Legal-Technical Bridge

LEGAL-TECHNICAL BRIDGE

The firm excels at translating intricate legal and technical concepts into understandable action items, thereby driving the advancement of robust compliance programs.

We develop technical solutions to operationalize data privacy requirements and detect risk, pinpoint potential root causes of identified issues, and assist clients in implementing remediation efforts effectively.

The firm's legal practice, uniquely complemented by Daniel's coding and technical knowledge, enables the firm to serve as a bridge between a client’s legal, development, and marketing teams. 

THE DILEMMA

In our experience, most companies do not intentionally violate the law or their contractual obligations. Instead, as a result of fast-paced development cycles, reliance on external code, misunderstandings with vendors, and communication gaps between marketing, legal, and technical teams, discrepancies can arise between a company’s perception of the data collected and disclosed on its websites and apps, and the data that's actually collected and disclosed.

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Coupled with the growing complexities of mitigating exposure, maintaining data privacy compliance can become a formidable task given the technical nuances associated with compliance efforts. We integrate technical prowess into our legal services to offer comprehensive solutions that stand out from other law firms.

 

We evaluate consumer-facing websites and mobile apps, and generate reports that detail the scope of data collection and disclosure. In addition to identifying the relevant first and third parties present on a website or app, the reports include detections of conventional and technical personal information such as name, email address, phone number, geolocation, cookies and similar technologies, mobile advertising IDs, device IDs, etc., plus hashed and encoded variants of this information.

 

With these reports in hand, clients can verify the accuracy of their privacy disclosures, differentiate between intentional and accidental third-party data transmissions (e.g., sales/shares under applicable law), execute data privacy agreements, implement appropriate technical remediations, conduct risk assessments, and build an inventory of relevant trackers, pixels, etc. on their consumer-facing assets.

We analyze the effectiveness of opt-out signals and consent flags, such as the Global Privacy Control (GPC), Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF), Global Privacy Platform (GPP), and US Privacy String (USP). This enables us to help clients determine whether or not applicable signals and flags are adequately transmitted to relevant downstream parties, as required by applicable data privacy frameworks. 

We evaluate the efficacy of consent management platforms and cookie banners, enabling companies to strengthen their data privacy obligations related to obtaining adequate consent. For example, we analyze which cookies and similar technologies are utilized prior to and post-consent to validate a company’s solution is working as intended and in accordance with applicable data privacy frameworks. 

We identify and categorize first and third parties on apps and websites, enabling clients to strengthen their visibility into relevant parties present so that they can execute applicable agreements and make adequate disclosures. 

We help uncover and mitigate unintended data leakage on consumer-facing assets to reduce legal exposure, such as with the VPPA and applicable wiretap laws. For example, we can help identify if video information and PII are transmitted to third parties on webpages that host video content. We can also assist clients in determining whether or not their websites employ certain session replay tools and similar technologies.

We employ AI to optimize and supplement our legal research, enabling us to efficiently conduct legal research for our clients. For example, some data privacy requirements take an opt-in approach while others take an opt-out approach. Using legally tailored and in-house built solutions, we can efficiently review and generate an inventory of the different approaches across the various data privacy frameworks to assist clients in navigating the nuances across their many data privacy obligations.

We assess mobile apps to help determine which data is collected and disclosed in order to help clients meet their mobile app store obligations. For example, our technology can help clients determine applicable purposes as defined by relevant mobile app stores, and honor opt-in requirements related to tracking.

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STRATEGIC TECHNICAL GUIDANCE & IMPLEMENTATION

In addition to developing our own technical solutions, we:

  • Strategize with clients on incorporating new technologies into their existing workflows.
  • Provide advisement on onboarding other technologies like identity graphs, AdTech, data clean rooms, privacy-enhancing technologies, and Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models.
  • Draft operational controls for developers to implement the relevant data privacy requirements, such as opt-outs, DSRs, and data minimization.
  • Offer guidance to clients about their in-house and external software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs).