Instead, much of the testimony was about arcane, small-bore accounting issues — whether revenue received by the firm during the first few days of January for work performed and billed the previous year could be booked in December; whether the return of a client’s retainer could be amortized over five months in the same calendar year; and under what circumstances payments to partners could be classified as a return of their capital contributions. Jurors were subjected to hours of testimony on each of these topics, which are also the subject of extensive discussion in accounting literature.

For some reason, prosecutors didn’t call any accounting experts to testify that any of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s accounting was improper. Nor did they call the Ernst & Young partner in charge of the firm’s audits. As even Mr. Canellas testified, on “almost any accounting issue people can differ in opinion.”

And while Mr. Sanders, as chief financial officer, was at least involved in some of the considerations of the accounting treatment, there was scant evidence that either of the “two Steves,” as Mr. Davis and Mr. DiCarmine were known at the firm, understood that any of the adjustments were questionable, let alone that they directed a conspiracy to defraud lenders and investors. There was testimony that Mr. Canellas hid some accounting adjustments from Mr. Davis and, in one instance, told a participant “not to tell Mr. Davis anything about it.”

In his summation, Mr. Moser seemed to address this missing link, arguing that Mr. Davis and Mr. DiCarmine “can’t escape” being convicted “just because they had others do their dirty work for them.” And he said that when Mr. Davis told employees that Dewey & LeBoeuf needed to meet its loan covenants, that was actually “a command to commit fraud.”

No matter the verdict, the Dewey & LeBoeuf prosecution may well add to a growing national concern about “overcriminalization and excessive punishment,” to quote Justice Elena Kagan of the Supreme Court. She was discussing the overzealous prosecution of trivial matters or, in the accounting context, prosecuting the exercise of business judgments over which experts can differ.

The Justice Department this week began a new initiative to hold corporate executives accountable for crimes at the corporate level, a response to widespread frustration that so few high-level executives have been prosecuted since the financial crisis even as their corporate employers have admitted wrongdoing and paid billions in fines. But that doesn’t mean prosecutors should bring cases based largely on inference and flimsy evidence.

Justice Kagan criticized aspects of the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform law as “a bad law — too broad and undifferentiated, with too high maximum penalties, which give prosecutors too much leverage and sentencers too much discretion,” which she found to be “an emblem of a deeper pathology in the federal criminal code.”