Melissa Maalouf’s practice focuses on advising a broad range of clients, including financial institutions, internet service providers, retailers, media companies, and publishers, on various U.S. and international data privacy and data security laws and issues.  These issues include drafting website, social media, and mobile device privacy policies; creating transparent consumer notice and choice mechanisms; advising on privacy risks raised by mergers and acquisitions and by the disclosure of data to government regulators; complying with state and federal financial privacy laws such as the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act; developing guidelines for clients’ online behavioral advertising and data sharing/use initiatives that are compliant with FTC guidance and industry self-regulatory principles; counseling general audience and children’s websites on compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and children’s safety issues; and guiding multinational companies in developing global strategies for compliance with marketing restrictions, consumer protection regulations, data protection laws, and international data transfer laws.

Melissa has also advised clients with respect to e-commerce issues such as domestic and international electronic signature laws, online contracting through click-wrap and browse-wrap agreements and terms of service, and online user authentication and authority issues.

Prior to her time at ZwillGen PLLC, Melissa was an associate in the Communications, Media, and Privacy group at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, where she counseled major media companies, financial institutions, and publishers on a wide variety of international and domestic data privacy, data security, e-commerce, and Internet law issues.

While at American University, Washington College of Law, Melissa served as the Editor-in-Chief of Volume 56 of the American University Law Review, received the Outstanding Graduate Award and the Myer’s Society Scholarship, and finished in the semi-finals of the 2006 Jerome Prince Memorial Evidence Moot Court Competition held annually at Brooklyn Law School.