Partners Kimberly Peretti and Jessica Corley, Senior Associate Kelley Barnaby, and Associate Lauren Tapson were honored with a 2015 Burton Award for Legal Achievement for their analysis of the corporate governance risks associated with cyber-attacks and the critical role played by boards of directors in addressing those risks.
William Burton, author of Burton’s Legal Thesaurus, started the Burton Awards in 1999 to honor clarity, knowledge, and innovation demonstrated in a published legal article. The winners are chosen from entries submitted by the nation’s 1,000 largest and most prestigious law firms. The judges this year included Burton, Virginia Wise of Harvard Law School, Philip M. Genty of Columbia Law School, Jeanne Merion of Stanford Law School, Judge Ed Forstenzer of California’s Superior Court (retired), and William Ryan, the former chairman of the White House Plain Language Committee.
The winning article, “Cybersecurity: What Directors Need to Know in an Era of Increased Scrutiny,” delves into the rapidly changing cyber risk landscape – including increased scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators and its potential impact on director liability – and what boards of directors can, and should, do to ensure that their organizations are appropriately considering and addressing cyber risks.
To write the article, the authors leveraged the firm’s knowledge across practices and across offices. Peretti and Barnaby, based in DC, are members of the firm’s Litigation & Trial Practice Group and the Security Incident Management & Response team. Corley and Tapson, based in Atlanta, are members of the Securities Litigation Group. Peretti co-chairs the firm’s Security Incident Management & Response Team and is a former director of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ cyber forensic service practice and a former senior litigator for the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. Corley chairs the firm’s Securities Litigation Group, where she concentrates her practice on securities and complex commercial litigation, as well as counseling companies and their directors on a variety of issues.