The Association of Corporate Counsel on Tuesday announced the launch of an Information Governance committee to help educate in-house lawyers about data management, marking the first new committee for the legal group in nearly five years.
The IG committee will be led by lawyers from Lockheed Martin, Occidental Petroleum, Physicians Insurance, Symantec and other companies and is planning a series of educational programs around data management.
Many corporate law departments manage data on a piecemeal basis, if at all, according to committee chair L. Shawn Cheadle, general counsel, military space at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company. The problem is that eDiscovery, cybersecurity, records retention, and various other data practices are all related, he said.
“Information governance is not one of these areas alone,” said Cheadle. “It’s not privacy, it’s not cybersecurtity, it’s not the EU law — it’s all of these things. Often we’re not really collaborating on them.”
It marks the first new committee at ACC since 2011 when a sports and entertainment committee was created.
Cheadle estimated he now spends 30 percent of his time working on Information Governance because data management touches so many issues: For instance, if Lockheed develops a relationship with a new supplier, he needs to look at that company’s cybersecurity. But he said his estimates were rough and that many companies track IG on a fragmentary basis.
“The challenge is we don’t track IG as a budget line item because it’s broken into all the different initiatives,” Cheadle said.
On Aug. 20, the IG committee will host a roundtable discussion, “Pulling Together the Information Governance Plan,” which will detail some of the practices a corporate law department should adopt.
The next two webinars, scheduled for September and October, will focus on the life cycle of data and how to mitigate “data sprawl.”
At the 2015 ACC Annual Meeting, to be held in Boston from Oct. 18 -21, the committee will make a joint presentation with the ACC Litigation Committee on cybersecurity.
Cheadle said that many law firms have been slow to adopt appropriate cybersecurity measures, such as hardening their firewall to eliminate vulnerabilities, and using encryption to protect sensitive emails. Encyrption is particularly critical, he remarked, “It’s absolutely unbelievable that law firms aren’t out on front of that technology.”