Alabama court data was in a vendor backup the courts did not know existed

Assessment

The Alabama Appellate Courts' statement says West Publishing informed them, after the initial 23 July notification, that "a copy of some Alabama appellate court data was maintained in a backup file within the company's cloud environment," and that the courts "did not request West Publishing to store a backup copy of Alabama court data in its systems and were not aware that the company had such data." Wyoming independently describes its exposed data as "historical data from retired case management systems," and Thomson Reuters' own list marks Pennsylvania's Environmental Hearing Board a "former client." The retained-copy pattern is established by three jurisdictions.