The lawyer suing the Douglas County school board raised “serious ethical concerns” about the legal team representing the district in a court filing this week, and he asked the judge presiding over the lawsuit to consider if his counterparts had violated their ethical duties. 

Attorney Steve Zansberg told a Douglas County judge Tuesday that details of the case had been misrepresented in legal filings by the board’s legal team from Hall and Evans and that board members who testified before that judge in late February had been untruthful in their statements.

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He pointed to recordings of conversations that he alleges contradict testimony given by board members. The defense team had access to those recordings before those members testified in court last month, Zansberg argued, and should’ve notified the court that their statements were untruthful.

The allegations are the latest turn in an ongoing lawsuit between Douglas County resident Robert Marshall and the board, as well as its four newly elected leaders: Mike Peterson, Christy Williams, Becky Myers and Kaylee Winegar. Marshall filed the suit in early February, alleging the four leaders communicated in a series of connected, private one-on-one conversations in late January; under state law, the board would’ve had to publicly meet if three or more of them were discussing public business together.

During those linked, one-on-one conversations, Marshall alleges, the board’s four leaders decided to fire Corey Wise, the district’s then-superintendent, in violation of the state’s open meeting law. Peterson, Williams, Winegar and Myers have all said they did not break the law and that they had not made a decision to fire Wise until they voted formally on Feb. 4.

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After communicating privately with Myers and Wineger, Peterson and Williams met with Wise on Jan. 28 and told him he could retire, resign or be fired. After they spoke with Wise, Williams and Peterson called David Ray, Elizabeth Hanson and Susan Meek – the board’s other three members who were not involved in the private conversations about Wise’s future. Ray and Meek recorded those conversations, unbeknownst to Peterson and Williams. Marshall filed his suit on Feb. 4, hours before the board voted 4-3 to fire Wise.

On Feb. 23, lawyers for the board asked Douglas County District Judge Jeffrey Holmes to toss the lawsuit and argued Zansberg hadn’t actually alleged any improper meetings or illegal decision-making on the part of the board in the suit.

In his response, Zansberg accused the board’s legal team of “flagrantly misrepresenting” his allegations in their attempt to have the suit tossed: The entirety of the suit is that the board’s leaders met illegally and made a decision illegally. He asked Holmes to consider if the defense team had violated professional ethics, and he quoted the professional code of conduct requiring court filings be “well grounded in fact.”

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Matthew Hegarty, one of the Hall and Evans attorneys who has represented the board, did not return a request for comment sent Wednesday afternoon. A spokeswoman for the district said on Wednesday that she had forwarded questions to the district’s legal team. No representative for the district responded to that request for comment by Thursday afternoon. The board’s leaders have consistently maintained that they did nothing wrong.

In an email, Zansberg said he would let his filing speak for itself.

In that filing, he said two board members were untruthful in their statements about the case. In a hearing in late February, Peterson, Williams and Myers testified that they had not made a decision about Wise before they voted to formally fire him on Feb. 4. They said they were talking with other board members privately to preliminarily discuss Wise’s future.

But Zansberg argued to the court that audio recordings made clear that the board’s leaders had already made a collective decision outside of the public’s eye, which would violate the state’s open meeting laws. What’s more, he argued, the board’s lawyers knew about those recordings and their contents before the board members testified to the contrary.

Zansberg then quoted the code of conduct related to a lawyer’s duty to inform the court about testimony that is “untruthful.” 

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Given that the board members and their attorneys “were fully apprised of what had actually transpired” via the recordings, their steadfast denial that they had broken the law “raises serious ethical concerns,” Zansberg wrote.

Earlier this month, in an early victory to Zansberg and Marshall, Holmes ordered the board to stop communicating in the way it had been ahead of the decision to fire Wise. The board is considering appealing that decision, and the rest of the lawsuit – which seeks to have the communications deemed illegal and Wise’s firing nullified – still remains to be litigated.