FCPA ... the "Law Version" of Baseball

October is a month for baseball - the playoffs are under way and the World Series is right around the corner. Baseball aficionados are found of their statistics, and with good reason, there are a ton of baseball statistics to digest.

Well, the FCPA is quickly becoming the "law version" of baseball when it comes to statistics. Every few weeks it seems (see here for a prior post) FCPA aficionados have new statistics to digest.

The latest FCPA statistics come courtesy of Fulbright & Jaworski's 6th Annual Litigation Trends Survey (see here for download).

According to a survey of over 400 corporate counsel in the U.S. and the U.K.:

(1) "the percentage of companies that has engaged outside counsel in the past 12 months to assist with a corruption or bribery investigation (i.e., FCPA and U.K. equivalent) has nearly doubled ..." (see p. 37) and;

(2) "the incidence of due diligence for bribery or corruption relating to mergers, acquisitions or other transactions in foreign countries has more than doubled ..." (p. 38).

These statistics should come as no surprise to followers of this blog who well know that FCPA compliance is a hot topic given the current aggressive enforcement climate.

Yet, the Fulbright survey (much like the prior Deloitte survey - see here) also shows that very few companies address FCPA risks on a pro-active basis. For instance, even though Fulbright's survey found that the incidence of FCPA/bribery due diligence in M&A transactions has doubled, the number of companies engaging in such due diligence remains below 20%.

As to the "big picture" issue of whether perceived levels of corruption in a foreign country result in a company doing less business in that country, the survey shows that "only about half as many respondents as last year say their companies, at some point in the past, have decided against doing business in a country due to the perceived degree of local corruption." (see p. 38). The one exception appears to be in the manufacturing sector "where 39% have made that decision v. 27% last year."