Incident Response and a Data Breach Coach

We can help you with incident response and be your data breach coach. If you have had an incident of failing to protect personal information (or a breach in your security), the way you respond is crucial. There are lots of decisions you need to make, for example:

• When are we going to notify the relevant regulators or authorities?
• When are we going to notify the data subjects and what will we tell them?
• What security steps do we need to take to close the hole?

We can help you to find answers to these questions and advise you on the legal issues around them. It is important to respond quickly – there is no time to lose.

Data Breach Coach

We can coach you through dealing with a breach or incident. We’ll coach you through responding to the recent security incident or data breach that has occurred. If you have reasonable grounds to believe that you have had an incident, contact us by filling in the form on the left. Because we are attorneys, confidentiality and legal privilege will apply automatically. We can coach you every step of the way to ensure it is dealt with in the most effective way.

• Streamline the process of responding so that you can do so faster.
• Be able to provide an auditable record of your response.
• Produce evidence to defend yourself against a damages claim.
• Fix problems that result in you failing to protect personal information.
• Gain the benefits of legal privilege.
• Avoid damages claims and fines.

There are two options of how we can help:

1. Join the Michalsons data protection programme. It will help you respond to your current incident and also to become data breach ready proactively in advance for the next one. There is guidance, simulations and templates in the programme all related to incidents and breaches. Once you’ve worked through the material, you can always ask for further assistance from us if you need it. This option works well if you need to deal with it right away – you don’t need to wait for one of our attorneys to be available. It is also often a cheaper option.
2. Engage with one of our attorneys one-on-one and they’ll coach you through responding to your incident (and possible breach) by meeting with you (in person or using online meeting tools). This is often a more expensive option.

Become data breach ready

We can also help you to become data breach ready proactively in advance. Often, it is too late to start preparing for a breach after it has happened. And it is probably going to happen to you at some point in the near future. Read more about the top five worst data security breaches.

Get cyber insurance

It is too late to get cyber insurance (or cyber liability insurance) once a breach has occurred but it can be worth getting it in place for the next one.

Incident Response Policy

It is also important that you put an Incident Response Policy or Plan in place now before the incident happens. It is also known as a Data Breach Policy or Plan. It is too late to try to put the policy in place once an incident has occurred. It is important that everyone knows what to do when an incident occurs. What steps will be taken? Who will make the decisions? We can help you draft an Incident Response Policy customised for your organisation. It provides a great feedback mechanism – a way for you to evaluate what went wrong, how you failed to protect personal information and what you can do to ensure that it does not happen again.

Incident Response Form

We can help you draft an Incident Response Form customised for your organisation that both the employee reporting the incident and your Information Officer should complete.

Incident Communication Plan

When an incident occurs, what are you actually going to say to people? The actual words that you use are important because they determine how people will react to news of your incident and they have legal consequences and rules that they need to comply with in terms of the relevant data protection laws. We can provide you with an incident communication plan so that you’re ready to say the right things at the right time.

Automatic Incident Response

We can offer you an automated solution to incident response or breach management. We have worked with an incident response software development company to develop a cutting-edge automated solution.