Using E-Discovery Technology to Mitigate FCPA Exposure

On April 5, the Criminal Division of the DOJ announced a pilot program aimed at more robust enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The program is designed to motivate companies to self-disclose FCPA-related misconduct, fully cooperate, and where appropriate remediate flaws in their controls and compliance programs. This requires an effective compliance program that can root out potential violations and swiftly ascertain and disclose all relevant facts.

For a multinational corporation, evidence of FCPA violations could lie hidden in emails, electronic documents and other files that could be stored anywhere across the company’s global footprint, and in any mix of languages. Searching all that data thoroughly and quickly can be done only with the help of the right technology. E-discovery software helps uncover evidence by providing in-house compliance professionals with sophisticated tools for searching and analyzing corporate data.

For FCPA cases, a critical capability is multi-language document handling. In these cases, the emails and documents under scrutiny could be in any of a number of languages, or even multiple languages within a single document. The platform should be able to process such documents and search them, in multiple languages.

The same sophisticated tools that let litigators explore documents, patterns and timelines can be used by compliance professionals to identify suspicious activity. Under the DOJ’s new policy, that could make the difference as to whether a corporation is prosecuted, and if it is, what penalties it could face.