Becoming a licensed attorney in Michigan requires completing law school, passing the bar examination, and surviving a character and fitness evaluation that includes background checks, financial disclosures, criminal history review, and letters of recommendation. Once admitted, the oversight structure becomes substantially thinner. The Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission and Judicial Tenure Commission dismiss the vast majority of complaints without public action, with limited transparency about how those determinations are made. No profession that exercises as much power over people’s lives as law — through prosecutions, defenses, and judicial decisions — should be more rigorously screened for ethics at entry than it is held accountable for ethics in practice. Michigan’s legal profession is.
Front-Loaded Scrutiny, Back-Loaded Trust
Michigan’s process for licensing attorneys is designed with the presumption that the heaviest ethical scrutiny should occur before someone is admitted to the profession. Law school completion, bar examination, character and fitness evaluation — background checks, letters of recommendation, disclosures of financial issues, criminal history — all of this happens before a person steps foot in a courtroom as a licensed attorney. The structure reflects a coherent premise: only people who meet high ethical standards should be licensed to practice law.
The premise becomes incoherent the moment the license is granted. The rigorous front-end vetting does not continue into practice. It does not inform ongoing accountability standards. It is, in effect, a threshold that someone crosses once — and having crossed it, they practice under a self-regulatory system that dismisses most complaints without public action and discloses little about how those determinations are made.
Michigan also faces a shortage of lawyers, particularly in rural areas. That shortage is relevant context for the ethics discussion: a bar admission process that screens out candidates on the basis of conduct that may be minimally relevant to professional fitness — a missed credit card payment in college, for instance — narrows the pipeline while the post-admission accountability system permits conduct that actually harms clients and defendants with limited consequence. The calibration is backwards. The front end is too restrictive in some ways; the back end is too permissive in most.
Most people who interact with Michigan’s legal system believe that if an attorney lies in court, suppresses exculpatory evidence, or engages in coercive practices against a vulnerable defendant, that attorney will be disciplined. That belief is the premise on which public trust in the legal profession rests. The reality is that unless someone has the time, resources, and insider knowledge to navigate the complaint process effectively — and follows up persistently — there is a significant probability that nothing will happen. The illusion of accountability is more dangerous than acknowledged non-accountability, because it prevents the public from demanding the reforms that would create genuine accountability structures.
The Self-Regulation Structural Problem
The legal profession is formally self-governing — attorneys set their own standards, investigate complaints against their own members, and determine the consequences for their own misconduct. The Grievance Commission that evaluates complaints against attorneys is populated by attorneys. The Judicial Tenure Commission that evaluates complaints against judges is the primary mechanism for a branch of government overseeing itself.
This structure creates institutional incentives that are not well-aligned with robust accountability. The body determining whether discipline is warranted is composed of people with professional, social, and institutional ties to the profession being disciplined. The standard for what constitutes serious enough misconduct to warrant public action is set by the same community that would bear the reputational cost of a finding of serious misconduct. And the transparency about how those determinations are made is controlled by the body making them — without independent oversight to verify that the process is functioning as designed.
The current accountability gap has documented real-world consequences in Michigan. The JTC took approximately five years to file a formal complaint against a judge who had been found “unsafe to practice” by a psychological evaluation. The Attorney Grievance Commission dismisses most complaints against attorneys whose conduct — lying in court, improper communications, conflicts of interest — would be immediately actionable in any profession with external oversight standards. People who have been harmed by attorney misconduct bear the cost of navigating a complaint process designed for practitioners, not for the clients they were supposed to serve. It should not be harder to remove a corrupt prosecutor than it is to deny a bar application from a student who missed a credit card payment in college. Currently, in Michigan, it often is.
What Reform Requires
An oversight body that is structurally independent of the profession it regulates is the foundation of accountability that self-governing professions cannot provide for themselves. Independent oversight — with the authority to investigate, find, and impose consequences — creates accountability that does not depend on the professional community’s willingness to discipline its own members. Several states have moved toward independent attorney discipline systems with meaningful external participation. Michigan has not.
The Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission and the Judicial Tenure Commission should be required to publish outcome data for complaints with sufficient detail for public evaluation — not just aggregate numbers, but information about the type of conduct complained of, the basis for dismissal where complaints are dismissed, and the nature of any action taken where they are not. Transparency about outcomes is the minimum precondition for the public to evaluate whether the self-regulatory system is functioning in the public interest.
Electronic complaint submission without notarization requirements — the standard for virtually every other consumer and regulatory complaint process in Michigan — should be the baseline for attorney and judicial misconduct complaints. Requirements that add procedural barriers without adding substantive protections serve the institution being complained about, not the people complaining. Clear, accessible instructions in plain language, without requiring insider knowledge of how complaints are evaluated, are a minimum standard for a public-facing oversight process.
People who have direct knowledge of attorney or judicial misconduct — court staff, paralegals, other attorneys, defendants — face real professional and personal risks in reporting that misconduct. Strong whistleblower protections that specifically cover disclosures of legal professional misconduct, with enforcement mechanisms and remedies for retaliation, are necessary to create an environment in which people with knowledge can report without bearing the full cost of doing so alone.
The public deserves a legal system where ethical conduct is not just a box checked during the application process, but an ongoing, enforceable expectation for every licensed attorney and sitting judge. Until Michigan creates independent oversight, requires transparency about outcomes, lowers barriers to complaint filing, and protects those who expose misconduct, ethics in the legal profession will remain what they currently are: a gate at entry and, for the most part, an honor system thereafter.
Sources
Rita Williams, The Ethics Gap: Why Michigan Lawyers Face Scrutiny Before the Bar, But Not After, Clutch Justice (June 6, 2025), https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/06/the-ethics-gap-why-michigan-lawyers-face-scrutiny-before-the-bar-but-not-after/.
Williams, R. (2025, June 6). The ethics gap: Why Michigan lawyers face scrutiny before the bar, but not after. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/06/the-ethics-gap-why-michigan-lawyers-face-scrutiny-before-the-bar-but-not-after/
Williams, Rita. “The Ethics Gap: Why Michigan Lawyers Face Scrutiny Before the Bar, But Not After.” Clutch Justice, 6 June 2025, clutchjustice.com/2025/06/06/the-ethics-gap-why-michigan-lawyers-face-scrutiny-before-the-bar-but-not-after/.
Williams, Rita. “The Ethics Gap: Why Michigan Lawyers Face Scrutiny Before the Bar, But Not After.” Clutch Justice, June 6, 2025. https://clutchjustice.com/2025/06/06/the-ethics-gap-why-michigan-lawyers-face-scrutiny-before-the-bar-but-not-after/.
