Bird & Bird participates in EU GDPR project DEFeND

The DEFeND project (Data Governance for Supporting GDPR), which started on 1 July, is a research and innovation project with a duration of 30 months funded by the EU Commission (2,737,300.00€). It aims at delivering an innovative data privacy governance platform to support organisations in their efforts towards GDPR compliance. The platform will empower organisations in different sectors to assess the compliance status with the GDPR, plan the achievement of GDPR compliance and increase their maturity in different aspects of the GDPR. It will provide 5 main services to assist organisations in collecting, analysing and operationalising different components and articles of the GDPR and to provide appropriate reporting capabilities: Data Scope Management Service, Data Process Management Service, Data Breach Management Service, GDPR Planning Service, and GDPR Reporting Service. The platform will be budget-available and will be adapted to the special needs of the organisations. It will be tested in living labs pilots in four different areas: healthcare, banks, energy, and local public administration.

Bird & Bird has been invited to join the Consortium of 10 partners which includes ATOS, the University of Brighton, Business-e, PDM E FC Projecto Desenvolvimento Manutencao Formacao e Consultadorialda, the Ionian University, Gridpocket, ABILab - Centro di Ricerca e Innovazione per la Banca, Fundación para la Investigación Biomédica Hospital Infantil Universitario Niño Jesús, and Peshtera Municipality. The Brussels team advising on the project comprises partner Benoit Van Asbroeck and associates Julien Debussche, Jasmien César, and Isis De Moortel. The team is responsible for the privacy and security compliance of the DEFeND platform. They are in charge of formalising and defining the privacy and security requirements of the platform as well as assessing its compliance. The team is also in charge of the compliance and ethics management of the whole project, and will provide the necessary legal support to the other partners, WPs and Pilots.

Benoit Van Asbroeck, Tech & Comms specialist and Data Protection partner at Bird & Bird said:

"We are delighted to participate to the DEFeND project. Our long-standing and extended expertise in Privacy and Data Protection will add valuable and practical insight to the project, particularly after the many GDPR compliance projects we have been carrying out for our clients. The platform will be a very useful tool for all types of organisations and we are thrilled to be part of its development."

The DEFeND project is financed by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union under Grant Agreement number: 787068.