Cyberattacks are a key concern for businesses worldwide. The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) published a State of Cybersecurity Report according to which 40% of the 600 companies from 36 countries surveyed suffered a data breach in the preceding year. Furthermore, reports states that the companies affected by cyberattacks even suffered an average of 24 incidents per year.

According to the survey, when asked who in the organization was primarily responsible for coordinating the response to a data breach, the most common answer was the chief legal officer (CLO) in 21.2% of these companies, up from only 4.6% in 2015. It was not the head of information technology (IT) at 18.5%, not the chief information security officer at 15.4%, and not the chief privacy officer at 9.4% of these organizations.

As cybersecurity breaches are on the rise, with the number of serious cyberattacks on critical sectors in Europe nearly doubling in 2020 according to the European Union’s Agency for Cybersecurity, Blake Garcia, Giuseppe Marletta, and Antje Teeler conclude in a recently published article that CLOs find themselves playing an increasingly crucial role in cybersecurity – both in terms of prevention and mitigation – and shed light on the consequences.