Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/786678
may consider renegotiating [the terms of the deal]. Now they said they will defi - nitely do so. It's having an adverse impact on the transaction," Ahmad says. "Maybe two years before the Verizon issue, nobody talked about this here in Canada. The only time I came across it was when a U.S. pri- vate equity deal was happening and they were insisting [cybersecurity due diligence] be done. Now you have investment bank- ers brokering deals, wondering, 'How can I make myself attractive?' Buyers are asking these questions." Laliberte agrees, arguing the impact will go well beyond Yahoo. "It affects valuation for every company." CCTX's Gordon sees all these conse- quences as linked. "Reputational [damage] becomes fi nan- cial, and the fi nancial hit becomes a reputa- tional piece," he says. "The other thing that becomes interesting in cyberattacks is you usually think of customers, but often when you're losing data, that's also your employ- ees' data." THE ACTION PLAN EVOLVES Most in-house lawyers, including Ian Kyer, have to think about cybersecurity amid many other things because they're busy — so busy in Kyer's case that he offered his ad- vice via email. The legal counsel for Toronto-based RPM Technologies, a maker of wealth management software, sums it up in four points. First, research cybersecurity and become familiar with it ("Not in the detail that a technology specialist would, but as a management and legal issue," he says). Next, bring it to the attention of the board and management. Work with them to establish a committee to address the issue from the perspective of the company; and, fi nally, work with the committee to make sure that a policy is developed and implemented. If that sounds familiar, it should: IT se- curity experts have been saying much the same thing for years. What's changing, perhaps, is the way in which technology can not only introduce risks and vulnerabilities into an organization but help better protect it from those same security holes. In a report that outlines key fi ndings from the 2017 Global State of Information Security Survey, for example, consulting fi rm PwC positions the cloud as less of a You're seeing a lot of litigation on the tort side of things — very creative class action lawyers proposing intrusion upon seclusion — typically things we would not historically see in this space. HOWARD SIMKEVITZ, Ontario Institute For Cancer Research MARCH 2017 20 INHOUSE