Fenwick & West LLP is a law firm founded in 1972 that specializes in tech and life sciences companies, operating from offices in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, Santa Monica, and Washington D.C. The firm employs more than 470 attorneys and handles over $15 billion in transactions annually.
On the cybersecurity side, Fenwick's relevance is straightforward: they sit at the intersection of technology law, data privacy, and regulatory compliance for the very companies building the systems you're trying to defend. Their client base - tech startups and growth-stage companies - means the firm deals directly with the legal and regulatory fallout of breaches, vulnerability disclosures, incident response, and evolving data protection frameworks. Think breach notification law, GDPR and CCPA compliance, and the contractual architecture that governs how security obligations flow between vendors and customers.
The firm's cybersecurity-adjacent work spans privacy counseling, data security regulatory compliance, and incident response support. For security professionals, this means working alongside attorneys who understand threat models at a technical level and need to translate technical risk into legal exposure. The stakes are concrete: when a zero-day hits a client's platform, the legal team needs to move at engineering speed on disclosure timelines, regulatory obligations, and liability frameworks.
