Donna L. Wilson

Monday, March 9, was the long-anticipated day when Donna L. Wilson, the CEO and managing partner of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, moved the firm into its new flagship offices in Century City.

"I looked at my phone and saw that the stock market was crashing, there was the worst oil crisis since 1973--plus a pandemic," she recalled. "I paused and said, 'We're Manatt; we got this.'"

Wilson took over last year and oversaw a major overhaul of the firm's IT infrastructure. "It was a fantastic tech update. So in March at the flip of a switch we were all on line remotely. Now I'm running a 330-million-dollar business out of my den with my dogs in the background. We have a strategic path, and economic downturn and pandemic be damned."

Instead of the planned firm annual retreat she instituted weekly remote sessions on topics she described as "inclusion," "grit and resilience" and "client services." "Challenges may exist in the world, but we continue."

Within days of the start of the coronavirus crisis, Wilson had established a Covid-19 Client Service Response Team, which she chairs, drawing on her expertise in privacy and data security. "The idea is to keep an eye on the horizon for emerging client needs," she said. That task fits with her ongoing role in advising companies in a wide range of industries, including financial services and healthcare organizations, on the seismic shift in the landscape of data privacy law in California in the wake of the California Consumer Privacy Act, which took effect Jan. 1.

Wilson doesn't name clients, but she noted an example of her duties included her with a large national health innovation company on a CCPA compliance initiative that addressed the risks associated with the new law and its relation to the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act, which requires financial institutions to disclose how they share and protect their customers' private information.

"The California AG is looking at enforcement now," Wilson said. "Our entire team is helping with this, because this will be an extremely active area." An added complication is that a November ballot initiative seeks to expand the law and create a new organization to be called the California Privacy Protection Agency.

"There's a lot to criticize about it, and it will cause a real struggle for clients," Wilson said. "It's like flying the plane while building it."

In mid-August she said she'd been back to Century City only once, to show her teenage daughter the new space. "She's hard to impress, but she said it totally didn't look like a professional services firm. It's truly a dynamic space. That delighted me."

-- John Roemer