Practice Highlights

While not exhaustive, the below list includes some of Mr. Saunders’ representative experience:

Advice and Counseling

Mr. Saunders serves international and domestic clients across a diverse range of industries, including financial services, online education, medical devices and health care, electronics, engineering and manufacturing, mass media, consumer products, consulting, telecommunications, global communications, technology, transportation and aviation.  Mr. Saunders helps clients understand the federal and state laws that may apply to their businesses, and develop risk-based, tailored programs to mitigate that risk by:

• Standing up and implementing privacy compliance programs;
• Drafting and updating privacy and data retention/management policies;
• Developing and participating in training at the employee and Board levels;
• Conducting cybersecurity due diligence for mergers, acquisitions and other transactions;
• Drafting and negotiating privacy and security contract terms related to data sharing among business affiliates, business partners and vendors; and
• Analyzing privacy implications related to new product development.

Incident Response

From misdirected e-mails to international, enterprise-wide incidents, Mr. Saunders has counseled clients through single person impact to multi-state and international cyber security incidents including for clients in the food/beverage, education and technology, engineering, manufacturing, technology, retail and financial services spaces.  Praised for his responsiveness, Mr. Saunders collaborated with clients quickly and nimbly to:

• Bring together a team of specialists to scope, understand, stop and remediate a wide variety of cybersecurity events from lost data to hacks and ransomware;
• Guide the client through public and regulatory disclosures, based on the situation;
• Counsel the client with respect to responding to inquiries from impacted data subjects and the press about an incident; and
• Assist the client to scope potential litigation risk resulting from the cybersecurity event.

Regulatory

Mr. Saunders has successfully worked with a number of state attorney general’s offices and federal regulators, and advocated on behalf of clients in the telecommunications, consulting and financial services sectors whether in response to routine inquiries or in response to reported data incidents. This work has included collaborating with clients to: provide testimony and comment on existing and planned data privacy legislation at the state and federal levels and respond to investigations and inquiries by state AGs and federal regulators.

Litigation

Mr. Saunders is currently engaged in some of the most high-profile and cutting-edge litigations around biometric privacy and claims of damage resulting from data breaches, bringing creative strategies to resolve clients’ most sensitive disputes.  Mr. Saunders combines his decade-plus litigation experience and his deep knowledge of the privacy landscape to assist clients in the entertainment, legal and technology spaces defend their privacy practices and conduct. 

• Mutnick v. Clearview AI Inc. et al. –  Representing Clearview AI in numerous class actions challenging Clearview’s facial recognition technology.  The plaintiffs’ lawsuits raise a variety of claims, including alleged violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
• In Rosenbach v. Six Flags – Represent Six Flags in defense of an Illinois Biometric Privacy Act case.
• WMC RMBS Litigation –  Represented WMC Mortgage, LLC, a bank owned by GE Capital, in numerous federal and state courts in a series of cases involving in mortgage-backed securities.