A survey of 458 in-house counsel conducted by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Corpedia Inc. revealed that in-house counsel continue to focus money and effort on compliance and risk assessment as their confidence in attorney-client privilege wanes.

More than 90 percent of participants in the 2007 Compliance Program and Risk Assessment Benchmarking Survey believe attorney-client privilege in government investigations is either non-existent or severely damaged, a 16 percent increase from the 2005 survey.

Sixty-seven percent of respondents said their companies spend up to $250,000 a year on ethics and compliance issues. Among organizations with 25,000 to 49,999 employees, 37 percent spend between $1 million and $5 million annually on ethics and compliance. An example of this spending is an increase in Code of Conduct training–more than 75 percent of companies now offer such training sessions.

The focus on compliance is company-wide. Nearly 44 percent of company boards received training on Federal Sentencing Guidelines compliance. Twenty-eight percent of the companies surveyed now have a dedicated ethics officer, and in 67 percent of those companies the ethics officer is not the same person as the chief compliance officer. Seventy percent of all companies surveyed now conduct periodic risk assessments, mainly internal document review and interviews with company leadership and employees, up 12 percent from the 2005 survey.

“With corporate scandals rocking boardrooms across the country, in-house counsel are taking steps to ensure they're not the subject of the next humiliating headline,” Corpedia CEO Alex Brigham said in a statement. “As a result, we are seeing significant spending on compliance programs, mandatory training and code of conduct reviews. Most importantly, companies are realizing that enforcing compliance and ethics involves every employee, at every level in the organization.”

Of the respondents, more than 45 percent were with publicly traded organizations, while 70 percent worked for companies who conduct business outside the U.S.