As a law student, Anne Toomey McKenna worked as a research assistant for a professor who happened to be working on a treatise on wiretapping. McKenna thought she was headed for a career as a civil litigator and took the opportunity as kind of a one-off thought exercise, something that was unlikely to shape much of her career.

Quickly, she realized she was wrong. McKenna found the knowledge base she’d developed while working on this system was a far bigger question for the organizations she was working with than she’d expected. Questions about phone call retention quickly evolved into data retention, and before she knew it, she was a cyber law expert.