Martha Barnett, former president of the American Bar Association, brings expertise to booming electronic data field

ACEDS Advisory Board member Martha Barnett counts to her résumé a wide range of notable legal accomplishments. She was the first woman chair of the American Bar Association House of Delegates and the second woman to serve as president of that prestigious body. She has worked alongside Hillary Clinton on an ABA task force, been named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal, and excelled in fields as diverse as education and budget reform.  

By all accounts, Martha Barnett is a big deal.

So that she names among her most gratifying experiences being honored by the University of Florida as a distinguished alumnus and, more so, speaking at her son’s law school commencement, sheds light on her continued commitment to education even amid great success.  

“To be recognized by my university really validated my life and a lot of the work I had done up to that point,” she said.

Though she quite literally issued a diploma to her son at the Florida Coastal School of Law, hooding him in the process, the experience works as a metaphor as well: Barnett is leading the next generation of knowledge workers into a new digital frontier, navigating the choppy waters of data security and personal privacy along the way. 

As chief privacy officer at TLO, a data mining company in Boca Raton specializing in all number of investigative tools, Barnett spearheads the development and implementation of best practices and safeguards protecting the cache of personal information powering TLO’s tens of thousands of synergistic databases.   

“The primary message about TLO is that every decision we make is grounded in a respect for the personal privacy and the information privacy of the entities affected by our system, including our customers,” Barnett said.

The first female attorney at decorated firm Holland & Knight, Barnett has undertaken a number of pro bono cases championing the rights of vulnerable communities. Her reparative victory for the descendants of survivors of the massacre at Rosewood, a small Floridian town destroyed by a white mob over a black man’s alleged rape of a white woman in 1923, appropriately prefaced TLO’s goodwill in the child protection space.   

“We have more philanthropy in our company than we have commercialized products,” Barnett said, referring to the child predator-tracking software founder Hank Asher provides free to law enforcement all over the world. 

The product, TLOxp Online Systems, identifies in real-time people who are actively viewing, trading and producing criminal childhood pornography and has already spread to law enforcement officials in all 50 states and 40 countries worldwide.

In her role at TLO, as in other walks, Barnett continually proves herself a diligent student of the burgeoning electronic environment.  

 “There needs to be an educational effort implemented with people who have access to or deal with that data,” she said. “From the guard at the door to the CEO, it is our responsibility to deal with this data in a thoughtful, informed way.”