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Anyone setting out to read the universe of reported cases of federal criminal prosecutions related to document destruction would not be occupied very long. Only a handful of such cases exist. They include destruction of materials sought by civil plaintiffs, the SEC, the FBI and Congress.

Notably, almost all of these cases involved the destruction of material that was under subpoena. Until Arthur Andersen’s January 2002 disclosure that certain of its employees had deleted a significant amount of data relating to Enron, little had been written or discussed publicly about corporate destruction efforts in advance of a subpoena. All that has changed.

The Justice Department’s March 2002 indictment of Arthur Andersen, the first indictment of a major accounting firm in the nation’s history for any crime, told corporate America that federal law enforcement will pursue aggressively pre-subpoena document destruction. Just as the federal Sentencing Guidelines brought a wave of attention to corporate compliance programs in the 1990s, the Andersen indictment will likely lead in-house counsel and risk managers to focus on their organization’s document retention and destruction policies today.