This sort of thing seems to happen a lot. Legal departments are responsible for making sure the company doesn't get sued, and are not really responsible for wor

This sort of thing seems to happen a lot. Legal departments are responsible for making sure the company doesn't get sued, and are not really responsible for working towards company success. So Legal's arse gets covered by denying absolutely everything that they don't believe is guaranteed legal, and the company loses business because things become unreasonable. I think legal should instead be more risk management, working for the benefit of the company to manage the legal risk rather than minimize it, and stay within ethical boundaries. It already is risk management, since all legal departments have to work with are their opinions and not facts about how future rulings will go, so it is just a case of accepting it. In the above example, it seems like that didn't happen, with lawyers creating a wall of red tape costing money and annoying customers, instead of realizing the risk was minimal, and if they were at all competent they could easily argue their case even if the low risk event occurred. And it is even more insane blindly accepting this sort of advice with GDPR, worrying about getting sued for for theoretical edge cases when the first round of warnings haven't even gone out to the worst offenders yet.