Tagged: Geoffrey Fieger

Twelve years ago, I went to talk to Geoffrey Fieger, Michigan’s most flamboyant attorney. Fieger told me he was thinking about running for mayor of Detroit, and wanted to know what I thought.

I told him I thought it was an absolutely brilliant idea with only three fatal flaws. “What do you mean?” he said. “Well, first of all, you don’t live there,” I said. Fieger told me he could buy a house anywhere. I didn’t dispute that.

But there was a second problem. I told him, you aren’t going to get elected because you aren’t black. Detroiters aren’t ready to vote for a white mayor. “You’re wrong,” Fieger said. “They love me.”

Ten years or so ago, I went to talk to the powerful and flamboyant medical malpractice lawyer Geoffrey Fieger, probably best known for successfully defending Dr. Jack Kevorkian in a series of sensational, high-profile assisted suicide trials.

He said he was thinking about running for mayor of Detroit, and wanted my confidential advice. I told him I thought that was a brilliant idea, but that there were only three things wrong with it.

Virtually everyone knows Geoffrey Fieger, the attorney whose first name often seems to be “flamboyant.”

Though he burst into national prominence 20 years ago as the attorney who kept Jack Kevorkian free, these days, he is mostly in the news for winning huge medical malpractice verdicts.

Last month, he racked up a $144 million judgment in a birth trauma case which is believed to be the largest medical malpractice suit in state history.