Why Legal Teams & Tech Companies Should Think About Data Privacy “Early and Often” (Chris Handman TerraTrue COO & Co-Founder)

Technically Legal - A Legal Technology and Innovation Podcast

In this episode Chris Handman, COO and Co-Founder of data privacy management app TerraTrue, talks about Shifting Left with data privacy. “Shift left” is a concept used to identify defects and bugs early in the software development process before deployment.

This is also how Chris and his team think legal departments, privacy officers and compliance professionals should think about data privacy.

TerraTrue is a data privacy management platform that companies can use and integrate with the other software (like Jira and Slack) to get people thinking about the data privacy implications of products they are building while they are building them.

Chris explains that with the continued growth of privacy regulations, companies cannot just ship software and hope to deal with privacy issues after the fact.

Chris ended up in the data privacy world after a successful career as a lawyer in private practice. Chris worked as an appellate lawyer right out of law school and handled high profile cases in front of federal appellate courts including the United States Supreme Court.

After a few years, an executive search firm contacted Chris about becoming Snapchat’s first general counsel. He had been doing more and more privacy work in his appellate practice and people began to notice. Chris made the jump to Snapchat and hit the ground running.

Among other intense and high profile legal cases he had to deal with, the FTC was all over Snapchat about data privacy issues that ultimately ended in a consent decree.

In 2017 Chris left Snapchat, took a little time off with his family, and began talking to some of his old Snap colleagues about building a new company. That is when TerraTrue was born.