Corporate attorneys breathed a sigh of relief last week when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction of Arthur Andersen; the court ruled that the jury was wrongly told that the former accounting giant could be convicted even if it never intended to do anything unlawful.
Andersen was convicted of witness-tampering for conduct that took place when its client Enron was the target of a looming investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the fall of 2001. A major component of the government’s criminal investigation involved an email that Andersen’s in-house counsel sent to employees working on the Enron account, reminding them to follow the accounting firm’s lawful document retention policy. As a result, numerous documents were destroyed—although apparently at least one copy of every key Enron document was preserved.
