Microsoft's John Frank Examines E-Discovery's Impact on Global Ethics

Global corporate ethics are a largely untapped major market for e-discovery technology, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel John Frank said in his keynote speech, the first at this year's LegalTech New York.

It was a local government official's request for a bribe that inspired a Tunisian fruit cart owner to set himself afire last year, leading to the still active Arab Spring of people's revolutions, and yet there remain many Western companies, such as Alcatel-Lucent and Siemens, that have been caught engaging in overseas bribery as a course of business, Frank observed.

"A repressive regime can control a limited number of western journalists, but having everybody out on the street corner with a smartphone can change the regime," Frank noted. "The business practices of international companies too often support the same corrupt governments and the same corrupt business practices [that] people protested."

Technology has helped. The U.S. government issued just $2.1 million in bribery fines in 2002, but that figure ballooned to $4 billion by 2011, Frank said.

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Source: law.com
By: Evan Koblentz