It was the end of the week when Jamie Hine heard from a private lawyer he’d worked with several times through his career at Federal Trade Commission.

The lawyer did not have all the facts but wanted to alert Hine, a senior attorney in the FTC’s division of privacy and identity protection, about a client’s data breach. Recounting the phone call at a conference in Washington on Wednesday, Hine said the lawyer passed along “high-level” bullet points on the breach, outlined the steps the company had taken in response and asked to schedule a follow-up call for the following week.