Recent Data Points

A sanctions decision handed down by a federal magistrate in San Diego on January 7, 2008, sent a shudder through the entire legal community. The magistrate ordered Qualcomm to pay more than $8 million as a penalty for failing to turn over relevant emails and other documents during its patent infringement suit against Broadcom. Qualcomm's outside counsel escaped monetary sanctions but were reported to the State Bar of California.

The Zubulake cases are widely viewed as the first series of definitive cases on electronic discovery and provide guidance in the areas of a party's duty to preserve electronic evidence during the course of litigation, counsel's duty to monitor their client's compliance, the ability of a party to shift the costs of retrieval of information to the requesting party, and the imposition of sanctions against a party found to have destroyed relevant evidence.

This year, companies will spend 10% to 15% of their IT budgets on compliance efforts, according to Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., and U.S. companies will spend more than $1.9 billion on technology for SOX compliance, according to Boston-based AMR Research Inc. Companies should look beyond finance department tools or software bearing the SOX compliance label, according to Michael Rasmussen, vice president at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.