news and knowledge from around the globe compiled by Global EDD Group
2009 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey Report Now Available
The full 2009 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey Report is now available for purchase. For detail, please contact George Socha (george@sochaconsulting.com, 651.690.1739) or Tom Gelbmann (tom@gelbmann.biz, 651.483.0022).
We are in the final stages of preparing the participant report and will be distributing that to part
via EDD Update: 2009 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey Report Now Available.
No one is naïve enough to think that bribery, kickbacks and other corrupt business practices don’t exist here in the United States. But it’s also understood that such practices are, at best, unethical and, at worst, illegal — not to mention potentially costly for companies caught engaging in them.
But in some countries, bribes, illegal payments and other underhanded activities are simply an accepted part of doing business. And if recent statistics are any indication, the current recession is only compounding the problem.
According to a recent Ernst & Young survey, half of the 2,246 respondents in major countries across Europe said they felt that one or more types of unethical business behaviors was acceptable, including 25 percent who thought it fine to give a cash bribe to win work. By country, that figure rose as high as 38 percent in Spain, 43 percent in the Czech Republic and 53 percent in Turkey.
In the same survey by the New York-based business and financial advisory firm, more than half of respondents said they expect corporate fraud to increase over the next few years, with 54 percent of participants from Western Europe and 55 percent from Central and Eastern Europe expressing the same sentiment.
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Alameda, Calif.-based telecommunications company UTStarcom, Inc. with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for authorizing millions of dollars in unlawful payments to foreign government officials in Asia.
UTStarcom agreed to settle the SEC’s charges and pay a $1.5 million penalty among other remedies. In a related criminal case, the U.S. Department of Justice announced today that UTStarcom agreed to pay an additional $1.5 million fine.
“UTStarcom spent millions of dollars on illegal bribes to win and keep customers in Asia,” said Marc J. Fagel, Director of the SEC’s San Francisco Regional Office. “It is important for corporate America to recognize that resorting to these methods of boosting profits contributes to a culture of corruption that cannot be condoned under U.S. law.”
via SEC Charges California Telecom Company With Bribery And Other FCPA Violations.
SharePoint, Microsoft’s broad and wildly popular business platform, is growing from good to great. SharePoint 2010 enables robust business collaboration for the enterprise and the Web by offering a fuller breadth of capabilities and new enterprise-class management tools.
While the improvements made to SharePoint 2007 popularized the product across industry segments with its collaboration and workspace capabilities, portal, and enterprise content management benefits, SharePoint 2010 boasts an even richer, more advanced and integrated feature set that readily enables business collaboration among employees, colleagues, and partners.
The foundational business-collaboration features of SharePoint 2010 include: document collaboration; wikis and blogs; RSS support; discussion boards; project task management; contacts, calendars, and tasks; e-mail storing and management; better design for working with Microsoft Office 2010; and, richer offline support using SharePoint Workspace 2010.
Industry experts say that with SharePoint 2010 Microsoft filled in the gaps of previous versions to offer a dynamic product that will have both existing SharePoint users and new customers clamoring.
“Microsoft definitely made SharePoint 2010 more compelling for current SharePoint customers and new potential customers,” says Guy Creese, research director at Burton Group.
In-House Legal Departments and the Use of Cloud Computing
International Law May Confound Benefits
By Greg Freemyer and Hope Haslam
Cloud computing, the process of storing and processing data on remote, outsourced third-party-owned servers, is growing in popularity, largely because it provides users with access to state-of-the-art and constantly updated software and fast infrastructure — without the overwhelming costs. As technology advances at exponential speeds, companies must find ways to remain competitive. Buying the latest and greatest, only to find it obsolete before it is paid for, is a progressively unsustainable option.
For international companies, however, there are tremendous legal hurdles to accomplishing an effective conversion. Two of the most troubling are:
As companies begin to set up, or more likely expand, a cloud computing system, they must understand the legal issues that need to be addressed in order to avoid subjecting the company to sanctions, fines, penalties and enormous e-discovery costs when litigation arises.
[continued] In-House Legal Departments and the Use of Cloud Computing.
A decade-long lawsuit pitting a tiny company called Convolve against Seagate Technology has taken an unexpected turn after a whistle-blower claimed that Seagate had appropriated Convolve technology and later destroyed evidence in the case.
The whistle-blower, a former Seagate employee named Paul A. Galloway, has provided what is described as “an eyewitness account” accusing Seagate of taking hard-drive technology from Convolve and incorporating it into its own products, according to documents filed recently with a federal court in Manhattan.
The court filings include claims by Mr. Galloway that Seagate, the world’s largest producer of computer hard drives, tampered with evidence tied to Convolve’s nearly 10-year-old patent infringement case against the company.
The allegations are detailed in an affidavit filed by one of Convolve’s lawyers as part of an effort to reopen the voluminous court record to include testimony from Mr. Galloway.
via Ex-Employee Says Seagate Took Technology From Convolve – NYTimes.com.
Adobe Systems' Flash and Acrobat Reader products will become the preferred targets for criminal hackers in 2010, surpassing Microsoft Office applications, a security vendor predicted this week.
“Cybercriminals have long picked on Microsoft products due to their popularity. In 2010, we anticipate Adobe software, especially Acrobat Reader and Flash, will take the top spot,” security vendor McAfee said in its “2010 Threat Predictions” report (PDF).
Hackers usually target the most widely used products in order to achieve the maximum impact. For a long time that has made Microsoft their primary target. But the software giant has tightened security in its recent OS releases, leading hackers to look for additional targets.
Adobe’s CTO acknowledged recently that his company’s software is being attacked more frequently, and said the company has stepped up its efforts to respond.
“We have absolutely seen an increase in the number of attacks, around Reader in particular and also Flash Player to some extent,” CTO Kevin Lynch told reporters at the Adobe Max conference in October. “We’re working to decrease the amount of time between when we know about a problem and when we release a fix. That used to be a couple of months; now it's within two weeks for critical issues.”
via Adobe Will Be Top Target for Hackers in 2010, Report Says – PC World Business Center.
Tracking new regulations and compliance rulings from federal and state government can be dizzying—they include FRCP, HIPAA, GLB, and more. But now more than ever, the government expects all businesses to comply, not just large corporations.
Today, every company is responsible for its data and for securing its customers’ information, no matter how much it costs to do so. In today’s litigious business world, the possibility of being dragged into a lawsuit is very real, and if that happens, you will likely need to make your information available to the process. And woe to the company that cannot comply with basic regulations, because a judge will not accept that you thought those requirements applied only to the big companies.
A good example is a recent investigation involving Freddie Mac. A small agency working with Freddie Mac was pulled into the investigation, and the agency had to complete a request by the government for an electronic discovery search. The agency assumed the cost would be minor, but it did not have an automated approach to managing its data in place. The inaccessibility of the data required an army of attorneys and staff to perform a hands-on physical review. The cost came to $6 million. When the agency sought relief, it was turned down by an appeals court. It should have known better.
via Todays Tip Dont Overlook Federal and State Data Regulations – BusinessWeek.
A German computer engineer said Monday that he had deciphered and published the secret code used to encrypt most of the worlds digital mobile phone calls, in what he called an attempt to expose weaknesses in the security of the world’s wireless systems.
The action by the encryption expert Karsten Nohl aimed to question the effectiveness of the 21-year-old GSM algorithm, a code developed in 1988 and still used to protect the privacy of 80 percent of the worlds mobile calls.
“This shows that existing GSM security is inadequate,” Mr. Nohl, 28, told about 600 people attending the Chaos Communication Congress, a four-day computer hacker’s conference that runs through Wednesday here. “We are trying to push operators to adopt better security measures for mobile phone calls.”
via Code That Protects Most Cellphone Calls Is Divulged – NYTimes.com.
Traditionally, the U.S. courts both federal and state have forced private litigants to exchange, through their lawyers, highly confidential paper documents recording the most intimate details of their business affairs. Such “civil discovery” often included disclosure under a “protective order” of both technological and financial trade secrets. By the late 1990s, however, the U.S. courts recognized that the most important business records were being created and stored electronically, rather than on paper. To keep U.S. civil litigation current with this rapid change in business recordkeeping, on December 1, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted a new and controversial set of procedural and evidentiary rules governing the discovery of “electronically stored information” in U.S. civil litigation.
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