Fenwick partner Tyler Newby was profiled as among the top privacy attorneys under the age of 40 in the United States by Law360, which cited his success in turning his experience as a cybercrime prosecutor into a thriving practice as a top privacy attorney.
"Advising Silicon Valley startups on responding to law enforcement and helping established players like Pandora Media Inc. fend off suits over alleged customer data misuse, Fenwick & West LLP's Tyler Newby has parlayed his experience as a cybercrime prosecutor into a thriving practice, earning him a spot among Law360’s top privacy attorneys under 40," the profile opens.
Having spent four years with the computer crimes section of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., Newby returned to Fenwick in 2011 and quickly rose to his position as partner and co-chair of Fenwick’s privacy and information security practice.
He uses his experience at the DOJ to advise high technology companies on how to balance the demands of national security and the privacy of their users. Many of Newby’s clients are young Internet companies that need guidance when federal investigators first begin seeking information from them. One example he gave Law360 is a company that provided an encrypted service linked to Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor responsible for leaking a massive number of U.S. intelligence documents.
In addition to his counseling practice, Newby's also a seasoned litigator. When a case demands it, he uses his DOJ trial experience to go to bat for his clients at trial.
He is co-leading the Fenwick team representing Pandora in a putative class action that claims the company improperly shared listeners' personal data with advertisers. Fenwick won dismissal of the original suit last March and is now battling against an amended complaint.
Newby is also defending Carrier IQ in one of the largest privacy class actions currently under way, a multidistrict litigation involving millions of potential class members. More than 70 lawsuits have been filed alleging that the Carrier IQ software pre-installed on many smartphones enables collection of personal data without the user’s knowledge.
While the specifics have varied over the 15 years since Newby first joined Fenwick as a new Stanford Law School graduate, Newby told Law360 that the ongoing challenge that technology presents for the law is its constant innovation.
“It’s like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole in trying to fit evolving technologies into a pre-existing legal structure that was never written with these technologies in mind,” he said.
The full article is available through the Law360 website (subscription required).