Data Fiduciaries

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Law Firms and Legal Departments

The technical expertise behind your advice


Law firms and corporate legal departments are asked to advise on obligations that depend on technical facts: whether encryption was in place, whether access was controlled, whether a program was reasonable. We provide the assessment and the expert analysis behind that advice, for your clients and for your own firm.

The pressure

What brings this buyer to an independent advisor

Advice resting on technical facts

The legal question is settled by what the controls actually did, which nobody has measured.

Matters that need an expert

A dispute or an inquiry turns on control adequacy, incident causation, or standard practice.

The firm's own obligations

Outside counsel guidelines, client security audits, and professional obligations on confidentiality and technology competence.

What we assess

What an engagement examines

  • Controls measured requirement by requirement against the statute, regulation, or contract at issue.
  • Whether a program met the reasonable security standard a statute, regulation, or contract applies.
  • Incident causation, control adequacy, and industry standard practice, for a report or for testimony.
  • The technical achievability of the security commitments in a contract or data protection agreement.
  • The firm's own program against outside counsel guidelines and client security audits.

What changes

What is different afterwards

  • Advice rests on measured facts rather than on a client's description of its own controls.
  • A regulator's technical questions are answered accurately and on the record.
  • Engagement terms, communications, and deliverables are structured so counsel can establish and maintain privilege.
  • The firm can answer a client security audit without assembling the answer from scratch.

Practices

Most often engaged

Regulatory and Legal Compliance

Technical assessment behind privacy, healthcare, financial, and government obligations, often under counsel.

View practice

Cyber Risk and Maturity

Measure maturity against NIST CSF or CIS, quantify exposure in dollars, and know what to fix first.

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Product and Application Security

Find what an attacker would find in your product, your APIs, and your cloud, before a customer's security review does.

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Third-Party Risk and M&A

Judge the security of a vendor, a target, or a portfolio company before the commitment is made.

View practice

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Can engagements be structured to support privilege?

Yes. When counsel retains us and directs the work to support legal advice, we structure engagement terms, communications, and deliverables to support attorney-client privilege and work product protection, which counsel establishes and maintains.

How do you handle conflicts?

Every engagement is conflict-checked at intake, and expert engagements are maintained separately from advisory relationships. Both the firm and the prospective client retain the right to decline an engagement.

Start with a confidential conversation

Thirty minutes on where your program stands, what is being asked of it, and what would have to be true for the answer to hold up.