I believe that we are both right here! Was this lawyer a public defender or one on the payrolls? He accessed the county records via the county computer. That leaves me to think that he was a county employee. Also, since he is a lawyer, the odds really jump that he is a registered demonicRat!
As you point out, if filed with a county clerk, anyone can go there to get the info. However, if someone filed for thousands of DD214s via the standard channels, some alarm bells might be raised!
"Accessing via the County computer" may include just hitting the county's Web server from his own computer...a few counties in America have managed to scan all of their public records into Adobe Acrobat and hook them up to a database server.