The Attorney Who Invoked Anti-SLAPP to Fight a Utility Company While Running a SLAPP Suit Against a Journalist

There is a certain kind of litigation strategy that is not really about winning. It is about the process. About forcing the other party to respond, to spend, to divert attention from the thing that generated the complaint in the first place. Courts have a name for the most obvious version of it. Anti-SLAPP statutes exist precisely because the legal system recognized that access to the courts could itself be weaponized.

Michigan got its anti-SLAPP statute in 2025. It is called the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, 2025 PA 52. It provides for expedited dismissal of suits arising from protected expression, shifts the burden to the plaintiff to establish a prima facie case, and awards attorney fees to prevailing defendants. The legislature passed it to protect people who speak on matters of public concern from being buried in litigation designed to silence them.

What the legislature apparently did not anticipate is that the same attorney could file a textbook SLAPP suit against a journalist in one Saginaw County courtroom while invoking that same statute offensively in a different Saginaw County courtroom against a major utility company’s counterclaim. Both cases are open. Both are in Saginaw. The judges are different. The irony is the same.

What Tortious Interference Actually Is

Tortious interference is not a complicated concept. A party has a business relationship or a reasonable expectation of one. Someone else knows about it. That someone else intentionally disrupts it without legal justification. Damages result. That is the tort.

In Michigan, courts have developed two related claims. Tortious interference with a contract requires an existing contract, the defendant’s knowledge of it, intentional breach inducement, and damages. Tortious interference with a business relationship or expectancy requires a valid business expectancy, knowledge, intentional interference that is either inherently wrongful or done with malice and without justification, and resulting harm.

The “without justification” element is where litigation-as-interference becomes legally complicated. Michigan courts have held that filing a lawsuit, even a losing one, is generally protected petitioning activity. But that protection does not extend to litigation filed with malice and without probable cause. When the evidence shows that the lawsuit’s primary purpose was to damage a business relationship rather than vindicate a genuine legal grievance, the protection evaporates.

The professional conduct layer compounds this. Michigan Rule of Professional Conduct 3.1 requires that claims and contentions be warranted by existing law or a nonfrivolous argument. MRPC 4.4 prohibits using means that have no substantial purpose other than to embarrass, delay, or burden a third person. When an attorney — not just a litigant, but an officer of the court bound by these rules — files proceedings that meet the tortious interference standard, the exposure is not limited to civil liability.

What It Looks Like in Practice

The pattern has recognizable features. Proceedings are filed in multiple forums simultaneously or in rapid succession. The legal theories are novel enough to require response but thin enough that no reasonable attorney would expect them to prevail. The target is a private individual or a small organization without institutional resources to absorb litigation costs. The filings themselves generate reputational harm regardless of outcome — because being sued is the point, not winning.

The docket of Saginaw County Circuit Court Case No. 26-000243-CZ is a useful illustration of what volume litigation looks like in the public record, independent of any characterization of motive.

The tree trimming dispute is the predicate. Consumers Energy is a regulated utility operating under easements that authorize vegetation management near power lines. The legal theory underlying the complaint — statutory trespass to trees — is a real cause of action in Michigan. Whether it applies here is a question the litigation will resolve. That is not the analytical point.

The analytical point is what happened when Consumers Energy filed a counterclaim. Rather than defending the counterclaim on its merits, the plaintiff invoked Michigan’s brand-new anti-SLAPP statute and asked the court to dismiss it on an expedited basis with fee shifting. The court denied the injunction and denied the UPEPA motion as moot. The plaintiff filed for reconsideration the next day.

The UPEPA Architecture Problem

UPEPA is a defendant’s statute. Its architecture is built around a specific problem: a party with resources files litigation against a party without them, specifically to silence speech or petitioning activity on a matter of public concern. The remedy is asymmetric by design. The defendant can move for expedited dismissal. Discovery is stayed. The plaintiff bears the burden of establishing a prima facie case. If the defendant prevails, fees follow.

Using UPEPA offensively — as a plaintiff seeking to knock out a defendant’s counterclaim on the grounds that the counterclaim implicates the plaintiff’s protected expression — inverts that architecture. The plaintiff in this posture is saying: I sued you, you sued me back, and my response to your counterclaim is that countersuing me chills my speech. The logical endpoint of that argument is that anyone with a UPEPA-eligible claim could file litigation with near-impunity, then invoke the statute to deflect any responsive pleading.

The Saginaw County court appears to have recognized this. The UPEPA motion was denied. The preliminary injunction was denied. Leave to amend the counterclaim was granted. That is a clean sweep for Consumers Energy at the preliminary stage. The plaintiff immediately filed for reconsideration.

The Parallel Docket and What It Shows

The same attorney who filed the Consumers Energy case is the plaintiff in Saginaw County Circuit Court Case No. 25-002441-CZ, filed against this outlet’s publisher. That case arises from published reporting on the attorney’s documented conduct in public court proceedings. The reporting is protected expression. The Michigan journalist whose work prompted the suit publicly supported the passage of UPEPA before it was enacted.

The irony is precise. The statute that same plaintiff is attempting to deploy offensively in one Saginaw courtroom is the statute that should protect the journalist being sued in a different Saginaw courtroom. Both cases are open simultaneously. Both cases share a plaintiff. The dockets are public.

When an Attorney Does It: The Professional Conduct Dimension

Litigants who are not attorneys have one set of accountability mechanisms for litigation abuse: sanctions under MCR 2.114, anti-SLAPP fee shifting, and tortious interference claims. Attorneys have all of those plus the Rules of Professional Conduct and the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission.

MRPC 3.1 is the frivolous claims rule. A lawyer may not bring a proceeding unless there is a basis in law and fact that is not frivolous. Filing multiple simultaneous proceedings in different forums against the same target, where the aggregate effect is to impose costs rather than obtain relief, raises 3.1 questions that a single filing might not.

MRPC 4.4 addresses means. A lawyer may not use means that have no substantial purpose other than to embarrass, delay, or burden a third person. PPO proceedings filed in a county with no statutory basis for venue, as this outlet has previously documented, are a specific example of means-based conduct that MRPC 4.4 reaches.

MRPC 8.4(c) covers dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation. MRPC 8.4(d) covers conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice. Multi-forum litigation designed to exhaust a target’s resources rather than vindicate a genuine legal claim implicates both provisions when the pattern is documented and the legal theories are pretextual.

The Counterargument, Named Directly

The counterargument is that every one of these cases reflects a legitimate legal dispute and that characterizing simultaneous litigation as a “volume strategy” unfairly imputes motive to what are simply separate legal matters proceeding on separate facts. Attorneys litigate multiple cases. That is what attorneys do.

That argument holds when the cases are independently motivated by genuine legal grievances and the litigation is conducted within the bounds of professional conduct rules. It does not hold when the aggregate record shows: proceedings filed in venues with no statutory basis, motions denied on threshold grounds before merits are reached, reconsideration filed the next day, and the same attorney appearing as a party on both sides of anti-SLAPP architecture in the same county courthouse at the same time.

The record makes the argument. The record is public.

Michigan’s anti-SLAPP statute is eleven months old. The legislature passed it to protect people who speak on matters of public concern. The first documented attempt to deploy it offensively — to insulate plaintiff-initiated litigation from a defendant’s counterclaim — was filed in Saginaw County by a plaintiff who is simultaneously running a SLAPP suit against a journalist who supported the bill. The court denied it.

That is how the system is supposed to work. The question is whether the other mechanisms — professional conduct oversight, sanctions, and the tortious interference tort itself — are applied with the same consistency to the pattern the public record shows.