Alex Smallwood

Alex Smallwood advises a wide range of global clients on all elements of cyber resilience, incident response and resulting regulatory investigations.

Mr. Smallwood has extensive experience counseling clients on complex, multijurisdictional cyber matters involving ransomware, extortion, insider threats, bad leavers, fraudulent payments, technical outages and attacks by nation-state actors. An experienced breach coach, he regularly guides some of the world’s largest and most high-profile organizations throughout the lifecycle of a cyberattack, helping them to mitigate the operational, financial, legal and reputational risks associated with major incidents.

In addition, Mr. Smallwood’s practice focuses on advising clients on cyber incident preparedness and emerging cyber, AI and data privacy regulations. He is also experienced in commercial litigation, having advised a host of prominent individuals, companies and international organizations on contentious data privacy, reputational and commercial disputes.

A selection of Mr. Smallwood’s work includes:

• responding to complex ransomware/extortion attempts, technology failures and data breaches, including resultant international regulatory notifications, data reviews and communications with staff, regulators and commercial partners
• advising on cyberattacker/threat actor engagement and negotiation strategy in conjunction with leading cyber extortion negotiation firms
• conducting tabletop exercises to help companies prepare for cyber and business continuity incidents involving ransomware, insider threats, nation-state attacks and third-party and supply chain attacks
• drafting and revising numerous data privacy policies, procedures and disclosures, covering regulations such as EU/UK GDPR, DORA and NIS2
• a variety of complex data privacy matters, including those involving data transfers and cross-border data subject access requests