Stewart Room is a partner in our Technology Practice,
within the privacy and
information law group. He is dual qualified as a
Barrister and a Solicitor holding full Higher Court Rights of
Audience.
He has considerable expertise and reputation in data protection
and privacy law matters, contentious and non-contentious. His
non-contentious experience covers auditing, consulting, advice on
the exercise of data subject rights, compensation claims, direct
marketing, data security, data retention, data access and
transborder data flows, drafting of documents (company rules and
procedures, controller-processor contracts, employment contracts,
privacy statements) and management and worker training. His
contentious experience covers both civil and criminal data
protection and privacy cases and he is heavily involved in
defending data controllers and individuals in prosecutions brought
by the Information Commissioner.
He is a regular contributor to legal and academic
journals. Recent publications including "Access to Stored
Communications and Traffic Data by Law Enforcement Agencies" (the
Communications Law Journal), "Hard-core Spammers Beware" and
"Data-Sharing - Efficiency or Confusion?" (both for the New Law
Journal). He has also written a book on the subject, "Data
Protection and Compliance in Context" (November 2006) as well as
the data protection chapter in "Goode: Consumer Credit Law and
Practice" (2005). He undertakes media work, appearing as the
UK legal expert in the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary "The Data
Theft Scandal", which exposed security failings in the Indian Call
Centre industry (2006).
Stewart is a member of The Honourable Society of the Middle
Temple, The Law Society, the British Computer Society, the Society
for Computers and Law and the National Association of Data
Protection and Freedom of Information Officers. He sits on the
British Computer Society’s Information Privacy Expert Panel, is a
member of The Sedona Conference expert working group on
electronically stored information and he is the elected Chairman of
the National Association of Data Protection and Freedom of
Information Officers (since 2004).
He is a visiting lecturer on data protection at Queen Mary,
University of London.