With today’s (23 January) inaugural Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) EMEA Institute causing quite a stir, we can reveal that the group has started a high level cyber group with a view to creating a cybersecurity standard – an initiative that this publication also set the ball rolling on towards the end of last year in a high-level meeting sponsored by Accenture and we hope to collaborate on.
In a move led by NetApp’s chief of staff & director of legal operations and CLOC founder Connie Brenton (pictured), CLOC held its first cyber meeting on Friday 9 January. Brenton told us: “Our first meeting is with CLOC people and then we have a group of CIOs coming on 9 February.
“We are looking to put together a cyber security standard. My boss at NetApp asked me to take a deep dive and I’ve found that for 10 years the industry has been working on this, but nothing has taken hold.
“I was approached by someone from CLOC who said, ‘I’m going to crack this nut’ and the more he talked, the more I thought ‘you’re actually going to do this.’”
Corporates represented at the initial CLOC meeting included Microsoft, Adobe and US bio pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences. The CIO meeting will involve a handful some of the biggest international US-headquartered law firms.
Towards the end of 2017, Legal IT Insider sponsored by Accenture brought together six of the biggest name CIOs/COOs from international law firms to discuss cyber best practice, including looking at whether we can create a security readiness index. The high-level findings of that discussion will be published in February.
For law firms, in absence of an official cyber benchmark or standard, answering client RFPs has become extraordinarily time consuming and answering ‘how much is enough’ or showing the executive that you have the right cybersecurity ‘badges’ is an eternal challenge for CIOs.
However, creating a standard or official cyber readiness index needs cross-industry participation and we are excited at the potential to leverage our platform and reach and collaborate with CLOC in a genuine attempt to make progress in this area.