Six months ago, general counsel reported that their most pressing challenges were regulations and enforcement, privacy and data security and risk and crisis management. This is still true, according to a new report, but there has been a shift in the amount of time devoted to these challenges.

ALM Intelligence and Morrison & Foerster unveiled Wednesday the second General Counsel Up-At-Night Report, which asked nearly 150 U.S.-based general counsel and other in-house attorneys about their top concerns. The results from the 26-page report affirm many findings from the original report released in June, but the latest results show a decrease in respondents dedicating a “substantial amount” of time to five challenges they've identified as pressing: regulations and enforcement; risk and crisis management; privacy and data security; intellectual property; and litigation.

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When it comes to regulations and enforcement, for example, 70 percent of respondents indicated in the June survey that they spent a substantial amount of time on this challenge. This number has dropped to 56 percent in the December report. Privacy and data security saw a slight dip from 43 to 37 percent, and for risk and crisis management, the numbers dropped from 46 to 34 percent.

For those three top categories of concern, the decreases could be because companies have already devoted a lot of resources to prepare for some kind of incident, said Bob Bostrom, senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary at Abercrombie & Fitch Co. “There's been so much time and energy focused on those areas in the past three to five years,” Bostrom noted, so while they're still important, “there could be a feeling of, we've built the foundation, and so now we're in maintenance mode.”

As for the 14-percentage point drop for regulations and enforcement specifically, Bostrom said this could be a product of the focus out of Washington, D.C., on deregulation. “I think there's been a change in tone from Washington, which could be part of spending less time on regulatory enforcement,” he said. “You clearly feel that there has been a rationalization and a de-intensification of regulatory enforcements.”

Sterling Miller, general counsel at marketing automation software company Marketo Inc., and former general counsel to Travelocity and Sabre Corp, agreed that it makes some sense to see the decrease in substantial time devoted to regulations and enforcement. “I think towards the first part of the year, there were a lot of unknowns about what was going to happen under the Trump administration … you maybe anticipated a lot of changes,” he said. “But it just hasn't materialized.”

Respondents also reported spending less time on intellectual property and litigation, with the numbers dropping from 40 to 32 percent and from 35 to 29 percent, respectively. These decreases are also understandable, Miller said.

But not all of the changes in time devoted to these challenges are as easily explained.

For Bostrom, the drop related to risk and crisis management came as a surprise. “The consequences of these events when they happen are so much more severe,” he said, though he added that it could be that the population of respondents for the report hasn't experienced a crisis this year.

Jason Winmill, managing partner at consulting firm Argopoint, which regularly advises legal departments at Fortune 500 companies, similarly said that 12 percentage point decrease related to risk and crisis management is “surprising and counterintuitive.”

“People are more active on social media and more vocal and even more vitriolic. And leading companies like Uber and United [Airlines] have been in the headlines for crisis-type situations,” he said. “That, combined with the recent focus on workplace sexual harassment, makes this number very surprising.”

Given that “the news is just riddled with crises,” Miller echoed that the crisis management change is unanticipated, as is the drop related to data privacy. “Given that the [General Data Protection Regulation] implementation is roughly six months away—not even that—I would think more attention would be going to privacy issues and data security issues,” Miller said. “It's not as though the issues around GDPR are decreasing as you get closer.”

“Something has shifted,” Miller said, “but I for the life of me can't tell you why on those two issues the numbers have gone down.”

Other findings from the report include:

• Comparing both surveys, the number of respondents describing risk and crisis management as “very important” fell from 63 percent to 53 percent.
• For 42 percent of respondents, regulatory uncertainty is the most significant regulation and enforcement concern, followed by cross-jurisdictional variability, the top concern for 30 percent.
• When it comes to intellectual property, the most significant concern for 27 percent of respondents is enforcing IP rights, which is followed closely by the 25 percent who pointed to trademark or copyright infringement.
• More than half of the respondents (62 percent) have between one and three issues of concern related to risk and crisis management. Thirty-three percent put the number at between four and six concerns.