Lynsey Morris Barron of Miller & Martin. (Courtesy photo)

Miller & Martin has added former federal prosecutor Lynsey Barron as a member in its Atlanta office.

Barron spent more than four years at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia, where she tried the high-profile embezzlement case of Atlanta lawyer Nathan Hardwick IV.

She joined Miller & Martin's white-collar defense practice and its data privacy and cybersecurity team last month after a short stint in-house at Atlanta-based UPS, where she handled internal compliance, data privacy and cybersecurity matters.

Barron said working at the U.S. attorney's office was the best job she'd ever had, but she returned to private practice, joining UPS last March, because she has a son to put through college. "Every single day was exciting. That I got to do it for four years was such a gift," Barron told the Daily Report in an interview from New York, where she was training for certification as a Certified Information Privacy Professional.

She decided to make the switch from UPS to Miller & Martin after Danny Griffin, who heads Miller & Martin's white-collar and investigations practice from Atlanta, got in touch with her. "I realized I'm a trial lawyer, and I wanted to be in a job with the possibility of being back in court," Barron said.

Barron said she'd known Griffin, who is also a former federal prosecutor, for years through Rick Deane, a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, who became her mentor when she worked at Jones Day as a young associate. "[Griffin] is a great lawyer, and he is so respected in the field. I'm learning a lot from him," she said.

At a midsize firm like Miller & Martin, Barron added, there are more frequent opportunities to appear in court than at a megafirm. "I'm not working on the same giant investigation for five years," she said, adding that the chance to strengthen her data privacy and cybersecurity expertise was another draw.

Miller & Martin now has 46 lawyers in its Atlanta office, the 130-lawyer firm's second-largest location after its Chattanooga headquarters.

As a federal prosecutor, Barron tried six cases to verdict–most notably the Hardwick case. A federal jury unanimously convicted Hardwick of embezzling more than $26 million from his now-bankrupt residential real estate closing firm, Morris Hardwick Schneider, in October 2018 after a trial that lasted over three weeks.

Barron tried the case with Doug Gilfillan, now a partner at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, and J. Russell Phillips, who led the prosecution team. She also argued four cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit during her stint as a federal prosecutor.

Barron didn't go to law school until she was 30, after working in Washington, D.C., for U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-New York, and then as a lobbyist for the American Association of University Women and the March of Dimes.

"I loved every minute from my first day in contracts class," Barron said, adding that she knew from her first semester in law school at Emory University that she wanted to be a federal prosecutor.

She clerked for the Atlanta U.S. attorney's office the summer after her 1L year. After earning her law degree, Barron in 2009 joined Jones Day.

It took her five tries, Barron said, but she finally landed a job with the U.S. attorney's office in 2015, where she worked in the economic fraud and public corruption units. "I think I was the last person Sally Yates hired before she went to the U.S. attorney general's office," she said, adding that she isn't ruling out a return to public service down the road.