A data breach starts a clock the moment it is discovered. GDPR, state breach laws, and sector rules impose tight notification deadlines, and how you handle the first hours shapes your regulatory exposure, your customer relationships, and the lawsuits that may follow. We help you get ready before anything happens and run the response when it does, with lawyers who can sit in the room with your security and forensics teams and actually follow the technical findings.
Planning Before It Happens
The best breach response is one you rehearsed. We help you build an incident response plan that settles the hard questions in advance: how incidents are classified, who escalates to whom, which team members own which decisions, and what forensic and crisis-communications resources you can call on. We line up the templates and documentation you will need for regulators and litigation, and we run tabletop exercises so your team has done this once before they have to do it for real.
Containment and Privilege
When a breach surfaces, the first priorities are stopping further data loss, preserving evidence, and standing up the response team to size up scope and severity. Bringing legal counsel in at the start matters: it helps protect privilege over the investigation and keeps your compliance obligations on track from hour one. We work to keep an incident contained and managed rather than letting it spiral into a public crisis while critical decisions get made on the fly.
Investigating and Scoping the Incident
You cannot meet your notification duties until you know what actually happened. Forensic investigation establishes how the breach occurred, which systems were reached, what data was exposed, and whether the attacker is still in the environment. Scoping pins down the affected individuals and data categories. We help you document the findings thoroughly enough to support your notification decisions and answer regulator questions, while balancing the need to be thorough against the deadlines already running against you.
Meeting Notification Deadlines
Notification rules turn on the type of data, where affected people live, and what kind of organization you are. GDPR requires regulator notice within 72 hours and individual notice without undue delay; state laws set their own triggers and timelines, some as short as 30 days; HIPAA adds its own requirements. We work out which laws apply, what crosses the threshold for notice, what each notice has to say, and what clock governs, then handle the overlapping obligations so nothing falls through the cracks.
Regulators, Third Parties, and Litigation
Most serious breaches do not end with the first notice. Regulators come back with questions and may probe both the incident and your underlying practices, and we manage those exchanges with an eye on accuracy and privilege. We coordinate the forensic firm, PR advisors, credit monitoring, insurers, and law enforcement so information flows without breaking privilege. Because class actions and enforcement often follow, we preserve evidence and build the record during the response, then carry it into the defense and the post-incident fixes that reduce your next exposure.