Retail Worker Asks 11th Circ. to Revive Data Breach Suit

Data Strategy, Security and Privacy attorney Paul Bond's argument before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals was recently quoted in a Law360 article about a retail worker's attempt to revive a class action lawsuit over a data breach. The suit comes from a former employer of The Paradies Shop LLC, whose personal information was exposed to hackers after ransomware attack. The representatives of the plaintiff argued that employers have as much of a duty to protect employees' digitally stored personal information as they do sensitive physical documents. Mr. Bond argued on behalf of Paradies, saying that the generic pleadings in this case were "very much like the pleadings in 100 other class actions" and that reversing the decision would open the floodgates to data breach class actions. Mr. Bond added that the Georgia Supreme Court requires plaintiffs to demonstrate that a duty to safeguard personal information might exist, and it does not here.

"They pled in a threadbare formulaic way as they do in each of these complaints. If that was enough, then literally every time a data security breach notice is sent by anyone in any industry, that is enough to staple it to a complaint and bring it to court. That is not what the Georgia Supreme Court intended," he said.

READ: Retail Worker Asks 11th Circ. to Revive Data Breach Suit