NT Analyzer data privacy detection tool wins top prize from Financial Times for innovation

As a part of its annual North American Innovative Lawyers series, The Financial Times has honored Norton Rose Fulbright’s NT Analyzer, a data privacy detection tool, by naming it the winner of its 2019 New Products and Services Award in North America.

NT Analyzer—short for Network Traffic Analyzer—helps clients detect when personal or proprietary information ends up with third parties in violation of privacy laws and regulations. The NT Analyzer tool suite tests clients’ mobile apps, websites, and Internet of Things (IoT) services to help them detect data privacy problems and remedy legal compliance issues.

With products judged on the basis of originality, leadership and impact, NT Analyzer earned the most points, 25 out of 30, including a score of 9 for originality. The tool suite bested 12 other products, including those from the four next highest vote-getters: Dentons; Latham & Watkins; Creel, Garcia-Cuellar, Aiza y Enriquez; and Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt.

The New Products and Services Award is one of the Financial Times’ Innovative Lawyers awards, established to break with the usual way of judging lawyers by revenues, profits or size of deals. Instead, the awards spotlight the real value that lawyers provide to business and lawyers and law firms by furthering the interests of clients, their own firms and the legal profession.

FT Innovative Lawyers bases its awards on the Financial Times’ own reporting and independent research by RSG Consulting, a specialist research and consulting company with decades of experience analyzing the legal industry.

NT Analyzer was developed and is spearheaded by Steven B. Roosa (New York), Norton Rose Fulbright's US Head of NRF Digital Analytics and Technology Assessment Platform, and Chris Cwalina (Washington, DC), the firm's Global Co-Head of Data Protection, Privacy and Cybersecurity. Daniel B. Rosenzweig (Washington, DC), also key in NT Analyzer's development and legal application, accepted the award on the firm's behalf.

The tool suite detects when data is transmitted or disclosed in violation of legal baselines such as ePrivacy, the California Consumer Privacy Act, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, HIPAA, and the General Data Protection Regulation (the European Union law on data privacy).

NT Analyzer applies these various legal baselines and is powerful enough that clients' technical teams can use the information to conduct remediation. It also provides attractive features allowing users to navigate from high-level summaries to particular data of interest into the full network traffic itself. This provides in-house counsel and companies' development teams with visibility they cannot obtain elsewhere.

No other commercial tool tracks personal data sharing at such a technical level, much less applies the technical facts to relevant legal baselines.