According to the Association of Corporate Counsel’s most recent investigation into the inner-working of in-house legal leadership, ethics and compliance-related issues remain the number one point of anxiety for chief legal officers and general counsel. Moreover, concerns around ethics and compliance seem to be growing – 71 per cent of survey respondents listed ethics and compliance a ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ important concern over the next 12 months, up from 66 per cent last year. Pulling in at a very close second place were adjacent concerns about regulation, which were listed by 70 per cent of respondents.

Upping the stakes

According to the ACC Global Census, approximately 62 per cent of in-house counsel worldwide currently have cross-border or transnational work, complicating compliance and throwing up new issues around ethics and transparency. ‘The expansion of business across border brings challenges such as the need to understand multiple, diverse, and even contradictory regulations and cultural environments,’ said the ACC in its most recent report, the ACC 2016 Law Department Management Report. As the globalisation of business makes compliance more complicated, the increase zeal with which regulators pursue corporate actors has upped the stakes of compliance-related risk. Global business is facing ‘an exponentially intensified regulatory environment driven by persistent corporate scandals, loss of public confidence, and political pressure on regulators to shape the current corporate legal landscape.’

The ACC’s full report can be viewed here.