It’s always a good idea to remind your students to be careful if they should ever take on the responsibility of managing a law firm, especially in times of financial bust. If you have been following the Dewey & LeBoeuf criminal trial, you know that the jury deadlocked in October of last year on dozens of charges against Steven H. Davis, the former chairman of Dewey, and two other former executives of the law firm, Stephen DiCarmine and Joel Sanders. The three men were accused of being the architects of an accounting fraud that enabled Dewey to defraud its lenders and creditors during much of the financial crisis.

In January of this year, Manhattan prosecutors reached a deferred prosecution agreement with Steven H. Davis. The agreement runs for five years and prohibits Davis from practicing law in New York during that period.

In February, prosecutors reached a deferred prosecution agreement with Zachary Warren, one of the four original defendants, just weeks before he was supposed to go on trial in the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. Notably, Warren was not a lawyer when he worked as the client relations manager at Dewey & Leboeuf. After leaving Dewey, he went on to graduate from Georgetown Law Center and clerked for a federal judge.  He plans on working at Williams & Connolly in the fall.   The agreement requires Warren to perform 350 hours of community service as part of a one year agreement.

The Manhattan prosecutors are planning to retry the case against DiCarmine and Sanders.

Articles about the agreements reached with Davis and Warren can be found here and here.