Brenda R. Sharton

Brenda Sharton, partner and co-chair of Dechert’s top ranked, global privacy & cybersecurity practice, is a top privacy and cybersecurity and commercial litigator. She is one of only 16 lawyers in the country ranked as a "Leading Lawyer" by The Legal 500 for Cyber Law and Data Protection/Breach Response. A first chair trial lawyer, Ms. Sharton counsels and represents public and private corporations and their boards in complex commercial litigation, arbitrations and civil government/regulatory and enforcement matters.

Ms. Sharton is a nationally recognized expert, pioneer and thought leader in the area of privacy and cybersecurity law. She has handled over 750 data breach investigations and cyber-attacks of every type and size for companies in every industry ranging from start-ups to global multi-billion dollar public companies. Ms. Sharton has handled some of the highest-profile data breaches brought by nation states, organized crime, insiders and other threat actors, including the negotiation of ransom/ransomware, business email interruption/Office 365 attacks, corporate and nation state espionage, DDoS, insider threats and theft of computer/electronic data of all types. She has defended companies in hundreds of privacy-related government investigations and enforcement actions brought by global and U.S. regulators, including state attorneys’ general, the FTC, HHS/OCR for HIPAA breaches, the SEC Cybersecurity Division, European regulators among others, as well as defended public and private companies in class action litigation arising from those data breaches.

Ms. Sharton’s experience is second-to-none in handling cyber attacks, including those brought by nation states, organized crime, and threat actors of all types. Since the late 1990s, she has handled hundreds of data breaches, including numerous high profile, front page news breaches. Since COVID-19 has forced a remote work environment, Ms. Sharton has counseled numerous companies on enhanced cyber and physical security related to the exponential increase in cyber attacks related thereto, including companies engaged in COVID-19 research. She counsels companies pre-breach cybersecurity counseling as well as handles all aspects of data breach investigations (crisis management, working with law enforcement and forensic firms, crisis and PR firms, as well as board, auditor and investor communications, advice on global notification obligations, and analysis of cyber insurance). She has litigated high profile landmark cases in this space, including one of the first bank online hacking cases to have been litigated to an appeals court. She provides counseling on cyber and physical security programs, in particular for high target companies.

Ms. Sharton has 30 years of experience in all manner of complex commercial litigation, internal investigations, arbitrations and civil government regulatory matters, involving contract claims, trade secret, post-closing disputes, non-compete, false advertising, business torts, fiduciary duties, banking and trust claims, fraud, minority shareholder and partnership disputes, among others. She is experienced with virtually every type of civil claim brought against financial services institutions, banks and asset managers and has a deep expertise in the financial services industry (including fintech and digital currency), as well as in the technology, life sciences, healthcare and artificial intelligence industries. Ms. Sharton has successfully tried cases to conclusion in federal and state courts throughout the country, and has represented clients in the full range of ADR procedures. In addition to trial work, she has defended government enforcement actions brought by an alphabet soup of federal and state regulators, including the SEC, FDIC, FTC, FINRA, DOL, FDA, HUD, OCC, HHS/OCR and the CFPB, among others.

Ms. Sharton has been recommended for commercial litigation, financial services litigation, and privacy and cybersecurity/breach response work by The Legal 500 United States consecutively for nearly a decade. She is named to Cybersecurity Docket’s Incident Response 40 list,  the best data breach response lawyers in the business.  She has been listed in U.S. News-Best Lawyers in the practice areas of Commercial Litigation, Litigation - Banking and Finance and, Mass Tort Litigation/Class Action - Defendants. A recognized thought leader, Ms. Sharton frequently writes on cybersecurity, having published and/or been quoted in publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, Law360, Risk Management and Practical Law, among others. She has also lectured at the Federal Reserve Bank, numerous state Bank Associations, the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Harvard Law School executive leadership program. 

Prior to joining Dechert, Ms. Sharton was a senior partner, global practice group leader and member of the executive committee at another leading international law firm.