UPMC’s employment records were hacked by criminals in 2014. A civil class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of approximately 66,000 employees, and criminal cases were filed by federal prosecutors against a number of...more
Dittman v. UPMC, 196 A.3d 1036 (Pa. 2018). The Pennsylvania Supreme Court holds that employers have a legal duty to use reasonable care to safeguard sensitive personal information of their employees when the employer chooses...more
Now a business that was hacked may be successfully sued under state common law by data subjects whose information was compromised in the crime. For the first time, a state supreme court has held that a company that was...more
Data breach liability for Pennsylvania employers of all sizes expanded with a recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision in Dittman v. UPMC. __ A.3d __, No. 43 WAP 2017, 2018 WL 6072199 (Pa. 2018). The Pennsylvania Supreme...more
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently held that employers have “a legal duty to safeguard” the personal data of their employees which is stored on internet-accessible computer systems and that the economic loss doctrine...more
Pennsylvania’s highest court recently issued a major decision that impacts employers and their storage of sensitive employee information in two important ways. First, the court imposed a new duty on employers to use...more
In finding a common law duty to protect employees’ personal data, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has unexpectedly, and dramatically, altered the contours of the data breach litigation landscape....more
In a landmark decision with far-reaching implication, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently held that employers have an affirmative duty to protect their employees’ personal information from criminal hacking. In particular,...more
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has drastically changed the data breach litigation landscape by holding that an employer has a common law duty to use reasonable care to safeguard its employees' personal information stored on...more
Creating a private cause of action in negligence for data breaches could result in the filing each year of possibly hundreds of thousands of lawsuits by persons whose confidential information may be in the hands of third...more