More than two thirds of organisations reported greater scrutiny from regulators in 2012, with one in five reporting that they had faced an issue which had led to a regulatory or internal investigation in the last twelve months. These were some of the key findings from a survey of legal counsels working for leading multinational corporations, conducted by global business risk consultancy, Control Risks.
And legal counsels do not expect their roles to get any easier in the year ahead. Many are preparing themselves for an even tougher regulatory environment, with a third anticipating that their organisation will face greater risk in 2013 than they did in the previous year…The increased use of social media further increases these risks. 80 percent of those surveyed believed social media could form part of investigative matters and a similar percentage had implemented a social media policy to try to mitigate the risks.
Legal counsels are adding new tools to their armoury to counter the increased threat, and the survey underlines the increasingly important role technology plays in this respect. Four fifths of all respondents had engaged with an eDiscovery provider to help them both identify instances of malfeasance and, in the event of an investigation, to allow them to efficiently retrieve and sift through significant volumes of data quickly and cost-effectively.
Mike Brown, Director of Control Risks Legal Technologies business in EMEA commented “Organisations today find themselves under ever-greater scrutiny, not only from regulators, but also from the media, their customers, clients and employees who are demanding that they be able to demonstrate that they operate ethically and with integrity.”
“With the complexity of today’s litigation matters – particularly those cases involving third parties or multiple jurisdictions – collecting, filtering and interpreting the volumes of data can be a major undertaking. eDiscovery software is no longer a nice-to-have, but a business-critical tool.”
The full report can be downloaded here
