About Lydia de la
Lydia de la Torre trained in Spain before building a career that bridges European and American privacy law. She earned a J.D. from Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1995, followed by an LL.M. in EU Tax Law from Centro de Estudios Garrigues in 1996. Later she completed an LL.M. in Intellectual Property at Santa Clara University School of Law in 2014. Her academic background reflects an early interest in cross-border legal issues and technical aspects of regulation.
Her professional life began in private practice in Spain. In 1996 she joined Garrigues as a senior associate working on privacy and data protection matters. That early experience in a large European firm exposed her to corporate compliance and regulatory work. She maintained ties to language and courts as well, working as a freelance Spanish interpreter in 2002 and later becoming a certified court interpreter for the Superior Court of Santa Clara County in 2009.
After moving into U.S. practice, de la Torre served as appellate counsel with the California Sixth District Appellate Program in 2011. She shifted into in-house and consulting roles focused on privacy and cybersecurity soon after. In 2013 she joined PayPal as senior counsel for privacy, data protection and cybersecurity. She later held senior counsel roles at Axiom in 2016 and served as of counsel on privacy matters at Squire Patton Boggs beginning in 2019. Those positions involved policy work, vendor agreements and incident response across multinational contexts.
Alongside practice, de la Torre has taught and researched. She has held adjunct faculty posts at The National Hispanic University, Santa Clara University School of Law and the University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco. In 2017 she served as a privacy fellow for Santa Clara County. In 2022 she was appointed senior lecturer and affiliated researcher at the University of California, Davis, where she contributes to courses and projects at the intersection of law, technology and ethics.
She has participated in policy and advisory bodies. Since 2018 she has been a senior policy advisor to Californians for Consumer Privacy. She joined the board of the California Privacy Protection Agency in 2021 and serves on the Internet Ethics Advisory Group at Santa Clara University. Those roles place her in conversations about state privacy rules and implementation.
In 2021 de la Torre co-founded Golden Data Law and serves as a founding partner. She handles matters involving privacy compliance, data protection strategy and cybersecurity risk for private and public clients. Her current practice focuses on privacy, data protection and cybersecurity issues.
