US Companies Increasingly Worry About Cross-Border Data Transfers, Finds BDO Survey
Since the EU high court rejected the old safe harbor trans-Atlantic data sharing framework in October 2015, corporate legal concerns over cross-border data transfers have spiked, said BDO Consulting in a Thursday news release outlining its third annual e-discovery survey…
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of more than 100 senior in-house counsel at "leading" U.S. firms. Sixty percent of corporate counsel -- up 9 percentage points from Q4 2015 -- said "their biggest challenge in cross-border e-discovery comes from numerous -- and often conflicting -- international privacy and security laws." That worry topped other issues including access to data, communication barriers and coordination with local resources. While BDO said safe harbor's successor, the EU-US Privacy Shield, harmonizes some privacy protections, individual country requirements still vary (see 1602290003). The general data protection regulation (GDPR) also provides more clarity on data protections, but also increases the EU's privacy scope and enforceability (see 1604140021), it said. BDO said 74 percent of respondents ranked data breaches as a top data-related legal risk, with 68 percent saying the legal department is more involved with cybersecurity now than a year ago. Mobile data management and under- or over-preservation of data also were listed as top legal risks. The company said independent research firm ALM conducted the survey but didn't indicate when.