Overview

Nancy Temple was an in-house attorney at Arthur Andersen LLP whose October 16, 2001 email became the pivotal piece of evidence in the criminal prosecution of the accounting firm for obstruction of justice in its destruction of Enron-related documents. Temple's email advised Andersen auditor Michael Odom and lead Enron engagement partner David Duncan to remove references to consultations with the legal group and to delete her name from audit memos, actions that prosecutors argued constituted consciousness of guilt and an attempt to corrupt the audit process. Temple graduated from the University of Illinois College of Business with a BS in Accountancy (1986) and earned her JD from Harvard Law School (1989). She practiced at the prestigious firm Sidley Austin (then Sidley Austin Brown & Wood) for eleven years, making partner, before joining Arthur Andersen as in-house counsel. At Andersen, she became centrally involved in advising on document retention policies during the period when the SEC was investigating Enron. Jurors later indicated that their guilty verdict in the Andersen obstruction trial was based in significant part on Temple's email and the document destruction it appeared to authorize. The conviction was devastating, it effectively killed Arthur Andersen, one of the Big Five accounting firms, destroying 85,000 jobs worldwide. However, on May 31, 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction in a decision written by Chief Justice Rehnquist, finding that the jury instructions had been too broad. Despite her central role in the events, Nancy Temple was never personally charged with any crime. She later worked at Freeman, Freeman & Salzman P.C. and co-founded Katten & Temple LLP in April 2008.

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Related Investigations (1)

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Sources & Documentation

3 documented sources from official records, investigations, and reports