Natasha G. Kohne

Kohne is a co-head of Akin Gump’s cybersecurity, privacy and data protection practice. In addition, she has an international legal practice focused on investigations, litigation, regulatory and compliance matters, often involving complex multi-jurisdictional and cross-border challenges. Her clients include global financial services, sovereign wealth and government-backed vehicles, private equity and hedge fund managers and other multinational conglomerates in retail, transportation, health, energy and technology.

A dozen years ago, she opened the firm’s Abu Dhabi offices, where she remains co-managing partner. “It’s one of the fastest-growing emerging economies,” she said, “and fortunately the business language there is English. Before the pandemic, I traveled there once a month…and then, March 2020 rolled around. I’m so sad, because I miss traveling and meeting with my international friends and clients. Now I’m having to connect with people without sitting in front of them.”

Kohne represents clients in the U.S., the Middle East and in other international markets in risk assessments and the mitigation and management of cyber intrusions along with related privacy and security incident response preparation.

A second Middle East office in Dubai is back open and active, while the Abu Dhabi shop remains more cautious about reopening. “Even so, things are going smoothly over there,” she said.

In California, Kohne led Akin Gump’s lobbying efforts to revise the 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act. She performed targeted work with legislators and activists in Sacramento and has since provided insights and analysis to clients, whose names she keeps confidential. Now, with additional privacy legislation on the ballot in the form of Proposition 24, the Consumer Personal Information Law and Agency Initiative, she said in late October that a passing vote would lead to “the only statute of its kind in the nation, with an additional tier of consumer privacy protections.”

She has begun preparing clients for Prop. 24’s likely passage. “There’s a two-year runway, with implementation set for Jan. 1, 2023,” she said. “Companies here are now thinking like a lot of their counterparts in Europe,” where the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union has been in place since May 2018.

“Companies here are having to go through what European companies went through” to prepare for the new measure.

Kohne also advises international investment management firms and other cross-border clients on The Privacy Shield, a framework arrangement between the U.S. and the E.U. and Switzerland and the U.S. to enable the transmission of personal data among them.

She believes that in addition to those rules, Congress may be getting closer to its stated intention to pass a federal privacy bill. “I work on that with our firm’s public law and policy practice in D.C.,” she said. “Regulation is needed, but you can’t move the pendulum too far too fast.”

— John Roemer