Anne Marie Hanson, a Partner with Mullen Coughlin, is an experienced attorney with nearly 20 years of data privacy experience within the healthcare and health insurance industry. She is a Breach Coach for organizations who have suffered, or are in the midst of, data privacy and security incidents such as ransomware attacks, business email compromises, inadvertent disclosures and other network intrusions, among others. While her practice is generally industry-agnostic, she focuses much of her practice handling incidents on behalf of organizations in the healthcare and life sciences industry, as well as counseling them on their data privacy obligations by state, federal and industry laws and regulations.

As a former in-house counsel focusing on data privacy and regulatory compliance for a nationwide health insurance provider, Anne Marie has an appreciation for the various data privacy and information security laws and regulations that govern healthcare and health insurance entities’, as well as other types of organizations’, handling of protected health information (PHI) and other personally identifiable information (PII), such as the:

• Health Information Portability and Protection Act (HIPAA);
• Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act);
• European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR);
• South Carolina Insurance Data Security Act; and
• California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA)/California Privacy Regulations Act (CPRA), as well as other state comprehensive data privacy laws.

Her skillful understanding and knowledge of the obligations required by these, and other laws and regulations, benefits her clients in not only mitigating the legal, operational and regulatory consequences of a data privacy and security incident, but also in mitigating the financial and reputational effects of any potential third-party privacy litigation or regulatory investigation surrounding said incident(s).

Anne Marie also responds to regulatory inquiries and investigations by regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Office for Civil Rights (OCR); the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC); state Attorney Generals; and state departments of health, financial services and insurance, among others.

Having been in-house counsel for 20 years, Anne Marie brings a unique understanding as to what in-house lawyers expect from their outside counsel and is extremely conscientious of the business considerations which go into making decisions.

Before law school, Anne Marie worked as a business analyst for a worldwide information technology company and spent time as a client liaison in England.