As co-chair of Ogletree’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Practice Group, Ben represents clients across all industries on both regulatory compliance and litigation matters. Ben regularly advises clients on compliance with state, federal, and international data privacy and security laws, such as CCPA/CPRA, GDPR, PIPEDA, COPPA, HIPAA, CAN-SPAM, FCRA, TCPA, CPA, UCPA, CTDPA, VCDPA, data breach notification laws, and other U.S. and international privacy and data security requirements. Ben also assists clients with incident response plans, tabletop exercises, privacy policies and data collection disclosures, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, employee monitoring policies and related disclosures, master services agreements, marketing agreements, business associate agreements, Software as a Service (SaaS) agreements, data processing agreements, and third-party vendor contracts. On the litigation side, Ben has experience defending businesses in numerous industries against individual and putative class action claims at the trial and appellate levels. Ben is a designated Certified Information Privacy Professional for Europe (CIPP/E) and the United States (CIPP/US) by the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
Ben routinely counsels clients through the data breach process, whether caused by employee wrongdoing or ransomware from a foreign threat actor. In that role, Ben coordinates the response and deployment of all relevant business units and forensics firms to promptly contain and remediate the threat, and he also ensures compliance with the requisite individual and regulatory notifications required by an increasingly complex patchwork of often overlapping state and federal laws, all while keeping an eye toward subsequent litigation and/or regulatory scrutiny.
Ben advises clients in both the employment and consumer-facing context regarding the complex data privacy and cybersecurity landscape through all phases of the business and product lifecycle. Ben assists clients with designing novel products and services to be compliant with laws governing transparency and usage of personal information, advises regarding policies and procedures addressing these laws, and, where necessary, defends clients in litigation or regulatory investigations.
Ben is a regular speaker at conferences regarding the constantly shifting privacy and data-security landscape and also has served as an advisor to various fintech companies through a startup company accelerator program. His combination of litigation and regulatory compliance experience allows him to assist clients with proactively mitigating risk by identifying and crafting creative solutions to problems before they devolve into litigation or regulatory scrutiny. Once a client is facing litigation or a regulatory investigation, Ben works closely with all affected business units to craft an early resolution to the proceeding.