Freedman strives for online security

UP FOR A CHALLENGE: Linn Foster Freedman’s career has been defined by high-profile cases locally and across the nation. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
UP FOR A CHALLENGE: Linn Foster Freedman’s career has been defined by high-profile cases locally and across the nation. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Medical records, credit card data, your Social Security number – all that information is stored in computers. Passwords and firewalls protect that information, and today the law does as well.
One of the experts in that emerging legal field is Linn Foster Freedman, a partner in the Providence office of Nixon Peabody LLP, an international firm with 700 attorneys. She leads its privacy and data protection group, a team of 22 lawyers – all information-security experts – in offices around the globe.
“It’s only been a field for the past five years,” Freedman said. “[Data security is] growing and it’s rapidly changing, because the laws haven’t been able to keep up with the technology.”
Freedman previously blazed a trail in courtrooms with litigation battles she took on as top lieutenant to the state attorney general.
She began her career in Louisiana, studying at Tulane University and Loyola University School of Law. When her husband, physician Steve Freedman, was ready to begin his medical residency, they relocated to Rhode Island.
After several years with Gidley, Sarli & Marusak, she joined the office of the state attorney general in 1998. She was soon promoted to deputy chief of the civil division, a post she held until 2003.
Working under Sheldon Whitehouse before he became a U.S. senator, she handled a number of high-profile cases and projects.
“I loved working in the attorney general’s office,” she said. “There’s nothing better than walking into a court and saying, ‘I represent the people of the state of Rhode Island.’ ”
The biggest legal battle the office took on at that time was a first-of-its-kind suit against paint manufacturers – demanding the industry pay for cleaning up lead hazards in homes throughout Rhode Island. Freedman was the lead prosecutor in the first eight-week trial, which ended in a hung jury. In 2006 – after Freedman’s move to Nixon Peabody – jurors decided in favor of the state, but the R.I. Supreme Court later overturned the verdict, dismissing the case. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she recalled. “We were the first in the nation, and everyone else was watching. We were definitely the underdog. They fought a hard fight.”
She also got a splash of exposure in celebrity tabloids when she defended state employees against a lawsuit filed by Richard Hatch, the Ocean Stater who became a national celebrity after winning the million-dollar prize in the first season of the CBS show “Survivor.”
Hatch, who was raising a foster son, was charged with child abuse after some parental difficulties. The charge was eventually dropped, but before that, Hatch filed a suit against the R.I. Department of Children, Youth & Families. Freedman got his suit dismissed as well, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals later re-affirmed the ruling.
While working with Whitehouse, Freedman was involved with creating the Rhode Island Quality Institute, a nonprofit set up to improve the quality and safety of health care in the state. In 1999, Lifespan and Care New England began discussing a merger. Eventually the plan was dropped, but the issues raised about changes in health care stayed at the forefront. The first institute meeting was in January 2000, and they have continued ever since.
“[Whitehouse] wanted to make sure the merger would not impact the quality of care to patients,” she said. One of the biggest concerns was the privacy of health care information, which during that time was being moved from filing cabinets into computer databases. In 2008, Freedman helped draft state legislation aimed at safeguarding records stored and exchanged electronically. Rhode Island’s Health Information Exchange Act of 2008 is considered the most stringent law of its kind in the nation.
Now in the privacy field, Freedman has continued working on important other cases as well.
In 2008, she took on a case involving allegations of torture at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where the U.S. military holds “enemy combatants” from the War on Terror. Freedman provided pro-bono representation for Louisiana psychologist Trudy Bond, who requested the state’s board of examiners conduct an ethics review of another in her profession who had done work at the facility. The board dismissed the complaint, and when Freedman appealed to a state district judge, he ruled he had no authority to address the board’s decision.
“It was a sad one to lose,” Freedman said. “It was very politicized. … The court did not want to deal with it.”
As leader of Nixon Peabody’s data-protection team, Freedman not only handles medical issues, but also civil rights investigations and emergency data-breach response. She is responsible for the group’s budget, marketing and client retention.
Freedman also leads the firm’s team that assists clients with compliance to the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which protects health-insurance coverage for workers and their families when they change jobs. She has published articles on privacy and security, and is a frequent speaker at national conferences. &#8226

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