The year started with the continued fallout from the collapse of energy giant Enron, which had filed for bankruptcy the previous December. In the political and media frenzy, questions were being asked about the role of Enron’s in-house legal team, although the man in the firing line, general counsel James V Derrick Jr, strenuously denied that they had in any way failed in their duties.
Then, in May, a US jury found Enron’s auditors Andersen guilty of obstructing justice on the basis of a single finding of ‘corrupt intent’ against one of its in-house lawyers, Nancy Temple. The jury decided that an e-mail she had sent – asking for her name to be removed from an Enron-related memorandum to avoid the chances of her being called as a witness – was proof that Andersen had tried to keep information from US watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
