Partner Reed Freeman has been selected as one of 45 lawyers on The National Law Journal’s list of Regulatory & Compliance Trailblazers. Those recognized on the inaugural list have “devised new strategies and decisively altered the playing field.” In Freeman’s privacy practice, a highly evolving area of law, he represents advertisers, online and mobile publishers, app developers, social media companies, and advertising technology companies before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and other regulators, and in counseling to avoid regulatory scrutiny and litigation.
In his privacy work, Freeman has been at the forefront on advertising technology, representing clients that use precise geolocation, cross-device tracking and targeting, and cookieless technologies. The NLJ states that Freeman guides his clients “through a very unsettled regulatory environment by counseling for sound privacy protections in a way that does not retard the continued development of ever-more efficient technologies.”
Freeman advises an industry of clients on data security and privacy where, in most cases, no explicit laws, rules or regulations exist, but rather general regulatory expectations that are either unwritten or stated only in speeches or law enforcement actions on specific facts. The NLJ lauds Freeman for having handled several FTC privacy investigations, nearly “always convincing the government to drop the investigation in light of the privacy protections in place.”
Freeman has significant experience in privacy law, having been a staff member at the FTC at the dawn of the commercial Internet, where he was present during hearings on “what privacy and the Internet should look like.” He entered private practice following his time at the FTC, and spends much of his time advising clients on how to avoid FTC scrutiny and defending clients when they are under FTC investigation.
As co-chair of the firm's Cybersecurity, Privacy and Communications practice, Freeman expects to see more “automated technology to help companies remain compliant.” He said, “we are beginning to see how privacy and data security can have a meaningful brand effect. That’s contributed to making it a board and C-level issue, and it will only get more attention.”
A profile on Freeman was published in the June 2015 special inaugural edition of The National Law Journal.