve been wronged out of up to [...]

Judge OKs legal settlement for Mo. gov.’s e-mails

By DAVID A. LIEB
The Associated Press
A judge has approved a legal settlement that requires outgoing Gov. Matt Blunt to hand over thousands of e-mails to investigators, but leaves unresolved the question of whether Blunt’s office violated public records laws.
Under the deal, Blunt’s office must provide 60,000 pages of e-mail documents from the accounts of the [...]