Companies have a business and legal imperative to understand their data practices. To ensure compliance with data protection laws in a quickly evolving landscape, they need to understand what data they collect and how they use, share, sell, store, and secure that data.

As new privacy laws are enacted in the United States and abroad, businesses must confront the challenge of developing and adapting their privacy programs to address novel legal and regulatory obligations. A foundational step in developing a compliant and effective privacy program is for companies to understand and document their business’s data practices. Once this baseline understanding has been established, companies can begin to benchmark their practices against applicable privacy laws and regulations and identify and remediate compliance gaps.

Businesses require a simple and effective way to document and track their data practices and to keep that record current. Perkins Coie’s Data Navigator helps fulfill this need. Data Navigator is our proprietary solution for helping organizations capture, analyze, and report on their data practices. It was designed by our Privacy & Security attorneys specifically to help companies address their legal compliance obligations.

Data Navigator utilizes a step-by-step wizard to help businesses build an accurate and detailed inventory of the data they collect and how that data is used, shared, sold, stored, retained, or otherwise processed. It also offers robust reporting capabilities to help visualize these data practices. Clients can use Data Navigator on their own or work collaboratively with our Privacy & Security team to build out and maintain their data maps.