CYBER RESILIENCE — COMPLIANCE & GOVERNANCE

Governance Is the First Thing a Regulator Examines.

After an incident, investigators do not start with your firewall rules. They start with your governance: who owned the risk, what the board was told, which policies existed, and whether any of it was real. Compliance programs fail on paper long before they fail in practice. We design privacy, security, and AI governance structures that allocate accountability clearly, generate the evidence regulators ask for, and keep pace with obligations that now change annually.

The pressure

  • Fines are the floor of the conversation. GDPR administrative fines reach €20 million or 4% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher. NIS2 adds fines of up to €10 million or 2% of turnover for essential entities — and makes management bodies personally answerable for approving and overseeing security measures.
  • Sector regimes are live. DORA has applied to financial entities and their critical technology providers since 17 January 2025, imposing ICT risk-management, incident-classification, and resilience-testing duties with contractual consequences across the vendor chain.
  • AI governance has hard dates. The EU AI Act is phasing into application: prohibitions on unacceptable-risk practices applied from February 2025, general-purpose AI model obligations from August 2025, and the bulk of obligations — including for high-risk systems — from August 2026. Governance built only for data protection will not cover it.
  • Disclosure is a governance test. The SEC's cybersecurity rules require public companies to describe their risk-management processes and board oversight in annual reports. A governance structure that cannot be described accurately to investors is not ready to be described to a regulator either.
  • US privacy is a moving patchwork. The CCPA/CPRA — enforced by a dedicated agency issuing detailed regulations on risk assessments, automated decision-making, and cybersecurity audits — sits alongside a growing set of state comprehensive laws, each with its own assessment and cure mechanics.

What we do

  • Program architecture: We build and restructure integrated privacy, security, and AI governance programs — charters, accountable executives, committee structures, and reporting lines — proportionate to your risk and your regulators, spanning GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, NIS2, DORA, and the EU AI Act where they reach you.
  • Board and committee support: We prepare board reporting, minutes discipline, and oversight frameworks that reflect NIS2 management accountability and SEC-grade governance expectations — so oversight is demonstrable, not asserted.
  • Policy systems: We draft the policy suite as one coherent system — security, privacy, acceptable use, incident response, vendor risk, AI use — internally consistent, versioned, and mapped to the obligations each policy satisfies.
  • Assessments and audit readiness: We run and document data protection impact assessments, legitimate-interest and transfer assessments, and pre-audit gap analyses against ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and NIST CSF 2.0, leaving an evidence trail that shortens every external audit.
  • Transaction diligence: We lead privacy and security diligence in M&A — governance quality is a valuation input and an integration cost, and we price it into the deal before it prices itself in after closing.
  • Regulator engagement: When authorities inquire, we manage the response — inquiry letters, remediation commitments, and corrective-action tracking — with the record your governance has built as the foundation.

Why TechLegalCounsel

TechLegalCounsel's principal has built GDPR and CCPA/CPRA programs from inside Google, Twitter, and Uber — organizations where governance had to satisfy regulators on multiple continents and boards that asked hard questions. The practice is led by a California-barred, CIPP/US-certified counsel holding a doctorate in law — governance designed by someone who has had to operate it.

Schedule a consultation

If your program cannot produce, within a day, the document that proves who owns each obligation — it is time to rebuild it properly.

Schedule a consultation: info@techlegalcounsel.io

An initial consultation does not create an attorney–client relationship. All inquiries are treated as confidential.