No area of legal practice is hotter right now than privacy. Today, the massive scale of personal data collection (and monetization) by corporations brings with it myriad new opportunities and challenges for lawyers and law firms. With cyberattacks and data breaches seemingly a daily occurrence, privacy law has become inextricably woven into day-to-day reality for a wide range of industries and practice areas, including health care, retail, and financial services.
Privacy law practitioners must be versed in state, federal, and international laws, as well understand technical subjects ranging from information security to cloud computing. And of course, the GDPR, the European Union’s sweeping data privacy regulation, becomes enforceable later this month and will have profound and far reaching implications for global commerce.
Against this backdrop, we decided to put together a new feature, The ATL Top Law Firm Privacy Practice Index. The Index is an attempt to capture the most active and relevant law firms in this complex and rapidly evolving practice area. (This is not an ordinal ‘ranking’—firms are presented in alphabetical order.)
Top Law Firm Privacy Practice Index
- Alston & Bird
- Baker & Hostetler
- Baker & McKenzie
- Carlton Fields
- Cooley
- Crowell & Moring
- Davis Wright Tremaine
- DLA Piper
- Eversheds Sutherland LLP
- Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher
- Hogan Lovells
- Jones Day
- K&L Gates
- Kelley Drye & Warren
- Latham & Watkins
- Mintz Levin
- Morrison & Foerster
- Paul Hastings LLP
- Reed Smith
- Ropes & Gray
- Sheppard Mullin
- Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom
- Venable
- White & Case
- Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Methodology
We used three (equally weighted) factors to identify the firms in our Index:
Survey results: In February and March, we fielded a survey of in-house counsel and corporate legal departments. Respondents were asked to rate law firms on the “strength and quality” of their data privacy and/or cybersecurity practices. We received input from 270 in-house attorneys.
“Resources applied”: A headcount measure: the relative proportion of a firm’s lawyers who are members of the firm’s “cybersecurity,” “data privacy” and/or other related practice designations.
Thought leadership: In order to gain of a sense of which firms are leading the conversation in the development of privacy practice, we assessed which firms publish the most (and most influentially) in this area. This incorporated elements such as publication of white papers, blogging, contributions to third-party media, and speaking engagements. We relied heavily on the “News” resource of the Thomson Reuters Data Privacy Advisor, for which the experts at TR have vetted a list of hundreds of law firm and journalistic data privacy blogs.
Questions about our rankings?
Contact us at research@abovethelaw.com.
