Data privacy is one of the most important topics facing businesses today. The collection, storage, use, and transfer of individual personally identifiable information is subject to an ever-growing body of laws and regulations across the globe, and with the amount of business being conducted online, engaging in these activities is easier than it ever has been before.
With the passage of every new data privacy law, like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect in May 2018 and new regulations in Australia taking effect this month, both your regulatory risks and the need to be educated about your responsibilities are growing by the day. The consequences for non-compliance can be severe. In the case of the GDPR, fines are the greater of $20 million Euro or 4% of your annual global revenue. Additional risks of non-compliance include government-imposed civil and criminal sanctions, as well as damage to your organization’s reputation. Activities as simple as marketing across borders qualify you as a global business under the law. You need a reliable source where you can determine which laws apply to you and ensure that you’re complying with them.
Enter Data Privacy Advisor. Recently launched by Thomson Reuters, Data Privacy Advisor was created by data privacy professionals for data privacy professionals. Thomson Reuters worked closely with a team of specialists in the area to create a product specifically for people who handle data privacy issues every day. They’ve combined the subject matter expertise of their Practical Law editors with the innovation of Thomson Reuters’s Center for Cognitive Computing and IBM Watson to provide unrivaled legal know-how and question answering capabilities. The result is a global product that helps you seamlessly navigate the complicated data privacy landscape with your team around the world.
Be In The Know
Keeping abreast of what’s happening in your home jurisdiction isn’t enough — you need to know what is happening with data privacy issues worldwide. Data Privacy Advisor provides you with that knowledge, curated specifically for data privacy professionals.
The Top News and Expert Analysis widget presents four of the top data privacy news articles of the day, chosen by experts and updated twice daily. Click on an article, and the text is searchable. You can even make and save annotations at the top of the document or within the text, which you can folder and share with your colleagues across the globe. Think of it as a modern version of pen-and-paper note-taking.
If you still want more, the More News tab has you covered with reliable information. The experts at Thomson Reuters have vetted a list of approximately 850 law firm and journalistic data privacy blogs to give you the most useful, expert-driven, and trustworthy resources out there. You can run searches and create email alerts set to your preferred parameters and frequency, so you never have to run the same search twice. Now there’s no excuse for not knowing the latest data privacy news.
Find Important Documents Fast
Being up on current events is important, but sometimes you want the actual statutes and regulations. The Top Data Privacy Documents widget puts key documents at your fingertips, no searching required, to help kickstart your research.
Data Privacy Advisor covers nearly 80 countries and counting, and in some instances, you can drill down further to the state, territory, or province level. Better yet, they’re adding additional content all the time. All the relevant available content for a given jurisdiction is amassed in one place, translated to English (though you can access the native documents if you want them).
Trusted Practical Law Know-How
Thomson Reuters brings the renowned practical know-how of Practical Law to Data Privacy Advisor with a dedicated Practical Law widget. Here, you can find all the resources you’ve come to expect from Practical Law, including toolkits, checklists, templates, and standard documents and clauses, all curated by former practitioners with global practice experience in the area of data privacy law. As always, the content is constantly updated to reflect the most recent law. You’ll also find contributions from external experts in the field.
The widget conveniently lets you filter content by jurisdiction. There’s also a handy Q&A comparison feature that runs top questions written and researched by the Practical Law team across the jurisdictions you choose, either on a 50-state or country-to-country level.
Simply select your jurisdictions and questions, and it generates a report that compares the relevant law between the selected jurisdictions. You can even folder the comparison and add jurisdictions later if your scope expands.
Artificial Intelligence To Make You Smarter
Watson’s not just for Jeopardy! any more. You, too, can interact with the famous AI system to enhance your data privacy research. Thomson Reuters joined forces with IBM Watson to create an Ask Watson a Question feature in Data Privacy Advisor. Simply type in a plain language question, select your jurisdictions, and wait for Watson to pull out a sentence-level answer from the top three documents in each content type. Click into the results, and you’ll see the sentence Watson pulled highlighted, giving you its context within the whole document.
And like any good AI, Ask Watson a Question feature gets smarter as more people use it.
Ask Watson a Question also offers a Related Concepts feature, which visually presents topics possibly related to your question.
These are concepts that don’t necessarily show up in your results, but Data Privacy Advisor’s algorithms have identified them as potentially related to your area of interest. It’s hard to imagine a better way to round out your research and make sure you’ve covered topics you didn’t even realize might be relevant.
The Bottom Line
Data Privacy Advisor exists as a stand-alone product, unconnected to Westlaw or Practical Law. It was designed to be its own global tool that provides the content and functionality you need to easily do your job in collaboration with colleagues worldwide. There aren’t different versions or add-ons — a single price per user, per year gives you all the features, whether you’re in New York or Japan. You also get toll free support in the U.S., Canada, and the UK, available 24/7 and staffed by a full-time team of Thomson Reuters reference attorneys.
Data privacy isn’t just a concern for big businesses — the rules apply to every organization that has any kind of global reach. No matter how small you are, you’re still expected to comply, and the hefty fines for noncompliance can ruin small businesses.
Sound scary? With Data Privacy Advisor, it doesn’t have to be. Thomson Reuters has created the perfect tool to give you the practical know-how you need, when you need it, so you can easily navigate the rocky terrain of data privacy.