The Association of Corporate Counsel is a professional organization comprised of in-house counsel serving the needs of in-house counsel. It has been in existence, in various forms, since 1983 and is currently an international organization with 45,000 members. After the Federal Trade Commission’s litigation support infrastructure was overhauled and all of its data pushed into a FedRAMP authorized cloud, the ACC began working with the consultants from the FTC project to create a data security program for the legal sector.

The first step was to establish a Data Steward Program in-house advisory board, a working group and a controls committee. These panels were comprised of industry leaders who are attorneys, cybersecurity and privacy experts and litigation support experts from corporations, law firms, vendors and government. The mission was to mirror the security protocols that the federal government and other industries were using to secure data in a reasonably priced, defensible and efficient process. After two years of groundwork and input from these expert bodies, the ACC Data Steward Program has arrived.

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