CYBER RESILIENCE — INCIDENT RESPONSE PREPAREDNESS

The First 72 Hours Decide the Next Two Years.

Companies are not judged on whether they were breached. They are judged on the quality of decisions made under pressure: what was preserved, who was told, what was said, and whether the record shows control or chaos. Preparedness is the difference — and it is built in calm quarters, not during the incident. We help leadership teams design, document, and rehearse incident response before it is needed, so the first real event is not the first test.

The pressure

  • Every clock runs at once. GDPR Article 33 allows 72 hours to notify the supervisory authority, with Article 34 communications to affected individuals where risk is high. NIS2 compresses this further — a 24-hour early warning and 72-hour report for in-scope entities. Public companies face the SEC's four-business-day Form 8-K deadline once an incident is determined material. Insurers and enterprise customers impose their own, often shorter, contractual notice periods.
  • Ransomware is a legal decision, not a payment. Paying a ransom implicates sanctions exposure — OFAC advisories warn that facilitating ransomware payments to sanctioned actors can violate US sanctions — alongside data-protection duties that payment does not extinguish and disclosure questions that follow either way.
  • The record is the case. Privilege, evidence preservation, and litigation holds are won or lost in the first days. IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 puts the global average breach cost at US$4.44 million; organizations with rehearsed, documented response consistently sit below that line.
  • Silence has a price too. Delayed or inaccurate disclosure compounds regulatory findings, feeds securities litigation, and converts a security event into a governance finding against the board.

What we do

  • Incident response plans: We draft response plans structured around legal decision points — triage and severity classification, privilege and work-product protection, evidence preservation, notification analysis, and executive and board escalation — integrated with, not duplicating, your technical runbooks.
  • Tabletop exercises: We design and lead counsel-run tabletop exercises for executives, legal, security, and communications: ransomware at quarter-end, a vendor breach, an insider exfiltration. Findings are documented with owners and remediation dates.
  • Ransomware decision frameworks: In advance, we build the decision framework for extortion events — sanctions screening, law-enforcement engagement, insurer notification, payment governance, and the no-payment communications path — so no element is improvised mid-crisis.
  • Retainers and panel readiness: We help you pre-position forensic, communications, and notification vendors under contracts negotiated in calm conditions, with engagement structures that protect privilege — rather than signed in a panic at crisis rates.
  • Notification machinery: We pre-draft the working documents: regulator notifications, individual notices, customer and partner communications, regulator Q&A, and holding statements — jurisdiction-mapped to your GDPR, NIS2, SEC, and state-law duties.
  • Post-incident discipline: After an event, we run the legal after-action: lessons learned mapped to remediation commitments, regulator follow-through, and the governance record that closes the file credibly.

Why TechLegalCounsel

Our principal has led breach and incident-response work inside global technology companies — Google, Twitter, and Uber — where incidents were measured against regulators in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously. Preparedness built on that experience is practical: plans written to be executed at 3 a.m., by the people who will actually be in the room.

Schedule a consultation

The worst time to learn your plan does not work is during the event. Test it now, while the cost of finding out is a workshop.

Schedule a consultation: info@techlegalcounsel.io

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