The defense’s goal, says Zachary Terwilliger, a former U.S. attorney and partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins, was to humanize Lynch. “As a defense attorney, you want the jury to be able to identify with your client, even if he is a millionaire,” he says. Meanwhile, the government sought to “push back the defense narrative: This isn’t some folksy guy named Mike, this is Dr. Lynch. He is someone who focuses on every excruciating detail,” says Terwilliger.
Most of the trial was taken up by the testimony of more than 30 government witnesses: a diverse cast of Autonomy experts, whistleblowers, and HP executives, among others. Witnesses testified about Lynch’s role in misleading auditors, analysts and regulators about the state of Autonomy’s finances, leading HP to overvalue the company. Lynch was the orchestrator, they alleged, of a careful campaign to inflate the software company’s sales figures by misdating and misclassifying sales and engaging in a practice known as round-tripping, whereby software resellers effectively received the funds to purchase Autonomy software.
In the UK civil trial, Lynch had attempted to deflect similar fraud allegations by claiming that Autonomy’s poor performance after the acquisition was the fault of HP, which had used him as a scapegoat for a deal gone bad. This defense was ruled out before the criminal trial by the presiding judge, Charles Breyer, who ordered that only evidence relating to the period before the agreement, when it was alleged that fraud had occurred, would be admissible.
Instead, Lynch had to argue that the financial gymnastics allegedly performed at Autonomy had nothing to do with him personally, but rather with other executives, such as Hussain, the chief financial officer. The defense “was based on the idea of a division of labor,” Terwilliger says. “The defense says that even if what you say really happened, my client didn’t know about it or he wasn’t involved.”
Lynch’s argument played on the fine distinction between negligence (a failure as CEO to maintain effective oversight of the company’s finances) that does not amount to fraud, and a willful blindness to the misconduct of other members of an organization. “Willful blindness is not a defense,” says Stephanie Siegmann, another former prosecutor and partner at the Hinckley Allen law firm, but negligence could be.
At the end of the trial, in an unconventional move, Lynch took the witness stand to plead his case. He described to the jury his “surreal” experience of the trial, sitting like a “parade of witnesses I have never met” recounted “a series of transactions in which I have no part, accounting decisions in which I have no part, and not much else.”
Although the decision to testify risked exposing Lynch to cross-examination by prosecutors, it gave him the opportunity to appeal directly to the jury. “Although this is a calculated risk, in some cases the defendants managed to convince the jury,” says Siegmann. “The jury evaluates the credibility of a witness: they determine whether he is telling the truth. They (could) determine that he had no intent to defraud.”