GDPR Featured Navigating Regulatory Enforcement: Tech Companies in the Government's Watchful Eye If you work at a "regular" tech company and you're warning your clients of fines that are "up to 4% of annual revenue" for GDPR violations, you're misleading them.
CEO Advice Being an Exceptional GC/Head of Legal To excel as a General Counsel or Head of Legal, one must be good at six things: 1. Lawyering 2. People management 3. Project management 4. Prioritizing (understanding the negative expected value of various issues and acting accordingly) 5. Building scale 6. Understanding the business Much of this work is
Legal Teaming Writing Excellent Legal Advice Clients are desperate for excellent written legal advice. The clearer the advice, the easier their job is. It's important, but it isn't easy. Here, I'll provide some recommendations about how to do it. Caveat: Reading about writing is of limited value. So, my primary
Legal Teaming A Template for a Legal Sub-Function Overview and Development Plan Last updated: [date] Goals * Deliver timely, excellent, delightful advice; * Deliver timely, excellent, delightful work product; and * Create an efficient legal sub-function to operate at scale. Areas of Ownership * Client: [Sub-Function] owns the relationship between Legal and [name of internal client (e.g., Product, Comms, Marketing Analytics, etc.)] Skills Development Skill
FTC Act Amazon Snuck Promoted Products Into Its Baby Registries: Lessons for In-House Lawyers Ed note: I wrote this in 2019 and published it to my earlier blog. It's still relevant, so I'm reposting it here. From a WSJ article [https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-parents-complain-amazon-ads-are-deceptive-1543417201] titled “New Parents Complain Amazon Baby-Registry Ads Are Deceptive”: > Kima Nieves recently received
Privacy Privacy Harms: Don’t Forget That Not Everyone Agrees About What’s Creepy Ed note: I wrote this in 2018 and published it to an earlier version of this blog. The content is still relevant, so I'm reposting it here. tl;dr Every Product Counsel has her own perspective about what constitutes a concerning and creepy privacy action. That’s fine,
Privacy Privacy Harms: An Overview (or, Why We Won't Have Broad U.S. Privacy Regulations Anytime Soon) Ed note: I wrote this in 2018 and published it to an earlier version of this blog. The content is still relevant, so I'm reposting it here. tl;dr People have drastically different sensitivities about privacy. Some believe that only those acts that cause some real-world negative consequences,
Legal Teaming Viewing Setbacks As Opportunities tl;dr * Viewing setbacks as opportunities makes you happier and helps you grow as a lawyer. * If you can’t adopt a setbacks-as-opportunity mindset, it’s worth considering why; you may not be viewing “growth” as a key part of your role. * As a leader, adopting a setbacks-as-opportunities mindset will
Legal Teaming Reasons to Write About What You Do Paul Graham, the famous co-founder of YCombinator, advocates for writing about the things you know. [http://www.paulgraham.com/words.html] I agree with that advice. Here, I want to emphasize and expand upon some of his points for those in in-house legal roles. Writing Helps You Figure Things Out
Legal Teaming Always Give a (Good) Reason tl;dr Whenever you ask for something, giving a reason will: 1. get you better responses; 2. reduce people's feelings of being told what to do; 3. teach your clients to help themselves next time; and 4. allow you to check your work. Whenever I ask for something–
Legal Teaming Running a Great Legal Sub-Function A great legal sub-function should have: 1. The right goals, 2. People on the team with a set of key skills, 3. The infrastructure to operate at scale, and 4. Explicit expectations about what to escalate and how quickly to respond. This post outlines my current best thinking on these
Contracts MVPing your Legal Terms and Policies Knowing what customer-facing documentation you’ll need at various stages of your startup’s evolution can both help you prepare for growth and be choosy about when to invest in costly legal documentation.
FTC Act Create a Written Information Security Program, Please If you’re running a tech company, you almost certainly have to implement “reasonable security measures." The best way to show that you've done that is by creating a written information security program (WISP).
Privacy All the Privacy Scandals in One Place When you're thinking through a privacy issue, it's helpful to look at the relevant precedent. But, it's not so easy to find—some of it is in FTC consent decrees, some of it is in class action lawsuits, and some of it is in press stories that, for one reason or another, never turned into litigation.
Privacy Featured Counseling Privacy Issues and Expectations: Four Questions and a Framework It sucks to botch privacy issues. It feels professionally bad (like, how did I not see that coming!?) and people—Twitter, the press, users, and, in extreme cases, regulators and plaintiffs’ attorneys—won’t let you forget it.
CEO Advice Featured Some Thoughts on Creating a Successful Legal Team A Legal team is unlike almost any of your others: Instead of building or improving something, it’s goal is to address low-probability, high-impact issues . . . .
Is Your Lawyer Any Good? At the absolute minimum, your counsel should be able to concisely tell you what rules apply to your situation and, using these rules, tell you whether the situation you’ve described falls within it.
Privacy Featured Internet Law in Ten Minutes A non-lawyer tech exec friend asked for a doc to help his team look out for legal issues. This is what I came up with.
GDPR Something Else to Worry About: The Death of Privacy Shield Perhaps the GDPR isn’t really about protecting privacy. I mean, from an Internet user's perspective, not much has changed since its inception. Companies still collect and use personal data in all sorts of ways. Internet users (EU-based and otherwise) still get retargeted with Adidas ads . . .
How to Review Marketing Content tl;dr Reviewing advertising and marketing materials is often straightforward buuuuttttt it can be easy to overlook legal issues. One solution: A checklist. This post provides a checklist that you can give to your marketing team or use yourself.
GDPR Featured Who's Asking? Defining “Personal Data” Under the GDPR. Because the GDPR only applies to “personal data”, knowing whether information qualifies as such is critical. The GDPR doesn’t make this easy. The crux of the problem is this: whether data qualifies as personal information depends entirely on who’s asking—that is . . .
Contracts How to Counsel an API Launch—6 Best Practices Disclaimer: Reading legal articles on the Internet and naively applying it to your situation would be silly. What follows isn't legal advice, it's general legal information. If you aren't an attorney, consult one. tl;dr Before launching a new API to your service, you
GDPR Featured GDPR Compliance in Four Easy(ish) Steps If your job is to implement the GDPR, let me start by saying . . . I'm sorry. I don't know if you pissed off someone powerful, or if you just made poor career choices, but here you are.
Security New Chrome Sign-in Fears are Overblown A feature update that would be a non-story for almost every tech company can turn into a massive headache for Google. So it goes with the new Chrome auto-sign in feature: > A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now
FTC Act Why Sears Holdings is a critical FTC consent decree The Sears consent decree dispels the notion, still common among some clients and some attorneys, that a privacy policy disclosure is a cure-all. Sears released a consumer research app that paid consumers $10 to join an “online community” of Sears Holding
