TMT Overview
Schadenfreude doesn’t feature much between in-house legal departments, so many general counsel would have winced when TalkTalk chief executive Baroness Harding admitted last year that she didn’t know all the technical details of the cyber breach that could ultimately cost the company £60m and contribute to the loss of 101,000 customers.
‘In the abstract, data protection doesn’t mean a great deal, but there have been many recent examples where large corporates have been hacked, and their senior executives are being questioned on TV and do not necessarily seem to know what data has gone. That’s not a great situation for any senior executive to be in,’ says Chris Holder, an IT partner at Bristows. ‘If I were a general counsel and my chief executive was on TV being grilled, then I would make sure that they were fully briefed with as much information about the hack, the missing data and the security situation as was possible.’
