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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