Patrick N. O’Brien

Patrick N. O'Brien counsels organizations on complex privacy, cybersecurity, and data governance matters, helping clients identify, manage, and reduce legal risk across the full lifecycle of their data and technology operations.

As an associate in Ice Miller's Tech, Privacy & Cyber Risk practice, Patrick works at the intersection of privacy counseling and technology transactions. He advises clients on the review and negotiation of privacy policies, terms of use, vendor agreements, and data processing agreements, ensuring that contractual commitments reflect how systems are actually deployed, integrated, and operated. He supports the firm's technology transactions team on SaaS, cloud, and enterprise licensing arrangements where data security and privacy risk are core deal terms, not afterthoughts.

Patrick's counseling practice spans compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other evolving state and federal privacy frameworks. He advises organizations on data breach preparedness and incident response, guiding clients through notification obligations, regulatory communications, and remediation strategies. Patrick counsels clients on website accessibility, advertising technology tracking risks, and the regulatory exposure created by pixels, cookies, and similar web-based tracking tools, an area of increasing enforcement activity and litigation risk.

His work also includes policy development for generative artificial intelligence (AI), the design of privacy programs and risk mitigation strategies for data sharing, software licensing risk analysis, and third-party vendor assessments.