After 10 days of discussion, the jury in the Arthur Andersen case found the once-giant accounting firm guilty of obstruction of justice last week. The verdict came as something of a surprise to both sides. Most commentators believed that the prosecution had a difficult case at best.

This was the first criminal prosecution in the Enron financial debacle and required the government to win on a number of novel legal issues. The greatest asset the government had was the decision by the Arthur Andersen partner in charge of the Enron account to personally plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges and to agree to testify for the government.

It is easy to imagine that as the days passed during which the jury could not come to a decision the lawyers for Andersen began to feel hope that they had prevailed in their case. The government had to prove that Andersen had, as a company, the intent to destroy documents for the purpose of deceiving the Securities and Exchange Commission so as to impede their investigations into wrongdoing at Enron.

Many commentators felt that this would be exceptionally difficult, even though there was no controversy about the fact that Andersen had, in fact, destroyed thousands of paper documents and e-mails. Andersen argued that the destruction of these documents had been ordered as part of normal business practices.

Large modern corporations routinely generate millions of pieces of paper and an equal number of digital documents every year. They must have some policy as to which documents to preserve and which to destroy routinely. Otherwise they would soon be overwhelmed by retained documents.

If one destroys documents according to such a routine policy then this is generally permitted. But when the destruction is for the purpose of subverting an investigation or litigation, then everything changes. But this is difficult for prosecutors to prove in a courtroom.

What is so remarkable about the Andersen case is that the jury, according to post-trial interviews, found Andersen guilty not based upon the destruction of documents as argued by the prosecution but rather because of testimony by an Andersen lawyer that she had advised Duncan to delete important information from a memorandum. This, was in the jury’s words, a “smoking gun.”

The end results of the guilty verdict in the Andersen trial are quite interesting and will develop over time. First, there can be no question that this verdict, even if reversed on appeal, means the end of Arthur Andersen as a viable company. One of the largest American accounting firms will soon be history.

Second, other accounting and law firms, as well as general business corporations, will now be forced to re-evaluate even further not only their document retention policies but their policies on document drafting and revision. Third, and, perhaps, most important, the business community will need to learn a lesson about public outrage from the Andersen trial.

The fact that the jury found Andersen guilty on a theory that no one, not even the prosecution, expected would seem to indicate that the jury, in my opinion, wanted to find the company guilty. When you have juries of that mind, motivated by outrage at certain business practices, they will always find a way to convict.

Andersen may well not be the last corporation to feel the negative response of the American public to questionable business practices. Only time will tell whether the lesson will be taken seriously.

 Mike Hoeflich is a professor in the Kansas University School of Law.