Ellen Blanchard, Esq. & Rodney Blake

  

Ellen Blanchard is the associate general counsel and director of eDiscovery consulting for Evolver. Ms. Blanchard brings deep knowledge of the intersection of litigation, big data and technology. Ellen regularly works with clients from a wide variety of industries to help them assess, select and implement enterprise technology to support their legal and compliance needs. Prior to joining Evolver, Ms. Blanchard was an associate at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, where she represented several Fortune 50 companies in a variety of complex litigation matters.

Ms. Blanchard earned her J.D. from American University, and Bachelor's degrees in International Business, Japanese Studies and Psychology from Ohio Wesleyan University. She is admitted to the Washington State Bar, Virginia Bar, and District of Columbia Bar.

Rodney Blake is the Program Manager for Evolver’s contract with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). He is responsible for the personnel, budget and strategy of network and security operations. Mr. Blake has over twenty years of experience in the information technology field. Prior to USPTO and 2010 Census contracts with Evolver, Mr. Blake spent five years at Freddie Mac, lastly as an Operational Risk Management Director. He holds an MBA from Virginia Tech and a Bachelor of Engineering Technology from University of South Florida.

Recent Articles by

Law firms are the new target for IP theft: Basic Protections

At a minimum, two-factor authentication rather than a single password, should be used to protect most types of confidential data. With two-factor authentication, the user is required to use two of the following three forms of identification – something they know (password or PIN), something they possess (a token or USB stick) or a physical characteristic of the user (finger swipe) in order to gain access to the data. For more sensitive data, a multi-factor approach offers an even higher degree of security. In multi-factor authentication, a user must use three or more forms of identification. For example, in addition to a password and a token, users are required to answer one or more custom questions, known only to the user.

Black Hats Look for Low Hanging Fruit: Law firms are the new target for IP theft

The USPTO has also created an increasingly sophisticated cyber security defense system to protect the nation’s patents and related information. In this multi-layered system, the USPTO guards against virtually every possible type of intrusion, protecting their systems against a multitude of potential denizens, from lone wolf to suspected nation-state Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attackers. Compared to the USPTO, or even corporations, most law firms are easy targets and the client IP on their networks is low hanging fruit that is all too easily harvested. Too many law firms still view ‘reasonable’ security as signature-based (passwords) access and malware protection, like McAfee, as good enough. Today, it is not nearly enough.