Corporate Fraud Data Base: “Last spring, as the five-year anniversary of the Corporate Fraud Task Force approached, The American Lawyer set out to review its record of fraud prosecution. This turned out to be a difficult undertaking. The U.S. Department of Justice, after repeated inquiries, finally explained that it collects its statistics from individual U.S. attorney’s offices and does not maintain a centralized record of the corporate fraud cases that produced the 1,236 convictions cited by then–attorney general Alberto Gonzales at the task force’s anniversary celebration last July. So we developed our own database of significant corporate fraud prosecutions. In this we were guided by the Corporate Fraud Task Force Web site, which identified about 80 investigations deemed important by the Justice Department. We added criminal cases cited in reports published by the task force, as well as more recent prosecutions mentioned by Justice Department officials in speeches or testimony. In all, we analyzed 124 corporate fraud investigations, which resulted in 440 indicted defendants. Our sources were publicly available case records, as well as interviews with hundreds of prosecutors and defense lawyers. This database contains information about when and where these 440 cases were brought, the lawyers on both sides, and how the cases turned out. In all, we believe the database provides a historic portrait of corporate fraud prosecution in the post-Enron age.”