Crawford Lewis, a former superintendent of the DeKalb County School System, was charged with serious crimes involving, among other things, alleged corruption in the award and management of school construction contracts, and he hired Michael Brown, a lawyer with the firm Alston & Bird LLP, to defend him against these charges. On the motion of the prosecuting attorneys, the court below disqualified Brown and his firm from continuing to represent Lewis, based on a finding that the firm has a conflict of interest because it also represents the employer of a witness for the State, albeit with respect to matters unrelated to both the witness and the prosecution. We granted a petition for interlocutory review to consider whether the court below abused its discretion when it disqualified Brown and his firm. Upon our review of the record, we find no proper basis for the disqualification, and for this reason, we reverse the order disqualifying Brown and Alston & Bird. Lewis served as the superintendent of the DeKalb County School System between 2005 and 2010, and in March 2010, he hired Brown to represent him in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation of corruption in the school system. Two months later, a DeKalb County grand jury returned a 127-page indictment, charging Lewis and three others with multiple violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, OCGA § 16-14-1 et seq. , and other crimes involving corruption, including in the award and management of contracts for several school construction projects.1 According to the indictment, Lewis and Patricia Reid, the chief operations officer of the school system, conspired to defraud the school system by, among other things,2 manipulating the bidding process to award school construction contracts to contractors that would agree to use Reid’s husband, an architect, as a subcontractor, a practice that, the State alleges, violates Georgia law governing the award of public works contracts, as well as school system regulations and policies concerning construction contracts.3 The indictment alleges that these crimes were committed between October 2005 and March 2010.
Even before the grand jury returned its indictment, the school system apparently became aware of some problems and relieved Reid of her duties as chief operations officer in November 2009. At that time, the school system engaged Parsons Commercial Technology Group, Inc., a large engineering and construction firm with operations throughout the United States and overseas, to manage its ongoing school construction projects, which Reid previously had managed. Barbara Colman, a Parsons employee, was assigned to work from the offices of the DeKalb County School System and manage these construction projects. On September 17, 2010, the State provided Lewis with a witness list, which identifies Colman as one of 73 individuals from whom the State might elicit testimony at the trial of this case.4 Apparently around the same time, the State served a subpoena upon Colman to compel her appearance at trial.
