“Korean corporate counsel and information technology (IT) departments … are … challenged in implementing the ‘best practices’ in information governance that help ensure they can adequately maintain and protect their data.” Reuters, Dec. 19, 2013
Regulatory authorities have been formally addressing Korea’s data management issues by ratifying tough legislations including the Unfair Competition Prevention Act and Trade Secret Protection Act (UCPA) or the latest Personal Information Protection Act dubbed as “strictest in the world.” However, with technological revolutions in the online sphere, legal, IT and privacy professionals as well as senior management find it increasingly challenging to create the right balance between corporate transparency and company secret and personal data protection, especially in the face of internal investigations or litigation cases.
While Korea has yet to adopt a standalone law to standardise the collection of electronic evidence, e-discovery is nonetheless becoming a process which Korean companies have to familiarise themselves with, particularly due to their increasing operation in jurisdictions such as the U.S. and Singapore, where e-discovery is strictly regulated. Many companies engage expert law firms and service providers to ensure equal compliance with e-discovery requirements, trade secret and privacy protection, but training among “high risk” internal staff from areas such as legal, marketing, IT, sales or HR is equally important. The law must be accompanied by comprehensive preventative and deterrence measures such as policies on the usage of external hardware and cloud computing or the periodic e-maintenance of consent agreements.
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