Randy V. Sabett, CISSP, is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, where he is a member of the Internet, Communications & Data Protection Practice. He counsels clients on information security, privacy, IT licensing, and patents, dealing with such issues as Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), digital and electronic signatures, federated identity, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Sarbanes-Oxley, state and federal information security and privacy laws, identity theft and security breaches. Mr. Sabett served as a Commissioner for the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency. He has been recognized as a leader in Privacy & Data Security in the 2007, 2008 and 2009 editions of Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business and is listed in the International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers. He also was named as one of the “Top 50 Under 45” by the American Lawyer’s IP Law and Business magazine.
Mr. Sabett helps companies develop strategies to protect their intellectual property, including preparing and prosecuting patents related to cryptography, authentication, security, certification and accreditation, and related areas of technology. He also drafts and negotiates a wide variety of technology transaction agreements, including software licenses, OEM agreements, ASP agreements, technology development and licensing agreements, template agreements, and joint marketing and collaboration agreements. Having previously served as an in-house counsel to a Silicon Valley start up, Mr. Sabett employs a pragmatic approach when structuring and negotiating such agreements.
Prior to joining Sonnenschein, Mr. Sabett was a Special Counsel at Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, where he founded the Information Security and Cybercrime practice group. He also served as Senior Technology Counsel for a Silicon Valley information security company. He began his legal career as an associate at Venable, Baetjer, Howard & Civiletti, LLP in Washington, D.C. Additionally, Mr. Sabett has several years of engineering experience in the information security marketplace and has worked in active noise cancellation, as well as having served with the National Security Agency as a crypto engineer. He holds two U.S. patents, one in the area of information security (U.S. Patent No. 6,981,149) and the other in the area of active noise cancellation (U.S. Patent No. 5,440,642).
Professional Affiliations and Publications
Mr. Sabett is a member of the Council of the Section of Science and Technology Law of the American Bar Association. He is also the Immediate Past Co-Chair of that section’s Information Security Committee, having previously served as a Co-Vice Chair (2002-2004). Within that committee, he has also served as editor for the book “Information Security: A Legal, Business, and Technical Handbook” (2004) and the Digital Signature Guidelines (1996), and was a Co-Rapporteur for the PKI Assessment Guidelines (PAG) (2003). Mr. Sabett is a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) and is on the Correspondents Panel for the Computer Law and Security Report, an Elsevier publication.
Mr. Sabett is a co-author of several publications, including “Beautiful Security” (2009), “Foundations of Digital Evidence” (2008), RFC 3647 (Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate Policy and Certification Practices Framework) (2003) and was also a member of the X9F5 working group within the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) that developed American National Standard (ANS) X9.79, the “PKI Practices and Policy Framework” (2000).
Mr. Sabett teaches Information Policy as an adjunct professor at George Washington University and is on the faculty of the Institute for Applied Network Security. He is also a speaker and frequent lecturer on issues involving information security and writes the monthly column “Sabett’s Brief” for the ISSA Journal.