Laura Irvine

As Head of the Regulatory Team at Davidson Chalmers Stewart and a Criminal Solicitor Advocate, I represent corporate clients and individuals who find themselves in trouble with the Regulators: whether the police, HSE, SEPA, ICO or any of the other Government agencies who are increasingly involved in the regulation of all that we do in the work place.

As a former procurator fiscal depute with COPFS, with 20 years of working throughout the court of Scotland, I know my way around the criminal justice system and provide my clients with invaluable insight into what to expect from regulators and the Crown.

I am also passionate about data protection, privacy and information law and I was part of the only legal team in the UK to have successfully overturned a data breach fine imposed under the Data Protection Act 1998 – see Scottish Borders Council v the Information Commissioner

I provide my clients with contentious and non-contentious data protection advice having spent 2017 and 2018 advising clients across all sectors on how to implement the changes that the General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018 brought in. I wrote the GDPR Guide for the Law Society of Scotland and worked on an immersive GDPR training app with Droman Solutions and the Scottish Business Resilience Centre (SBRC).

I also advise on cyber security law, working collaboratively with many of the cyber security firms in Scotland.

I am a co-founder of Protectors of Data Scotland, a MeetUp group of ‘data protection geeks’ with over 200 members.