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Lisa Peets

Lisa Peets leads the Technology Regulatory and Policy practice in the London office and is a member of the firm's Management Committee. Lisa divides her time between London and Brussels, and her practice embraces regulatory counsel and legislative advocacy. In this context, she has worked closely with leading multinationals in a number of sectors, including many of the world’s best-known technology companies.

Lisa counsels clients on a range of EU law issues, including data protection and related regimes, copyright, e-commerce and consumer protection, and the rapidly expanding universe of EU rules applicable to existing and emerging technologies. Lisa also routinely advises clients in and outside of the technology sector on trade related matters, including EU trade controls rules.

According to the latest edition of Chambers UK (2022), "Lisa is able to make an incredibly quick legal assessment whereby she perfectly distils the essential matters from the less relevant elements." "Lisa has subject matter expertise but is also able to think like a generalist and prioritise. She brings a strategic lens to matters."

On February 13, 2024, the European Parliament’s Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection and its Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (the “Parliament Committees”) voted overwhelmingly to adopt the EU’s proposed AI Act. This follows a vote to approve the text earlier this month by the Council of Ministers’ Permanent Representatives Committee (“Coreper“). This brings the Act closer to final; the last step in the legislative process is a vote by the full European Parliament, currently scheduled to take place in April 2024.

The compromise text approved by Coreper and the Parliament Committees includes a number of significant changes as compared to earlier drafts. In this blog post, we set out some key takeaways.Continue Reading EU AI Act: Key Takeaways from the Compromise Text

On January 24, 2024, the European Commission (“Commission”) announced that, following the political agreement reached in December 2023 on the EU AI Act (“AI Act”) (see our previous blog here), the Commission intends to proceed with a package of measures (“AI Innovation Strategy”) to support AI startups and small and medium-size enterprises (“SMEs”) in the EU.

Alongside these measures, the Commission also announced the creation of the European AI Office (“AI Office”), which is due to begin formal operations on February 21, 2024.

This blog post provides a high-level summary of these two announcements, in addition to some takeaways to bear in mind as we draw closer to the adoption of the AI Act.Continue Reading European Commission Announces New Package of AI Measures

From February 17, 2024, the Digital Services Act (“DSA”) will apply to providers of intermediary services (e.g., cloud services, file-sharing services, search engines, social networks and online marketplaces). These entities will be required to comply with a number of obligations, including implementing notice-and-action mechanisms, complying with detailed rules on terms and conditions, and publishing transparency reports on content moderation practices, among others. For more information on the DSA, see our previous blog posts here and here.

As part of its powers conferred under the DSA, the European Commission is empowered to adopt delegated and implementing acts* on certain aspects of implementation and enforcement of the DSA. In 2023, the Commission adopted one delegated act on supervisory fees to be paid by very large online platforms and very large online search engines (“VLOPs” and “VLOSEs” respectively), and one implementing act on procedural matters relating to the Commission’s enforcement powers. The Commission has proposed several other delegated and implementing acts, which we set out below. The consultation period for these draft acts have now passed, and we anticipate that they will be adopted in the coming months.Continue Reading Draft Delegated and Implementing Acts Pursuant to the Digital Services Act

On 15 January 2024, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) announced the launch of a consultation series (“Consultation”) on how elements of data protection law apply to the development and use of generative AI (“GenAI”). For the purposes of the Consultation, GenAI refers to “AI models that can create new content e.g., text, computer code, audio, music, images, and videos”.

As part of the Consultation, the ICO will publish a series of chapters over the coming months outlining their thinking on how the UK GDPR and Part 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018 apply to the development and use of GenAI. The first chapter, published in tandem with the Consultation’s announcement, covers the lawful basis, under UK data protection law, for web scraping of personal data to train GenAI models. Interested stakeholders are invited to provide feedback to the ICO by 1 March 2024.Continue Reading ICO Launches Consultation Series on Generative AI

On December 9, 2023, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission reached a political agreement on the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (“AI Act”) (see here for the Parliament’s press statement, here for the Council’s statement, and here for the Commission’s statement). Following three days of intense negotiations, during the fifth “trilogue” discussions amongst the EU institutions, negotiators reached an agreement on key topics, including: (i) the scope of the AI Act; (ii) AI systems classified as “high-risk” under the Act; and (iii) law enforcement exemptions.

As described in our previous blog posts on the AI Act (see here, here, and here), the Act will establish a comprehensive and horizontal law governing the development, import, deployment and use of AI systems in the EU. In this blog post, we provide a high-level summary of the main points EU legislators appear to have agreed upon, based on the press releases linked above and a further Q&A published by the Commission. However, the text of the political agreement is not yet publicly available. Further, although a political agreement has been reached, a number of details remain to be finalized in follow-up technical working meetings over the coming weeks.Continue Reading EU Artificial Intelligence Act: Nearing the Finish Line

On October 30, 2023, days ahead of government leaders convening in the UK for an international AI Safety Summit, the White House issued an Executive Order (“EO”) outlining an expansive strategy to support the development and deployment of safe and secure AI technologies (for further details on the EO, see our blog here). As readers will be aware, the European Commission released its proposed Regulation Laying Down Harmonized Rules on Artificial Intelligence (the EU “AI Act”) in 2021 (see our blog here). EU lawmakers are currently negotiating changes to the Commission text, with hopes of finalizing the text by the end of this year, although many of its obligations would only begin to apply to regulated entities in 2026 or later.

The EO and the AI Act stand as two important developments shaping the future of global AI governance and regulation. This blog post discusses key similarities and differences between the two.Continue Reading From Washington to Brussels: A Comparative Look at the Biden Administration’s Executive Order and the EU’s AI Act

A would-be technical development could have potentially significant consequences for cloud service providers established outside the EU. The proposed EU Cybersecurity Certification Scheme for Cloud Services (EUCS)—which has been developed by the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA over the past two years and is expected to be adopted by the European Commission as an implementing act in Q1 2024—would, if adopted in its current form, establish certain requirements that could:

  1. exclude non-EU cloud providers from providing certain (“high” level) services to European companies, and
  2. preclude EU cloud customers from accessing the services of these non-EU providers.

Continue Reading Implications of the EU Cybersecurity Scheme for Cloud Services

On July 4, 2023, the European Commission published its proposal for a regulation laying down additional procedural rules relating to the enforcement of the GDPR.  The aim of the proposed Regulation is to clarify and harmonize the procedural rules that apply when EU supervisory authorities investigate complaint-based and ex officio cross-border cases (i.e., where the relevant processing conducted by a controller or processor  spans multiple Member States, resulting in a “lead” authority and additional “concerned” authorities).  If adopted, the Regulation will sit alongside the GDPR, complementing the existing cooperation and consistency mechanisms set forth in Chapter VII.Continue Reading European Commission Proposes GDPR Enforcement Procedure Regulation

On 21 June 2023, at the close of a roundtable meeting of the G7 Data Protection and Privacy Authorities, regulators from the United States, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Canada and Japan published a joint “Statement on Generative AI” (“Statement”) (available here). In the Statement, regulators identify a range of data protection-related concerns they believe are raised by generative AI tools, including legal authority for processing personal information, and transparency, explainability, and security. The group of regulators also call on companies to “embed privacy in the design conception, operation, and management” of generative AI tools.

In advance of the G7 meeting, on 15 June 2023, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) separately announced that it will be “checking” whether businesses have addressed privacy risks before deploying generative AI, and “taking action where there is risk of harm to people through poor use of their data”.Continue Reading UK and G7 Privacy Authorities Warn of Privacy Risks Raised by Generative AI

Late yesterday, the EU institutions reached political agreement on the European Data Act (see the European Commission’s press release here and the Council’s press release here).  The proposal for a Data Act was first tabled by the European Commission in February 2022 as a key piece of the European Strategy for Data (see our previous blogpost here). The Data Act will sit alongside the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), Data Governance Act, Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act.Continue Reading Political Agreement Reached on the European Data Act