A recent survey by Gartner found that financial compliance management spending for IT will triple from 2004 (less than 5% of IT budgets) to 2006 (10-15% of IT budgets). I wonder whether legal spending on the same set of issues has jumped anything like this amount.
The report makes the excellent point from another perspective. “Sustainable compliance … will only be achieved by consolidating compliance efforts through a programmatic rather than a project oriented approach.” In other words, a law department, like its IT sibling, should not choose one-off solutions for each regulatory challenge, but should create a broader, longer term program for compliance. Gartner states that a one-off response incurs IT spending “10 times more on IT solutions for compliance” than a programmatic response, which may directionally hold true for law departments.