By Privacy law has grown too large for a single conference track to cover, and the organizers behind the Privacy + Security Forum seem to agree. Their Fall Academy, running out of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. starting November 4, 2026, trades the usual conference format of back-to-back panels for something closer to a training course: extended sessions that let attendees actually dig into a topic instead of skimming it.
That structure matters for an audience of privacy attorneys, compliance officers, and in-house counsel who are expected to not just understand data protection law but apply it correctly under deadline pressure. A forty-five-minute panel is enough to learn that a new state privacy statute exists. It is rarely enough to learn how to build a compliant data mapping process around it. The Fall Academy’s longer sessions are built for the second kind of learning.
The 2026 program lands at a moment when the regulatory picture in the United States has become genuinely difficult to track. States continue adding comprehensive privacy laws at a steady pace, each with its own definitions, thresholds, and enforcement mechanisms, while federal agencies push forward on cybersecurity rules that touch everything from healthcare to critical infrastructure. Attorneys advising multistate businesses are increasingly expected to maintain a working map of obligations that shifts every few months. Sessions at the Fall Academy are designed to help with exactly that, walking through state-by-state compliance strategy alongside deeper technical material on cybersecurity incident response and vendor risk management.
Washington is a deliberate choice of location. GW sits close to the agencies and congressional offices actively shaping privacy and cybersecurity policy, and the Fall Academy typically pulls in current and former regulators as speakers, giving attendees a vantage point on how enforcement priorities are shifting that is hard to replicate from case law alone. For attorneys building a privacy and data security practice, understanding where regulators are likely to focus next is often more useful than knowing where they focused last year.
The forum’s broader identity, built around the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ orbit and reinforced by firms like Alston & Bird that maintain active privacy and cybersecurity practices, gives the event credibility with a technically sophisticated audience. Alston & Bird has published details on the fall sessions, including timing and format, through its own events page. Alston & Bird’s event listing is a useful starting point for attorneys deciding whether the academy format fits their CLE and training needs this year.
Legal marketing teams and law firm business development professionals should also take note. Data breach litigation and regulatory investigations have become a reliable source of client work, and firms that want to be seen as credible players in that space need attorneys who can speak fluently about both the legal and technical sides of a breach. Sending associates to a program like this is one of the more direct ways to build that credibility rather than simply claiming it in marketing copy.
Litigators handling data privacy disputes may find the sessions on enforcement trends particularly relevant given how active state attorneys general have become in this area. Attorneys Mag’s reporting on the Texas data privacy lawsuit against Netflix brought by Attorney General Ken Paxton offers useful background on how aggressively states are now pursuing companies over data handling practices, a trend likely to come up repeatedly throughout the Fall Academy’s sessions.
For a law student or junior associate trying to decide whether privacy and cybersecurity law is worth specializing in, this is a reasonable low-risk way to test the waters. The field is growing faster than most corners of legal practice, and programs like the Fall Academy are where the next generation of privacy counsel tends to get its first real exposure to the regulators and senior practitioners shaping the field.
Last updated on: November 3, 2026