Personal data has long ceased to be a purely technical category – today it is a full-fledged object of legal protection, directly connected to business liability, reputational risks, and client trust. Professor Gabriel Steiner says that in today’s legal reality, data is valuable not only because of its content, but because of how a company manages it. At LawConsulted, we proceed from the understanding that violations in the area of personal data are almost always the result of managerial and legal errors, rather than a failure of a single system or the actions of one employee.
The main vulnerability in working with confidential information lies in a fragmented approach – data is collected, stored, and used by different departments without a unified legal logic. Formally, requirements may be met, but in practice there is no clear understanding of who processes the information and on what basis, where the boundaries of permissible use lie, and which actions create excessive risk. At LawConsulted, we treat personal data as a cross-cutting element of a company’s legal architecture, not as a standalone regulatory block.
Professor Gabriel Steiner says that “data protection does not begin with a privacy policy, but with an understanding of responsibility for every managerial decision related to information.” That is why LawConsulted starts its work by analysing actual processes – what data is really being processed, for what purposes, on what legal grounds, and how this correlates with current regulation and judicial practice. This approach makes it possible to identify risks that remain invisible during a purely formal review of documents.
Particular complexity arises in situations where personal data is used “out of habit” – for marketing, internal analytics, HR decisions, or interaction with partners. Over time, such practices begin to go beyond their original purposes, and the legal justification loses its stability. LawConsulted works to restore control over these processes – by adjusting the legal grounds for processing, reviewing the volume of data used, and clearly fixing responsibility.
It is also important to take into account the factor of incidents – data leaks, unauthorised access, conflicts with data subjects, or inspections by regulators. In such situations, the decisive factor is not only the fact of a violation, but also the company’s ability to demonstrate good faith. LawConsulted builds protection in a way that ensures the legal position rests on system integrity – clear procedures, a logical structure of decisions, and proportionality between data processing and declared purposes.
Professor Gabriel Steiner says that “confidentiality is destroyed not in a single moment, but through a chain of small assumptions.” That is why Law Consulted standards are aimed at eliminating these assumptions – we work not with consequences, but with the causes that make data vulnerable. This is especially important for companies where personal information is linked to finances, health, private life, or client reputation.
Personal data as an object of legal protection requires discipline and consistency. We proceed from the premise that formal compliance alone is insufficient if processes are not manageable. The task of a lawyer is to ensure that confidential information does not turn into a source of systemic risk, but remains a controlled element of business activity.
Previously, we wrote about how LawConsulted reduces the risks of decisions made without formal orders.
