Today's General Counsel, September 2023

Anyone who is responsible for cybersecurity at a business or involved in the legal aftermath of a data breach must dread looking at the numbers. The average cost of these attacks set an all time high this year of $4.45 million per breach, according to a report issued recently by IBM. Cyber insurance premiums rose 28 percent in Q4 2022. The Federation of European Risk Management Associations warned that cyber insurance was in danger of becoming “an unviable product.” It’s a grim picture, but in this issue of Today’s General Counsel, Brian Gillam writes that there is a silver lining for small and medium businesses. He notes that the average costs of a data breach are skewed because they factor in the kind of hefty losses by large businesses that smaller ones are not likely to suffer. He also has some interesting numbers of his own pertaining to the appropriate amount to spend on cyber-attack prevention, and how that affects insurance.

In an interview, Nick Vandivere of Thomson Reuters discusses how best to integrate functional AI into legal department processes in a way that helps with specific tasks. In other articles, Matthew Grady writes about handling intellectual property if we encounter economic down-times, and co-authors Corinne Spencer and Jonathan Brown examine the compliance obligations that a new California regulation, SB 1162, imposes on employers.