Practice Guide: Keeping Control of Critical Data When Key Employees Depart

Summary

Losing a key employee is never easy. They often take with them institutional knowledge, important relationships, and critical skill sets. All this is enough of a challenge, but if they also take confidential information with them, it becomes an even more pressing data security challenge. Organizations today rely heavily upon electronically stored information (ESI) – and when employees leave, there’s always a risk that they’ll take some of that ESI with them when they go – either inadvertently or on purpose.

Because this can represent significant risks to organizations in terms of data security – representing risks from data privacy and security to intellectual property and competitive positioning – it’s important for legal and compliance teams to both identify potential risks associated with departing employees and implement policies and procedures to safeguard valuable information.

In this Practice Guide

• Guidance on how to assess risks
• Discussion of policy development
• Top five tips for preventing data loss

Key Insights

• Why prevention is better than cure
• The importance of legal-IT collaboration
• The value of post-mortem reviews