By James D. Troxell and
Terence J. Clark
The internet, financial newspapers and trade journal articles worldwide are covering Year 2000 information system technology issues; and more recently liability issues are being raised. Gartner Group is widely quoted for predicting that the global cost of the Year 2000 cure would be $600 Billion Dollars. Gartner Group studies also concluded that only 50% of North American companies will achieve Year 2000 compliance by 12/31/99. Recently the Federal government predicted its expenditures for Year 2000 | compliance would be about $2.3 Billion Dollars. Some have suggested the Federal government’s cost would exceed $60 Billion Dollars, and others have opined that the world-wide costs will be ten times the Gartner estimate. But regardless of all the dire predictions, what are the legal issues involved and how should management react? I. Describing the Year 2000 Problem.
The Year 2000 problem (or millennium bug as it is sometimes called) relates to a legacy of days when programs and data were input, output and stored via the computer punch card, a small | 
Year 2000 Countdown
paper card punched full of holes to express information. The benefits of expressing a date like March 5, 1964 as 030564 rather than 03/05/1964 saved millions of punch cards and ...
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