Data breaches and protecting corporate data are increasingly the issues keeping in-house lawyers awake at night, research shows.
More than a third (36%) of chief legal officers (CLOs) consider these issues of ‘extreme importance’, compared to only 19% in 2014, according to the annual Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) CLO survey.
Bitter experience may be driving the concern—more than one-quarter of respondents said their company had experienced a data breach in the past two years.
The survey also suggests the worries ‘may partly be attributed to the attention large-scale data breaches have received in the media.
‘In the past year, major breaches at Uber, Equifax, Gmail, Yahoo, and others have expanded knowledge how data breaches have occurred and how prepared companies were when theirs was discovered’. CLOs are therefore ‘thinking about risks when it comes to third-party vendors, big data storage, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, etc’.
The research, published last week, is based on a survey of nearly 1,300 chief legal officers in 48 countries.
