DUI Defense Lawyer Didn't Want to Remain an Accountant, and Other 'On the Move' News

Ryan B. Schwartz. Rebecca Breyer

When big-name DUI defense lawyers Bubba Head, Larry Kohn and Cory Yager interviewed Ryan Schwartz for a job at their firm, he'd already racked up a lot of experiencebut working for accounting firms and then, after law school, for prosecutors.

Schwartz had only been handling criminal defense cases as a solo for a year and a half when they invited him to join their firm, Kohn & Yager, last month as a senior associate.

Schwartz, 37, started out working for big accounting firms in their financial consulting divisionsjoining Arthur Anderson in 2001, right before the Enron scandal blew up, then Ernst & Young, which acquired his group. To gain more accounting expertise, he enrolled in a night MBA program at the University of Baltimore, where he's from, while working for asset management firm Legg Mason.

But after completing his MBA and more financial consulting jobs, Schwartz decided to go to law school. "My skill is communication and dealing with people. I don't like sitting behind a desk and being told what to do," he said. "How am I helping people's lives for the better? I want to have an impact on someone's life and help change, maybe, the trajectory of their life."

Consulting, he said, did not do that. "And I love to argue," he added. "I love to win an argument. It drives my wife crazy."

"Ryan is very personable," said Head. "He asks for business. He can walk up to anybody and tell them what he does for a living. That is great for walking around a courthouse. And he dresses better than me."

Head said Schwartz's business experience and work in seven different prosecutor's offices, including internships, were a selling point.

"He's using his experience to become a businessman. You can't just be a lawyer in today's legal marketplace," Head said, citing statistics that DUI arrests in Georgia have dropped from about 90,000 in 1993 to under 30,000 in 2014. There were 25,421 DUI arrests in Georgia in 2015, according to Statistic Brain Research Institute.

Meanwhile, there are a lot more Georgia lawyers specializing in DUI defense.

Kohn, Yager and their mentor, Head, left DUI defense firm Head Thomas Webb & Willis last year to start Kohn & Yager, where Head is of counsel. The firm handles DUI and other criminal defense cases. Their former firm is now Thomas Webb & Willis.

Kohn met Schwartz while he was briefly prosecuting cases part-time in Sandy Springs and Dunwoody municipal courts to supplement his new criminal defense practice. "He had a good working knowledge of the law and I thought he treated people fairly. I thought he was very aggressive, building his business in the right way, and hard working," Kohn said.

Schwartz also had good connections in the community from all the prosecutor jobs, Kohn said. A few months later, Kohn invited him to join the firm.

Initially Schwartz was interested in prosecuting the criminally accused, not defending them. While attending Atlanta's John Marshall Law School, he landed four prosecution internshipsat the district attorneys' offices in Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb counties and the Gwinnett County Solicitor's Office.

After graduating in 2012, he got a job as an assistant district attorney with the Northeastern Judicial Circuit DA's Office, which serves Hall and Dawson counties, but the long commute from Atlanta prompted him to move to the Fulton DA's office.