Episode 14: Kate Colleary of Pembroke Privacy - Why Trust is the New Gold and a Quest to Make the Complex Simple

Fiftyfaces Focus - Inspiring People in the Law

Kate Colleary is the director at Pembroke Privacy, a data protection consulting practice, a firm she established in 2019. To assist organizations and their data protection officers achieve compliance with privacy laws. She is the country leader of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) as well as a practicing solicitor.
Kate and I were classmates at Trinity College Dublin, and we start her journey there, reflecting on how losing both of her parents when they were in their 50s, and she was a young adult led to her resilience and pledge to enjoy life through travel and seizing opportunities. We move through her career as a solicitor and what interested her in data protection and privacy law. She reflects that while she was a student she was fascinated by family law as it was changing rapidly in the 1990s in Ireland - she now finds that data protection and privacy law is changing just as rapidly.
We talk then about what prompted her to set up her own consultancy and how she aims to make the complex clear. She shares the satisfaction she gains from conducting data audits and fulfilling outsourced data protection officer roles. The importance of this is underscored by the fact that "trust is the new gold" and that proper use of and protection of data is so key to company integrity.
There is more information about Pembroke Privacy here: https://pembrokeprivacy.com and about the IAPP here: https://iapp.org
Kate's late mother, Deirdre Madden, wrote the iconic "bible" of home economics and is beloved of all Irish secondary school students: https://www.mayobooks.ie/All-About-Home-Ec-Madden
This series is brought to you with the kind support of Eversheds Sutherland. As a global top 10 law firm, Eversheds Sutherland provides legal services to a global client base. With more than 3,000 lawyers, Eversheds Sutherland operates in over 70 offices in more than 30 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
The firm recognises that having diverse talent across its business brings many benefits. It is committed to accessing a wide range of views, perspectives and thinking in all of its teams and in this way is building a culture of inclusion, where each person feels able to be their true self at work and reach their full potential.

Diversity and Inclusion is fundamental to the firm’s purpose of “helping our clients, our people and our communities to thrive”, and ‘Inclusive’ is one of its five values.