New EU rules are compressing cyber incident reporting deadlines to as little as 24 hours, placing unprecedented pressure on legal teams to identify impacted data with precision and speed.
When a cyber incident occurs, the pressure on the General Counsel is immediate and intense. The familiar 72-hour notification clock from GDPR is no longer the only concern. A new wave of overlapping European regulations, from the Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) to the financial sector’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), has fundamentally altered the timeline. For many businesses, these rules now demand an initial warning within just 24 hours, often before the full scope of the cyber incident is even understood.
This compressed timeframe amplifies legal and operational risk, demanding a more structured response. The board, regulators, insurers and customers all demand immediate answers to critical questions: What happened? What data was exposed? Who is affected?
Relying on traditional manual review processes to find these answers in sprawling, unstructured data sets is no longer a viable strategy. By the time you find the relevant documents, your reporting deadline may have already passed, exposing the business to significant regulatory penalties and reputational harm.
Identify Impacted Data at Speed
The first and most urgent challenge is to understand the data. The crucial questions, which files contain personal or sensitive data, where are they, and whose data is involved, require speed and accuracy. This is precisely where modern preparedness strategies must focus.
Engaging external experts early enables a more accurate assessment of potential harm and informed regulatory engagement within tight deadlines. It transforms the initial phase of a cyber incident from a panicked search into a structured, evidence-based assessment.
Rather than relying on fragmented manual efforts across departments, a better approach uses targeted analytics and sophisticated tools to rapidly scan vast environments, including complex software applications and cloud-based systems like Microsoft 365.
Build a Defensible Record
Speed is critical, but it is meaningless without defensibility. Regulators and insurers will not only ask what you found, but how you found it. A robust, documented process is non-negotiable and increasingly expertly appraised by both regulators and insurers alike. Your team must be able to produce a clear audit trail that shows what was searched, what criteria were applied, which data sets were excluded (and why), and when key decisions were taken, which data sets were excluded (and why), and when key decisions were made.
To support this, legal and compliance teams can work with advisors to establish a defensible framework before a cyber incident ever occurs, embedding cyber readiness into your broader data governance and compliance framework. This advisory work helps tighten data retention and deletion policies, ensuring that you are not searching through legacy data that should have been defensibly deleted. It can also help align legal hold procedures with modern data systems and establish clear protocols for maintaining a contemporaneous record of the response effort. This proactive governance not only shrinks the potential scope of a future cyber incident but also provides the documentation needed to stand behind your conclusions under regulatory scrutiny.
The Path to Readiness
Cyber readiness is no longer just an IT issue; it is a core legal and business strategy. By embracing proactive governance and leveraging the right technology, General Counsel can transform their role in a crisis from one of damage control to one of strategic leadership, safeguarding the business and demonstrating clear value to the board.
The shift from a reactive posture to a state of readiness is now a core requirement for any effective legal department. This is where KLDiscovery brings real value. We partner with General Counsel to operationalise cyber readiness, embedding the right technology and defensible processes into their teams. Our goal is to ensure that when a crisis hits, the legal team can lead with confidence.
