Privacy & Cybersecurity

As the clock ticks down to May 25, 2018, when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) becomes fully enforceable throughout the EU, the Internet and airwaves have become saturated with guidance for companies about what to expect and how to prepare for its new protections and restrictions.

The law firm that inadvertently produced records containing personally-identifying information (“PII”) relating to 50,000 Wells Fargo customers in response to a third-party subpoena, which we first reported on here, went before a judge earlier this month, seeking to permanently bar the recipient and his counsel from further exploitation of the documents and their customer-identifying contents.

Wells Fargo’s inadvertent production of personal identifying information ("PII") in a case involving a former employee became national news when the New York Times broke the story late last week. 

In a decision sure to have wide-ranging implications for cross-border discovery and governing privacy regimes, the Supreme Court recently held in Water Splash, Inc. v. Menon, that the Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil and Commercial Matters (the “Hague Service Convention” or the “Convention”) does not prohibit service by mail. 

You’ve had your apple a day, but you can’t keep the subpoenas away…  
And, if your organization is facing a request seeking records or other materials that may contain patient health information (“PHI”), it bears repeating that while HIPAA provides a number of methods through which covered entities that hold records containing PHI may produce such records, these guidelines are closely enforced by courts.