The dubious case of global law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf

New York

THE names Enron and WorldCom are synonymous with accounting fraud and an era in which top executives turned to desperate measures to inflate company earnings, mislead investors, prop up share prices and supercharge their already exorbitant compensation.

Surprisingly, the post-Lehman Brothers, post-financial crisis period has yielded no such headline-grabbing cases. So it's easy to imagine that the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, thought he had struck gold when someone accused the top officials of Dewey & LeBoeuf - the prestigious global law firm that imploded in May 2012 after a series of partner defections - of defrauding the firm's lenders and bondholders by means of a sophisticated accounting conspiracy.