In-house lawyers involved in recent high-profile fraud investigations swap war stories and discuss new enforcement trends at Legal Week's Corporate Counsel Forum Europe

Peter Kurer, former UBS chairman: Our combined experience covers three Department of Justice (DoJ) investigations, two deferred prosecution agreements, and around £2bn in fines, so we should have some useful insights. Barry, what are the most important trends?

Barry Vitou, Winston & Strawn partner: Global legal harmonisation feeding through to enforcement. Stronger UK-DoJ co-operation will translate into more cases and investigations. In the last two years the UK has seen three prosecutions and two civil settlements – one involving Balfour Beatty – and the Financial Services Authority is getting in on the act, fining Aon and writing a report on the insurance sector. So it is really starting to kick off and the Bribery Act will only increase that activity. Sector investigations will come here. The US has run three, in the orthopaedic, pharmaceutical and oil and gas extractive industries. The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) doesn't do them yet but one of its successful prosecutions this year almost certainly fell out of the US orthopaedic investigation. The eye-watering fines are mostly US-led, but watch this space, because the UK judiciary has suggested fines need to be on the same scale.

Chris Vaughan, Balfour Beatty general counsel and company secretary: Balfour Beatty agreed a £2.25m civil settlement on a corruption investigation. We have since had an external monitor in place for two years, reporting to the SFO, and providing a platform to push through changes. Anti-corruption programmes are not so much about compliance but culture, and general counsel can lead the charge in driving ethics programmes in conjunction with other senior management.

Roger Wiltshire, BAE Systems chief counsel: BAE Systems' issues were related to export contracts in Saudi and Eastern Europe. One of the difficulties was investigating events that happened up to 15 years ago. We learned you need to have a good document management process to identify and recover information.

At the beginning of the SFO investigation in 2004, we realised there was a gulf between the perception of the company in the media and reality. This was affecting our reputation, so we chose to act and Lord Justice Woolf was appointed to do a thorough review of the company's ethics policies and processes. The five-year-long regulatory investigation involved huge resources, and therefore cost. So my advice is to never get yourself into one!

Gerard Gent, Siemens GC and legal UK & group company secretary: In 2007 both the Munich state prosecutor's office and the DoJ and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) notified us they would commence investigations into a number of transactions. An immensely distracting two-year period followed, involving the appointment of no less than four international law firms and two accountancy firms, 1,740 interviews of employees, and reviewing 38 million financial transactions across 32 countries.

The consequence was a mixture of fines and disgorgement orders, totalling $1.6bn (£999.4m), plus external consultant costs of just under $900m (£565.8m). We did have a compliance officer, but the function was under-resourced and without a voice on the main board.

Now we have a combined head of compliance and legal as a full board member and we've developed an extensive programme, with communication and training as a big part. It's particularly important in relation to agents: we now have a vigorous process for vetting third party agents. With 450,000 employees globally, the biggest challenge for us is not establishing a message from the top, but also from the middle management, where the coalface issues happen.

Our incentives for managers are now linked to both results in compliance implementation and employee feedback on how seriously they see the organisation is taking compliance.

PK: I agree; the public and regulators say it is about the tone from the top, but the challenge is further down. We failed at UBS because people in the middle didn't follow through. Don't underestimate the resistance.

CV: When we started we had a rules-based handbook and I set myself a target of three months to rewrite it. But redrawing our corporate values, redrafting the code of conduct, developing training, helplines and proper enforcement and monitoring procedures took a year. It's not about having a code of conduct – we all had one and we've all had problems – but how embedded it is.

RW: One of the comments from the DoJ was, although we have 130 lawyers in the group, we needed more, and more compliance lawyers in particular, because we were light compared to a US defence company.

PK: Gerard, how did you handle the public and media?

GG: It is very hard to gain control of the media coverage because the regulators you are dealing with have their own communication agendas to follow, so we were responding to sometimes difficult briefings from the DoJ and Munich state prosecutors office and press reaction to this. You start with damage limitation and then try to move the agenda on once you can bang the drum about initiatives you are putting in place.

• Are your law firms doing enough to keep costs down during the recession? Click here to take part in the 2010 Legal Week Law Firm Audit.