Shanna Holako

She has extensive experience in compliance and risk counseling, with a focus in location data. Shanna is a skilled relationship builder, communicating well with regional/local counsel and collaborating with a wide range of professionals from engineers to product designers.

Throughout her career at Perkins Coie, Shanna has had the opportunity to work on secondment with two large tech companies, Meta Platforms, Inc. and cloud storage provider, Dropbox. While working in house for these firm clients, Shanna gained valuable experience in leadership, communications, and client services. She has also become adept at smoothly transitioning between varying work environments, from pace to culture.

On secondment at Meta, Shanna is a location product counsel working horizontally across the Meta family of apps, focusing on privacy forward thinking in terms of location use, collection, sharing, and user experience. She has become deeply knowledgeable on issues surrounding location data, as she was the primary legal professional in a nearly year-long deprecation that successfully saved Meta millions of dollars in storage and resources. The outcome was perceived as a win for user privacy and a quick response to the changing regulatory landscape.

During her secondment at Dropbox, Shanna advised the company on its legal obligations and rights in responding to government entities from around the world. She counseled the company and led the operations team on responding to governmental requests, civil requests, and matters regarding the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act. She assisted the provider in building their international legal compliance infrastructure relating to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), helped manage and oversee the rollout of a technical mechanism made to make data productions to law enforcement more efficient.

With a comprehensive understanding of state, federal, and international privacy laws and regulations, Shanna is able to ensure that her clients' strategies align with the current privacy and security best practices. She has also counseled clients on the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the GDPR, as well as helped communications service providers respond to requests for surveillance and disclosure of information in accordance with the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). She analyzed domestic and international legal process and requests, representing providers in interactions with government and private counsel, developing compliance manuals and materials, while also counseling and training in-house lawyers and employees on compliance.

Maintaining an active pro bono practice, Shanna helped the Transgender Law Center with logging and responding to letters from incarcerated transgender people with legal information and resources. She worked on drafting a human trafficking vacatur relief petition for an individual in hopes of helping invite opportunities to a new life, job, and housing. Shanna has also assisted in representing a key prosecution witness of a domestic violence dispute and successfully prevented the defendant from obtaining sensitive and invasive records. She has represented clients, including Queens College Hillel and SAGE, a nonprofit that advocates for LGBT elders, in data breach cases and has counseled small businesses on developing their privacy policies and terms of services. She has participated in the Bet Tzedek Self-Help Legal Conservatorship Clinic.