By the time you read this, Americans will have been working from home for more than three months. This has never happened before in this country during the age of technology. As millions logged on to their home networks and personal devices in an attempt to keep their companies afloat, cybersecurity issues rose to the forefront of the many issues that companies had to manage.
The biggest challenge with any legal hold process is ensuring that potentially relevant data is actually preserved. But with evolving requirements for how data is managed by new data privacy laws like the CCPA and the GDPR, it's become harder to secure data by simply sending a legal hold and assuming the custodian will do their duty to preserve it.
The London Interbank Offered Rate has long been the global basis for agreements that include a variable interest rate component. However, LIBOR would be replaced by other benchmarks by the end of 2021. Key to assessing risk of exposure, quantifying the financial impact, developing remediation plans and communicating material information to stakeholders will be the identification, analysis and remediation of LIBOR-based contracts.
As the current pandemic has forced much of the world into virtual workforce mode, cybercriminals have seized on the uncertainty of the current times to launch new and creative offensives. Fears surrounding COVID-19 are high, conspiracy theories are running rampant, and cyberattackers are counting on stress and distraction to decrease our vigilance against intrusions.
A new French law that would have required such social media platforms as Facebook to take down objectionable content within 24 hours has been rejected by France's Constitutional Council as a disproportionate response to the proliferation of hate speech online.
Proposed class actions against Zoom are illustrative of a challenge many businesses face: what is "reasonable" data security? The FTC's key data-security-related enforcement can help guide businesses in developing their data security programs.
At law firms, attorneys will need to sustain the high quality of work they do in normal times, albeit with reduced budgets. The good news is that with ediscovery — an essential but expensive part of the litigation process — advances in technology since America's last recession have made it possible to save money and time by adopting a more modernized and comprehensive approach.
Malls across America, long suffering even before the rise of COVID-19, are now forced to confront a wave of store closures. Troubled retailers will, without doubt, seek to close their failing mall locations. To stem these efforts, landlords have applied to courts for injunctive relief to force stores to remain open and operating, despite lagging sales, through the enforcement of the "continuous operations provision" found in mall leases.
Federal courts have long disagreed over whether the unauthorized "making available" of a plaintiff's works to the public is sufficient to constitute copyright infringement under the U.S. Copyright Act. Two June District Court decisions demonstrated the differences between the views of the Fourth and Ninth Circuits.
According to news reports, and judging from the plethora of lawsuits filed seeking insurance coverage for lost income incurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, insurance companies are for the most part denying claims for business interruption losses. The type of insurance claim at issue may make a difference.
