Ask a corporate risk manager what gives him or her pause for consideration in 2010, and be prepared to absorb the huge responsibilities their jobs entail. Not only are risk managers tasked with unearthing, assessing and quantifying the breadth of strategic, operational and financial exposures confronting their organizations, they must detail plans to mitigate their impact. Obviously, this is not a job for the weak-kneed.

While no two organizations face the same exact risks, all must address such familiar challenges as regulatory reforms, litigation trends, natural and man-made hazards, global supply chain resiliency, and the vicissitudes of the cyclical property and casualty insurance market, among copious others. The financial crisis and subsequent recession have created new risks while enlarging others, from enhanced risk governance and onerous compliance requirements to growing concerns over liability for directors and officers and company employment practices, now that the number of bankruptcy filings and the ranks of the unemployed have skyrocketed.

So with the recovery allegedly under way, what are risk managers fretting over this year? Plenty. There's mushrooming uncertainty over federal policies (read: taxation and regulation), anger about the lifting of the ban on contingent commissions paid insurance brokers by insurers, and continued nail-biting over lingering economic malaise and its corrosive effects on business prospects.