Corporate fines in the US, UK and Europe are on an upward trajectory. In the UK, US-style deferred prosecution agreements have been introduced and new corporate sentencing guidelines for economic crime, health and safety, corporate manslaughter and environmental offences have led to a significant jump in corporate fines.

In the face of these challenges, new Legal Week research, in association with Pinsent Masons, has found that almost three in four senior in-house lawyers expect their business's compliance spend to rise during the next five years.

Other key findings from the research, which drew on interviews with general counsel, in-house lawyers and compliance personnel at businesses around the world, include:

- Cost pressures are most keenly felt in the financial services sector, where 87% of respondents are expecting an increase in compliance workload;
- Of those who expect their compliance spend to peak this year, 86% expect it to go up by as much as a fifth; and
- Ninety-two percent of respondents rely on compliance processes which are either partially or manually administered.