Yesterday, AlixPartners announced the results of its Global Anti-Corruption Survey and noted that despite some positive findings, companies continue to face hurdles when implementing anti-corruption compliance programs.  Many of those hurdles involve lack of resources:  as noted in the AlixPartners survey, 46% of respondents said their companies had inadequate staffing to deal with training and due-diligence issues.   A Thompson Reuters survey released last week echoed the sentiment that companies are struggling to manage corporate compliance due to limited resources and constrained budgets.

Despite conventional wisdom, it’s not necessary to blow the corporate budget to have an effective compliance program.

via FCPA Compliance: Don’t Blow Your Budget Just Yet – Forbes.

Drawing The Line

How much data access is too much? Security concerns take center stage in The American Lawyer’s annual survey of law firm technology.

More @ Law Firm Technology Survey 2011 – The American Lawyer.

slideshow @  eDiscovery Disasters: What Every CIO Needs to Know – IT Management.

This week came a somewhat unusual report, compiled by the global consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. It surveyed more than 9,000 executives in over 130 countries and found them confident in their ability to secure their information systems and bullish about cybersecurity spending. In the survey, released Thursday, 43 percent of respondents said they had confidence in their security protocols and 50 percent said they expected their companies to spend increasing amounts of money on cybersecurity.

Digital hubris can be dangerous, though.

PricewaterhouseCoopers parsed the data more closely. They asked the executives about the precautions they were taking. It turned out that only 13 percent of those surveyed had actually done what the consulting firm considered to be adequate — meaning they had an overall security strategy, they had reviewed the effectiveness of their strategy and they knew precisely the types of breaches that had already hit them over the last 12 months.

Even as the use of social networks has proliferated, barely one in three respondents said their companies had a policy governing their employees’ use of tools like Facebook and LinkedIn. Social media, the report’s authors concluded, is a double-edged sword for many companies.

via Executives May Be Too Confident on Cybersecurity, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com.

This week came a somewhat unusual report, compiled by the global consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. It surveyed more than 9,000 executives in over 130 countries and found them confident in their ability to secure their information systems and bullish about cybersecurity spending. In the survey, released Thursday, 43 percent of respondents said they had confidence in their security protocols and 50 percent said they expected their companies to spend increasing amounts of money on cybersecurity.

Digital hubris can be dangerous, though.

PricewaterhouseCoopers parsed the data more closely. They asked the executives about the precautions they were taking. It turned out that only 13 percent of those surveyed had actually done what the consulting firm considered to be adequate — meaning they had an overall security strategy, they had reviewed the effectiveness of their strategy and they knew precisely the types of breaches that had already hit them over the last 12 months.

Even as the use of social networks has proliferated, barely one in three respondents said their companies had a policy governing their employees’ use of tools like Facebook and LinkedIn. Social media, the report’s authors concluded, is a double-edged sword for many companies.

via Executives May Be Too Confident on Cybersecurity, Survey Finds – NYTimes.com.

Coming in a distant second was Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad with webOS, named by 10.4 percent of respondents as a tablet they would consider buying, according to the Baird survey (table below). Given that respondents were allowed to give multiple responses in naming a tablet they’d consider buying, HP probably shouldn’t get too complacent about its second-place finish.

And given that Best Buy has reportedly sold only 25,000 of the 270,000 TouchPads that HP has supplied the retailer with—this despite HP slashing its asking price for 16GB and 32GB TouchPads by $100 recently—all of the other tablet makers who finished even further behind Apple probably ought to be really worried.

via Survey: Tablet Buyers Only Have Eyes for the iPad | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

Only 25% of respondents considered themselves prepared to handle e-discovery requests inside the cloud, with 30% indicating that they reported cloud applications “in scope” for e-discovery in 2010 and 60% anticipating the discovery of cloud-based applications in 2011. Thirty-seven percent have no defined policy, while 18% have no agreement with their cloud provider. This is a problem because, when user organizations first set up agreements with cloud providers, they are more interested in putting the information into the cloud and don’t think so much about how to retrieve it, says Katey Wood, an analyst in information management for ESG. Similarly, cloud vendors encourage users to put more data in the cloud but don’t have an incentive to give the data back, with the result that user organizations don’t have custody and control of the data but are still considered responsible for it, she says. The data can be difficult to work with, Wood adds, noting that one can download a Gmail mailbox but conversational threads are not maintained.

Similarly, while 27% of respondents considered social media in scope for e-discovery in 2010, 58% said they considered it in scope for 2011, with 79% showing interest in Facebook, 64% showing interest in Twitter and 55% showing interest in LinkedIn. This result surprised Wood because, she says, not all companies are using social media and because some companies didn’t appear to have any sort of policy around it.

via E-Discovery Needs To Move To The Cloud, Survey Finds – Network Computing.

The information is part of a set of findings from the State of Litigation Management report released today by LexisNexis. The report, which is available for free download at ( www.lexisnexis.com/litigation-survey2011 ), also reveals attitudes among U.S. lawyers regarding current litigation management practices and suggests opportunities for ways to achieve greater efficiencies.

via Litigation Management Survey Identifies Trend Toward Bolder Investments in People and Technology in Law Firms – MarketWatch.

Conducted annually, the survey also revealed a reduced reliance on paper, more work being done in-house and an overall higher volume of data to manage.

Other points uncovered in the study include:

Government agencies have no standard approach to impose and manage litigation holds.

Almost one-half of agencies are now collecting “structured data” in repositories, databases and similar systems.

The form of production varies greatly. Almost 40 percent of respondents reported producing discovery requests in image and text formats, 37 percent in native file formats and only 41 percent on paper.

Bill Detamore, IE Discovery’s chief legal officer, said that government agencies should look at improving their early data assessment strategies, which in the long run, could save money by reducing the sheer size of data sets they handle.

“Gaining competence in this area may be one way for government discovery professionals to better leverage their limited resources and fulfill the expectation to do more with less,” he said in a statement.

via CIOZone.com – Professional Network for CIOs and IT Professionals – E-Discovery: A Growing Trend For Increasing Efficiencies Using IT.

Beyond that, there wasn’t much to cheer about in the biannual Dow Jones State of Anti-Corruption Survey, released on Thursday.

“At face value these findings support the view that anti-bribery and corruption regulation damages business and is ineffective in stopping corporate bribery,” said Rupert de Ruig, managing director of Risk & Compliance at Dow Jones & Company, in a press release that accompanied the results.

But he did see a possible silver lining. “There may be a stronger argument that the findings are an indication of higher standards and controls in companies,” he suggested, “and an increasing awareness of bribery and unethical business practices in the marketplace.”

Again, on the bright side: Almost three-quarters of the companies have anti-corruption programs in place, and they’re implemented consistently across all regions and industries. Most programs have been established for at least three years.

Yet half the companies have delayed or called off new business opportunities because corruption risks could not be assessed. And more than half have avoided deals for fear of violating regulations.

via Survey: Fear of Corruption Leads Companies to Pass Up Business.