Alston & Bird Partner Brown's Path to the Georgia Federal Court Bench
ALM Media
Updated
It's been a good month for Alston & Bird partner Michael L. Brown.
President Donald Trump nominated Brown July 13 to fill a long-vacant post on the federal court bench in the Northern District of Georgia. Brown's nomination came only 23 days after he and his New York law partner secured the acquittal of a bond trader in a federal trial in Connecticut closely watched by Wall Street.
Brown a former federal prosecutor and co-leader of Alston's government and internal investigations practice teamed up with Alston New York partner Brett Jaffe in a successful defense of Tyler Peters, a former vice president at international broker-dealer Nomura Securities International Co.
The jury convicted only one of Peters' co-defendants in the securities fraud conspiracy and gave Brown's client a clean sweep after the Alston team presented Peters as a junior trader who was simply doing what he had been trained by his supervisor to do and who did not know that the misstatements the traders made when making securities sales were illegal.
The court record included scrappy and lengthy letters Brown wrote to the judge on the defense team's behalf flatly accusing federal prosecutors of misconduct. The at times pugnacious letters were indicative of Brown's style. He is not afraid of a legal brawl.
"Mike is a great lawyer," said Atlanta attorney Page Pate, who has known Brown since the two were first-year law students at the University of Georgia. "If he is representing the government, he's going to be a hard-ass for the government. If he's representing a client, he's going to fight like hell for his client. He is one of a select group of people who can literally go either way."
Pate, who has a criminal defense practice, said Brown "will make a good judge, although I would not necessarily have said that if he had gone straight from the U.S. Attorney's Office. But the experience he has had since he left there will help him understand the people who come before him in criminal cases. I am hoping, and optimistic, that he will be very fair."
Brown grew up in Atlanta where his father, David Brown, was a commercial litigator at Atlanta's Smith Gambrell and represented Atlanta's Roman Catholic Archdiocese. The younger Brown attended Marist, a private Roman Catholic prep school in Atlanta, then earned his undergraduate degree at Georgetown University and his law degree at the University of Georgia.
At UGA, Brown was "the kind of guy we always knew in law school would either be a judge or a professor," Pate said. "He is always well-prepared."
Following law school, Brown clerked for Circuit Judge D.L. Edmondson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta. He then spent four years as an associate at Atlanta's King & Spalding before becoming a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida in Miami in 1999. Brown spent three years in Miami before going to work for U.S. Attorney William S. Duffey in 2002. His specialty was big money-drug cases.
But in prosecuting former Baltimore Ravens running back Jamal Lewis in 2005, he conceded to a plea bargain that dismissed six drug felonies in return for Lewis' plea to using a cellphone to help a friend facilitate a drug deal. U.S. District Judge Orinda Evans suggested that the case was weak, noting the government had only one witness: an informant the judge described at Lewis' sentencing hearing as "potentially quite impeachable."
Five months later, Brown left the U.S. Attorney's Office for Alston & Bird, where he dove into two high-profile public corruption cases: one in Birmingham, Alabama, where he represented a county commissioner accused of taking bribes; and a second in Georgia defending a county school superintendant.
While defending former DeKalb County School Superintendent Crawford Lewis against civil and criminal racketeering and public corruption charges stemming from massive school construction projects, Brown was booted from the case because Alston also represented a contractor the school system had hired. Brown appealed and won. Two years later, when Brown cut a plea deal for Lewis on the eve of his trial for a probated misdemeanor sentence, he became embroiled in a more bitter battle with DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Cynthia Becker over Lewis' sentence. Lewis complained to the state Judicial Qualifications Commission about Becker's conduct, which eventually led a special prosecutor to secure a grand jury indictment of Becker that was dismissed within days. It also prompted the Georgia General Assembly to abolish the JQC as an independent constitutional agency.
The legal brawl stemmed from Becker's decision to sentence Lewis to a year in jail, rather than probation, as Brown insisted. Within 24 hours, Brown had launched a broadside of emails and motions aimed at securing his client's release. Becker set a hearing for the following week, then left town. Brown then filed an emergency motion for bail with the Georgia Court of Appeals. The appeals court granted the motion.
In 2014, the Court of Appeals vacated Lewis's sentence and remanded it, finding in a case of first impression that Becker had no authority to send Lewis to jail "provided that he testified truthfully." The following year, the Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed with the appellate court, rejecting arguments by Brown and the county district attorney, who had allied on Lewis' behalf, that Becker had no authority to decide whether Lewis's testimony met the conditions of his plea deal.
