Understanding Encryption & Cryptography: A Technical Primer for Legal Professionals
As encryption and cryptography increasingly intersect with privacy law, criminal procedure, export controls, national security, and emerging regulatory frameworks, legal professionals with a working understanding of this technology are better equipped to counsel their clients, resolve their problems, and be assured that encryption does in fact meet the confidentiality requirements of ABA professional responsibility Rule 1.6. Nevertheless, lawyers still need to take precaution in creating sophisticated passwords and applying encryption to data-at-rest, data-in-transit, and data-in-use. With apologies to those lawyers who joined the legal field to get away from math, this article includes certain mathematical concepts underlying cryptography and encryption technology.
Thomas C. Reynolds
Thomas C. Reynolds is a former Executive Secretary of the Export- Import Bank of the United States and an international trade and investment lawyer with over a decade of experience in export controls, sanctions, customs and national security law. He is currently a Technology Law & Policy LLM candidate at Georgetown University Law Center, and he earned his JD from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent College of Law in 2013, and BA from the University of Florida in 2009 (double major in Political Science and Religion). Thanks go out to Prof. Paul Ohm, Andrew Jakab, Joey Tonzi, and the rest of the GLTR staff for their helpful feedback. © 2025, Thomas Reynolds.