Defense counsel in the trial of three ex-Dewey & LeBoeuf executives pressed their argument on Thursday that many of the accounting adjustments made by former firm employees were appropriate, American Lawyer reported today. The prosecution has sought to portray those adjustments as acts of fraud. On Thursday, Bryan Cave partner Austin Campriello confronted accusations that his client, former Dewey & LeBoeuf executive director Stephen DiCarmine, had been sent a list of allegedly false accounting adjustments. The list appeared on a slide in a PowerPoint presentation that detailed the firm’s 2009 budget and was projected on a screen during the testimony of Ilya Alter, a former Dewey & LeBoeuf budget and planning director. In 2009, Alter sent the PowerPoint presentation to ex-CFO Joel Sanders, who is on trial along with DiCarmine and the firm’s former chairman Steven Davis. Sanders presented most of the PowerPoint slides to the now-defunct firm’s executive committee in March 2009, but included in the version sent to the defendant by Alter were other slides marked with the phrase “Steve’s copy.” Alter testified Tuesday that those slides were meant only for Stephen DiCarmine. One of the marked slides listed some accounting adjustments made in 2008 that Alter testified were false.
