Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Pennsylvania High Court Finds Duty to Safeguard Employee Information; Lexology, November 26, 2018

Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, Lexology; Pennsylvania High Court Finds Duty to Safeguard Employee Information

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court handed the state’s employees a major legal victory last week when it decided that employers have an affirmative legal responsibility to protect the confidential information of its employees...

In reversing two lower courts, the justices ruled that, by collecting and storing employee’s personal information as a pre-condition to employment, employers had the legal duty to take reasonable steps to protect that information from a cyber-attack...

The ruling revives a proposed class action lawsuit against the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and one of its hospitals, UPMC McKeesport, after a 2014 data breach in which hackers allegedly stole the personal information of 62,000 former and current employees...

Whether the ruling is viewed narrowly as confined to its facts, or more broadly as establishing a general legal duty to safeguard confidential information, there is little question that the decision marks an important development in tort law governing data breach cases...

The case is Dittman et al. v. UPMC, Case No. 43 WAP 2017."

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