Butzel Long attorney Claudia Rast reappointed to ABA Cybersecurity Legal Task Force
ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Butzel Long attorney and shareholder Claudia Rast has been reappointed to serve on the American Bar Association (ABA) Cybersecurity Legal Task Force. To date, she has served six one-year terms since this Task Force was created in 2012.
Task Force members are charged with examining risks posed by criminals, terrorists and nations that seek to steal personal and financial information, disrupt critical infrastructure, and wage cyberwar.
In 2017, Rast co-authored a chapter to the second edition of The ABA Cybersecurity Handbook. Her current ABA book project, for which she is a co-author, is due to be published in early 2020 and is entitled, Cyber Incident Response Handbook: A Resource for Attorneys, Law Firms, and Business Professionals.
Rast, who serves as Butzel Long’s Intellectual Property Practice Department Chair, blends her expertise in law, business, and science to assist companies in their strategic use of technology, counseling clients in the areas of privacy, cybersecurity, data theft, intellectual property licensing and registration, and the forensic preservation and analysis of electronically stored information.
With the rise of cyber events in recent years, her background in forensics, IT environments and security has proved invaluable in working with clients to both defend against and respond to pervasive cyber attacks and to conduct cybersecurity awareness and response training sessions.
Similarly, over the past several years, she has worked within both the IT entrepreneur community and the automotive supplier network to negotiate contracts covering innovative technologies associated with autonomous and connected vehicles, to address security, privacy, IP ownership, and new and potential regulations.
Rast is an experienced environmental lawyer, focusing on alternative energy and sustainability practices, including work on the development of a global Rule of Law Index for environment and energy with the World Justice Project. This past May she moderated an environmental rule of law panel in the Netherlands at The Hague sponsored by the World Justice Forum.
She is a frequent national speaker on matters ranging from cybersecurity, privacy, data breach, eDiscovery, and social media. In addition, she has published numerous articles including an online course for CPE credit.
Her memberships include the American Bar Association's Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, where she has been involved in the leadership of the Section since 1999, including Chair of the Section in 2008-2009, Ann Arbor's New Enterprise Forum Board of Directors (2008-2017), the Michigan League of Conservation Voters Board of Directors (2008-2013), ICLE's Technology Training Advisory Board (1998-2017), and the Children’s Leukemia Foundation of Michigan Board of Directors (2017-present). In 2001, she was the only lawyer named as a Technology Industry Leader in Crain's Detroit Business, and in 2003 the Ann Arbor Chapter of American Women in Computing named her as one of twenty "Top Michigan Women in Computing." In 2015, she was named by Michigan Lawyers Weekly as a “Leader in the Law.”
Rast is a graduate of the University of Michigan (B.S., Natural Resources) and cum laude graduate of the University of Detroit School of Law, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the University of Detroit Law Review. In 2014, she successfully completed the four-week online program, "Tackling the Challenges of Big Data," developed and taught by the faculty of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in collaboration with MIT Professional Education.
