People shop during the 2025 Detroit Festival of Books
A look the scene at one shed at the Eastern Market in Detroit on Sunday, July 20, 2025 as people browse for books, records, comics, posters, and more.
I was struck by one of the many billboards on Eight Mile Road the other day, and I realize as I type those words that since most of the signs near the Lodge Freeway are from law firms, I need to be more specific.
I noticed the billboard from Morgan & Morgan, which entered the Detroit market two years ago because goodness knows we didn’t have enough personal injury lawyers already. I detected the billboard. I was taken aback by the billboard.
The billboard did not fall and hurt me, which meant I did not need to call Sam, Mike Morse, David Femminineo or (888) Dial Davis, who also advertise within a few seconds of that interchange. I did not need to dial 855-CAR-HIT-U, which is good, because that guy’s law license was suspended after he was convicted of tax fraud in 2022.
I only needed to reach out to Morgan & Morgan, and to my surprise, the return caller from the sprawling firm was the founder and CEO.
John Morgan and I wound up talking about lots of things, including marketing, his friends Hulk Hogan and Geoffrey Feiger, and why he despises Disney World, even though he’s based in Orlando, Florida.
He inadvertently reminded me to track down Sandra Kas-Mikha, founder of a small law firm in Southfield, whose half-dozen scattered billboards for 855-CALL-KAS make her an earnest sapling in the forest of legal signage.
And, as for the billboard that raised my eyebrows, he said, that’s show biz.
An angelic approach
The billboard faces eastbound traffic and is mostly blue and maize. “America’s Largest Injury Law Firm,” it says across the top, and with 1,300 attorneys and 6,000 other staffers spread across 50 states, that’s a claim that will hold up in court.
“Proud partner of Michigan athletics,” it says in smaller letters next to a Block M, and given the befuddling state of college sports, I’m sure that’s appreciated. Watch for an official muffler repair shop and hot dog cart, too.
What stopped me, or at least made me drop to the speed limit, were the three big white words in the middle: “We Are Michigan.”
Wait a minute. I’ve been here 40 years, not two. I have a son with two U-M degrees, which means I’ve written more checks to the university than Morgan & Morgan has. And I wouldn’t lay claim to being Michigan, so what gives?
“The halo effect,” Morgan said. “When I go into a city, I find whatever is popular and align myself with it, for the halo effect.”
The Yellow Pages are mostly good for kindling at this point, he said, and with cord-cutting, TV advertising can be unreliable. But sports fans’ loyalty is darned near eternal.
He has deals with the Phillies, Yankees, Mets, and his alma mater, the University of Florida, among others. He sponsors UFC bouts and a NASCAR team. The halo keeps expanding, and Morgan & Morgan keeps growing.
Realistically, said Morgan, 69, he was late to our legal party. He didn’t want to encroach on Geoffrey Feiger, a close enough pal that they have vacationed together.
“Then Geoffrey told me he didn’t mind if I came to Detroit, so I did.”
Morgan & Morgan has 10 lawyers berthed in a downtown Detroit office tower, presumably fighting like a sack full of badgers for their clients and for position.
The firm is notably generous — it rented an entire top-end hotel for a weekend in Lake Tahoe last month to reward its top producers — and notoriously competitive. Month-to-month, everyone knows which lawyers’ revenue numbers aren’t keeping up.
In Southfield, meantime, Kas-Mikha stood out to me by not standing out.
The state of a small firm
Some days, depending on how the digital billboards are booked, there might be eight pitches for Sam Bernstein and his children along the southbound Lodge.
The Kas-Mikha Legal Group has one, just northwest of Schaefer Highway. The group, meantime, is Kas-Mikha, one associate lawyer and five staffers.
She dabbles in billboards, she said, because competition has made it almost mandatory to post a sticky note inside the craniums of people who might someday need help.
“It’s a saturated market,” she conceded, made even more crowded by Morgan & Morgan’s arrival, but she had only gracious things to say about the firm. Where its public focus is usually on its bulk — “Size Matters,” says one slogan — hers is on the absence of it, making them only marginal competitors.
“I know all of my clients by name. I know their faces,” she said. “When they call me, I’m not confused about who they are.”
Kas-Mikha, 30, was Sandra Toma at Birmingham Groves High School. Born in Royal Oak, the child of Chaldean immigrants from Iraq, she went to Wayne State, then the University of Detroit Mercy for law school.
A jury might conclude that she actually is Michigan, but she said she’s happy just quietly churning along, doing the only job she ever aspired to.
“I never have a boring day in my life,” she said, “that’s for sure.”
Top marks on a loyalty test
Morgan doesn’t have boring days, either. He spends his winters in Hawaii, does magic tricks and used to own an amusement business that featured chickens beating humans at tic-tac-toe.
He still co-owns WonderWorks, six science-themed tourist attractions designed to look like their buildings are upside down. The late wrestler Hogan and Shaquille O’Neal came by the Orlando location so often that Morgan awarded them free passes, he said, on the theory that they were worth their weights in exposure and customer delight.
In his student days, he worked in costume at Disney World, first as one of the Three Little Pigs and then ascending to Pluto.
His affection for the company ended when his younger brother, Tim, a lifeguard at the park’s Polynesian Village Resort, dived into a lagoon, hit a submerged pylon, and wound up paralyzed and uncompensated.
“Disney treated him like the Taliban,” Morgan said, and Morgan has spent his professional life unleashing that half-century-old fury on what he sees as negligent corporations and obstructionist insurance companies.
“I will tell you modestly,” he said, “I’m a great personal injury law firm. I got a verdict just recently in Miami for $100 million.”
That still does not make him or his law firm Michigan — “but in my defense,” he said, “I always pull for Michigan over Ohio State. Make sure your readers know, I can’t stand Ohio State.”
Duly noted, and if that’s an application for residency, he’s making a solid case.
Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com.
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