Inappropriate Emails

“To the extent there are questions about certain communications by General Allen, he shares in the desire to resolve those questions as completely and quickly as possible.”

–John G. Baker, general counsel of the U.S. Marine Corps

The revelation of the extramarital affair between CIA Director David Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell, quickly grew to ensnare others, among them General John Allen, the top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Officials at the U.S. Department of Defense revealed that they were investigating 20,000-30,000 pages of communications between Allen and Jill Kelley, the Florida socialite who initially notified authorities about threatening emails from Paula Broadwell.

Officials have described several of the emails between Kelley and Allen as “flirtatious” and “suggestive,” although some have said that only a small number of the communications are problematic. Allen has denied any wrongdoing.

Criminal Chemist

“There are a lot of really, really massive problems with this situation.”

–Lisa Hewitt, general counsel of The Committee for Public Counsel Services

Thousands of criminal prosecutions have been called into question by the revelation that a chemist at a Massachusetts state drug laboratory reportedly falsified test results for years. According to authorities, Annie Dookhan reported results for samples that she had never tested and contaminated samples with other drugs to cover up inconsistent results.

At least 10,000 people were reportedly prosecuted based on Dookhan's drug testing. Hewitt, who represents the state's public defender agency, told the Boston Globe that it would take as much as $332 million to retry all of the cases that the lab handled during Dookhan's tenure.

Abysmal Acquirement

“They used low-end hardware sales, but put out that it was a pure software company. They put this into their growth calculation.”

–John Schultz, general counsel of Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP)

HP investors got an unwelcome surprise this month, as the technology company announced that it would take an $8.8 billion charge, largely as a result of alleged financial misrepresentations at Autonomy, which HP acquired for $11.1 billion last year.

According to HP, “some members of Autonomy's former management team used accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company” prior to the acquisition. One of these misrepresentations included counting hardware sales as software sales, which typically have a larger profit margin, Schultz said in an interview with the New York Times.