Michael Best & Friedrich has grown by more than 50% and expanded in new markets over the last decade through a number of acquisitions of smaller firms or groups of laterals instead of one transformational merger.       

“No authoritative case holds that being unable to verify a defendant’s address on three search engines—despite the address being verifiable on other popular platforms—constitutes reasonable diligence,” wrote U.S. District Judge Manish Shah, of the Northern District of Illinois.       

A federal judge in Chicago looked in part to a divided 2025 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which solidified stringent requirements for class certification in an automotive defect case.       

The appellate panel said the doctrine of unclean hands does not bar the attorney’s malpractice suit because the alleged wrongdoing in an underlying case “had nothing to do with defendants’ legal work.”       

With a “good, strong, solid year” in 2025, the Midwest-centered firm was ranked on the Am Law 200 for the first time.       

“It … means that many thousands of cases were wrongly decided, and default judgments were wrongly entered,” said defendant-appellant counsel Wesley Johnson of Cross-Border Counselor.       

Tim Brown comes to Principal after eight years at Venerable, a startup that helps insurers contain their variable annuity losses by buying their old blocks of business and 16 years at what’s now called Voya Financial.       

The St. Louis-founded firm grew lawyer head count by nearly 20% in 2025 and exceeded its net income budget by about 10%.       

The federal appellate court affirmed a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana requiring an adult plaintiff accused of sexual misconduct in a university Title IX proceeding to litigate under his real name rather than a pseudonym.       

U.S. District Judge Maria A. Lanahan for the Eastern District of Missouri approved a $440,000 settlement resolving a Fair Labor Standards Act collective action brought by health care workers against Midwest Geriatric Management.