Brian Dickerson on Geoffrey Fieger

In yesterday's Freep, Brian Dickerson calls Geoffrey Fieger a "courtroom Robin Hood...championing the rights of the downtrodden."

Umm...no. He strikes me as an opportunist who preys on the downtrodden, using legal tactics often found by appeals courts to be illicit, and receives headline-grabbing jury awards, even though the vast majority of them are struck down on appeal. His care doesn't appear to be for the individual plaintiffs he represents; it comes across as trying to make a quick buck on the occasional big-time award that doesn't get struck down, even if it appears that he knows that his idiotic tactics are going to screw over the vast majority of his clients.

Fieger plots a wide-angle legal defense
Detroit Free Press

Is Geoffrey Fieger a courtroom Robin Hood who has earned the powerful political interest by championing the rights of the downtrodden?

Or is he a multimillionaire businessman who has surreptitiously used his considerable wealth to magnify his own political clout?

The only reasonable conclusion, for anyone who has been paying attention for the last decade or so, is that Michigan's best-known trial attorney is both.

But now that the U.S. Justice Department has him in its crosshairs, Fieger's freedom may depend on his ability to convince jurors that he is more the victim of a political vendetta than the legitimate target of a campaign to cleanse campaign finance.