In the continuing quest for alpha, hedge fund managers are increasingly seeking nontraditional data sets to inform their investment decisions. A recent webinar presented by the Hedge Fund Law Report, entitled “Best Practices for Private Fund Managers’ Use of Alternative Data,” took an in-depth look at the regulatory and compliance issues involved in collecting and using alternative data. William V. de Cordova, Editor-in-Chief of the Hedge Fund Law Report, moderated the program, which featured Stacey M. Brandenburg, shareholder at ZwillGen; Jeffrey D. Neuburger, partner at Proskauer; and Adam J. Reback, director at Optima Partners. This first article in our two-part series covers the portions of the webinar that explored data gathering and managing third-party data providers, including due diligence, contract provisions and associated issues. The second article will detail issues relating to insider trading, regulatory risk, data privacy laws, cybersecurity and web scraping. See our three-part series on the opportunities and risks presented by big data: “Acquisition and Proper Use” (Jan. 11, 2018); “MNPI, Web Scraping and Data Quality” (Jan. 18, 2018); and “Privacy Concerns, Third Parties and Drones” (Jan. 25, 2018).