The U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision that Arthur Andersen LLP was wrongly convicted for witness tampering looked like good news for corporate counsel at first. The case partly dealt with whether an Andersen in-house attorney should have told employees working for client Enron Corp. to comply with Andersen's document handling policies. The attorney's advice, issued just as government investigators were ramping up their Enron probe, resulted in massive document shredding.
The high court didn't address the question of whether the Andersen attorney's advice was proper. But the justices did say that as long as there isn't an intent to commit a crime, it's OK to simply offer legal advice. It's also OK, the Court said, for companies to have valid document retention and destruction policies.
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