Robert Melton has represented businesses and their legal teams in complex regulatory and compliance matters for nearly two decades. His practice is built on a foundation of transactional depth — he has negotiated and drafted more contracts, data protection agreements, and compliance documents than most lawyers see in a career — combined with substantive regulatory expertise that spans AI governance, privacy law, healthcare compliance, anti-corruption, employment, intellectual property, and global trade. When clients bring him a problem, they get a lawyer who has almost certainly encountered a version of it before.

Contract Drafting and Policy Development

Rob drafts and negotiates the full range of technology and data protection agreements that businesses need: SaaS contracts, software licensing agreements, data licensing and sharing arrangements, enterprise security addendums, and AI-specific contractual provisions for companies deploying machine learning and generative AI. He also drafts the internal frameworks that sit behind those agreements — information security policies, incident response plans, business continuity and disaster recovery programs, HIPAA policies and procedures, and privacy and security training materials. He approaches every document as a working business instrument, not a legal formality. The goal is a contract that does what the client needs it to do and holds up under pressure.

A Track Record of Excellence

Since the GDPR took effect in May 2018, Rob has accumulated a body of transactional experience in data protection and privacy law that is unusual in its depth. He has reviewed and negotiated hundreds of data processing addendums, hundreds of business associate agreements, hundreds of enterprise security addendums, hundreds of standard contractual clauses, and hundreds of technology vendor agreements on data protection matters. He has negotiated thousands of indemnification clauses and liability caps in data protection contexts — enough to know precisely where the real risk concentrates and where the boilerplate is noise. He has handled dozens of student data protection agreements for EdTech companies, dozens of AI and generative AI agreements, dozens of data licenses, and dozens of NDAs. Volume matters in legal practice: patterns emerge at scale, and a lawyer who has seen hundreds of the same type of agreement stops being surprised by the hard issues and starts being efficient at resolving them.

Data Protection and Incident Response

Rob has guided dozens of companies through security incidents — from the first hours of discovery through the legal investigation, regulatory notification analysis, and remediation process. He has advised companies on hundreds of GDPR and CCPA compliance questions across industries and company sizes. He has led the legal workstream for companies navigating international data transfer challenges following Schrems II, including the assessment and implementation of standard contractual clauses and transfer impact assessments. He understands that data protection advice is most valuable when it is practical and actionable under the constraints that real businesses actually operate within.

Mergers & Acquisitions

Rob regularly serves as data protection and regulatory diligence counsel in M&A transactions. He has represented buyers on data protection and compliance in dozens of private equity rollups and B2B startup acquisitions, and in more than a dozen transactions involving reps and warranties insurance, where the rigor of the diligence directly affects the scope and reliability of coverage. He has advised more than a dozen healthcare companies on HIPAA and data protection in the M&A process. He has represented sellers across the advertising, ecommerce, financial services, healthcare, and technology industries. M&A diligence is not a checklist — it is a risk assessment that has to be calibrated to deal structure, purchase price, and the operational realities of integration. Rob approaches it that way.

Regulatory Compliance and Government Investigations

Beyond transactional work, Rob has advised clients across a wide range of regulatory compliance matters and government proceedings. He has assisted companies with export compliance under the EAR and ITAR, EEOC investigations involving employment discrimination claims, False Claims Act matters, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act compliance and internal investigations, and inquiries from the SEC and CFTC. He has managed subpoena responses for corporate clients and guided companies through voluntary self-disclosure processes with federal enforcement agencies. This regulatory breadth reflects the nature of his practice: the businesses he advises operate in complex, multi-front regulatory environments, and they need a lawyer who can follow the problem wherever it leads.