McDonald Hopkins welcomes Nicholas Schmidt to Detroit office

Nicholas Schmidt has joined the Detroit office of McDonald Hopkins PLC as an associate in the Litigation Department.

As a Certified Information Privacy Professional/ United States, Schmidt will add depth and experience to McDonald Hopkins Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Group. He spent the past year with KPMG in Chicago, where he was a senior associate in its cyber group’s strategy and governance pillar. His duties focused on evaluating, building, and improving the privacy compliance practices of large corporations. A large part of this work was helping companies prepare to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act, a major omnibus privacy law in the style of GDPR. He was also involved in the firm’s M&A due diligence efforts, where he evaluated the privacy compliance programs of relevant acquisition targets, and international coordination efforts. His expertise includes HIPAA, GDPR, and FERPA.

After completing a dual degree in computer science and psychology at the University of Notre Dame in 2013, Schmidt worked as a software engineer and technical project manager, before earning his J.D. in December of 2017 from the University of Michigan Law School. At Michigan, he was the Executive Technology Editor for the Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review. He also served as the co-president of Law Breaks, the law school’s alternative spring break and pro-bono legal aid organization.

Following law school, Schmidt served as a legal research fellow with the International Association of Privacy Professionals, where he performed privacy-related research and published think pieces and white papers on technology law issues. His engineering background includes in-industry development experience with internet of things and big data applications. Schmidt speaks Spanish and French and can write code in eight programming languages.

Schmidt can be reached at 248.593.2941 or nschmidt@mcdonaldhopkins.com.