Mark Paul Szpak is an American lawyer and a retired partner at Ropes & Gray LLP in Boston, Massachusetts. He is known for complex commercial litigation and for his work as a data breach and privacy litigator. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and was admitted to practice law in Massachusetts in 1985.
Education
Szpak received an A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1977 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Harvard College, the undergraduate college of Harvard University, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, founded in 1636.
He then attended Harvard Law School, where he received a Juris Doctor in 1984. Founded in 1817, the school is one of the oldest law schools in the United States and became a leading center of American legal education.
At the Law School he served as co-chair of the Articles Office of the Harvard Law Review, the student-edited journal founded in 1887 that selects and edits scholarly articles. In 1984 The Harvard Crimson described him as the outgoing articles director and reported that the department received about 600 manuscripts annually.
Career
Szpak was admitted to practice law in Massachusetts in 1985 and in New Hampshire in 1986. His admissions also include the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First and Seventh Circuits, and federal district courts in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. His professional career was centered at Ropes & Gray LLP, a Boston law firm, where he became a partner. A later Ropes & Gray biography describes him as a retired partner.
His practice covered complex litigation, including business and commercial disputes, class actions, intellectual property, securities fraud, regulatory enforcement, and bankruptcy matters. He became known as a data breach and privacy litigator. His experience includes assisting companies such as The Home Depot, Sony, Arby's, athenahealth, Heartland Payment Systems, The TJX Companies, Neiman Marcus, and Wyndham Hotels in responding to breach and privacy incidents, from forensic investigations to dealings with regulators and the defense of multidistrict class actions in the United States and Canada.
Earlier in his practice he was one of the lead lawyers defending Gillette against a multidistrict consumer class action over advertising for its M3Power razor. He also worked on the response of The TJX Companies to a significant unauthorized computer network intrusion. Breach notification requirements under state laws created a growing area of practice in which companies needed counsel for incident response, regulatory matters, and class action defense.
