There are a lot of data blogs out there … why would you want to read this one?  

As I would say to my law students, good question! 

I teach a class at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law on "Big Data:  Law and Policy”.  In this class I take a look at data and the law and how lawyers can better understand and use data. My goal is to help the students understand what data is and how to improve data use and compliance.  The fundamental concept is to explore the connections between types of data and data disciplines as well as between data and other areas of the law.  Those connections are the focus of this blog.

Before teaching, I was one of the first Data Lawyers for a Fortune 50 company (no, not a Privacy or Cybersecurity Lawyer … an actual Data Lawyer!).  In this role, I created and implemented a data intake process for my clients that put them significantly ahead of anyone in their data governance and control.  More about that to come in later blog posts.

My first “a ha!” moment in understanding the value of data came over 10 years ago when I was my company’s Growth Markets Compliance Officer located in China and working to ensure adherence to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and our business conduct guidelines.  In this challenging role, I kept asking myself… “how can we proactively detect and avoid bribery and corruption?” Of course, I needed to do this without a large expenditure of money.  It occurred to me that a lot of data was being offered up to the company freely by employees.  If we only looked at that data only for the reason it was provided (e.g., expense reimbursement), we were likely missing out on telltale clues regarding potential corruption.  So, the question was - how could we mine that data for greater insights?  

We know that when an employee submits a claim for reimbursement of a meal expense with or for a client meeting, it does not directly indicate any wrongdoing.  But what if we looked for trends or anomalies in the data?  What would be unusual in claims for reimbursement and how could we draw connections from those unusual claims to uncovering possible bad actions?  

Most employees, for example, do not claim for reimbursement of client meals on weekends or holidays; most employees are not regularly claiming 2x or 3x the amounts for reimbursement compared to their peers, etc.  While this data would not per se show that someone was doing anything wrong, it could provide a starting point to look for anomalous behaviors that might indicate wrongdoing.  If you are bribing someone to get business, it is unlikely that you will want to do it with your own money; and it is unlikely that making one meal claim would fully reimburse you… so, you are likely trying to find ways to increase the amounts and the times you are claiming for reimbursement while also trying to “stay under the radar”.   Data can help us to find those patterns and connections.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  In this blog, I will start with the basics of what data is and why you should care about data.  I will explore a variety of headline grabbing and seemingly mysterious topics related to data. We will discuss such things as: whether data is “good or bad”; why the lack of a comprehensive privacy law in the US has left the US subject to the whims of the European approach to privacy (which may be in conflict with our interests in freedom of speech); why data silos are making utilization and control of data harder; how data governance is the unsung hero of the data world; how the hype around Artificial Intelligence taking over the world has diverted our attention from more immediately important and more achievable actions we need to be taking to make AI better — and so much more! I hope you will join me as we explore these topics together.

If you have questions about your data and your legal compliance programs for data, Mortinger & Mortinger LLC can help! Contact me directly at: steve@mortingerlaw.com