Over the last several years there has been a dramatic change in the practice of white-collar criminal defense. The highly publicized corporate scandals involving Enron, WorldCom and others, and the federal government’s reaction to those events have resulted in an enormous shift of power away from protecting corporate employees’ rights.
After the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and the Justice Department’s issuance of the so-called “Thompson Memorandum,”[FOOTNOTE 1] the focus has been on enhancing the power of big government and protecting the existence of large corporations. Individual corporate employees, however, have been left powerless, facing the reality that events beyond their control could result in the loss of employment or life-long prison sentences.
