A defense lawyer for the former chairman of the Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP law firm urged a judge to toss out financial fraud charges against his client, saying that prosecutors did nothing more than offer "scant and ambiguous" evidence that amounts to "rank speculation,” Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported on Friday. The request, made in a court filing on Thursday, comes after three months of a trial in which prosecutors have sought to convince jurors that the former chairman, Steven Davis, and two other former leaders oversaw a plot to manipulate Dewey's books to keep the firm afloat before its 2012 collapse. Testimony from about 40 witnesses has ranged from colorful anecdotes on internal firm disputes to dissections of complex accounting documents.
