Security News > 2023 > February > Lawyers join forces to fight common enemy: The SEC and its probes into cyber-victims

More than 80 law firms say they are "Deeply troubled" by the US Securities and Exchange Commission's demand that Covington & Burling hand over names of its clients whose information was stolen by Chinese state-sponsored hackers.

In an amicus brief filed this week, 83 firms with a total of more than 50,000 attorneys employed backed their fellow lawyers in Covington's ongoing battle with America's financial watchdog.

"Not only would the SEC breach well-established principles of confidentiality in the service of this fishing expedition, it would turn attorneys into witnesses against their own clients, while offering no guarantees that it will not disseminate the information to other parts of the government, the press, and the public," the court documents [PDF] say.

In the filings, the lawyers ask the court to deny the SEC's application for an order enforcing the subpoena of Covington's clients' names and other information.

Last year, the SEC issued a subpoena asking Covington to hand over the names of SEC-regulated clients whose data had been "Viewed, copied, modified or exfiltrated during the attack" as well as communications between those publicly traded companies and their attorneys.

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https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/02/23/covington_sec_amicus/