“Trust Me! I’m a Lawyer!” The Michigan Bar Journal Has No Fact-Checking Requirement, and the Profession Polices Itself About as Well as You’d Expect.

After Clutch Justice published its investigation into retired Allegan County Circuit Court Judge Roberts Kengis, a reader raised a straightforward question: how does something misleading get published in the Michigan Bar Journal?

The answer is not complicated. It is, however, worth documenting precisely, because the answer reveals something important about how the legal profession manages, or declines to manage, its own credibility infrastructure. And it connects to a larger pattern that anyone who has ever dealt with an attorney, a judge, or a bar association will recognize immediately.

The Profession Runs on an Honor System It Has Never Earned

The foundational premise of attorney regulation is that passing the bar examination produces a trustworthy professional. An applicant clears a character and fitness review, passes the exam, takes an oath, and is thereafter assumed to be operating in good faith unless proven otherwise. The profession has constructed its entire self-regulatory architecture around this assumption.

This would be a reasonable premise if the evidence supported it. It does not.

The legal profession is one of the only licensed fields in which the primary accountability mechanism is peer reporting. Attorneys are supposed to report other attorneys. Judges are supposed to report other judges. The bar is supposed to investigate and discipline based on those reports. The underlying logic is that lawyers, having sworn an oath and passed an ethics exam, can be trusted to flag misconduct when they see it.

What the profession has never grappled with honestly is what happens when the people responsible for reporting misconduct have professional, social, and financial reasons not to. Attorneys practice in the same courts. They appear before the same judges. They refer clients to each other, co-counsel on cases, and share professional networks that span decades. Filing an AGC complaint or a JTC complaint against a colleague is not a neutral act. It is a professional risk. The profession designed a system that depends on people taking that risk and then expressed surprise when almost no one does.

When Attorneys Lie in Court and Call It a Strategy

The pattern extends well beyond professional narrative management in bar publications. Attorney fraud schemes in litigation are well-documented, recurring, and persistently undercharged.

One of the clearest examples: staged accident and injury fraud schemes involving attorneys. These are not marginal cases. The National Insurance Crime Bureau and federal law enforcement have documented networks in which attorneys recruit plaintiffs, coordinate with medical providers to generate false treatment records, and file litigation based on injuries that did not occur or were deliberately staged. The attorney is not a passive participant who got fooled by a client. The attorney is the architect. They know the records are fabricated. They sign the pleadings anyway.

This conduct is prosecutable as mail fraud, wire fraud, and insurance fraud under federal law. It is also a violation of MRPC 3.3, 3.4, and 8.4. Those rules prohibit attorneys from knowingly making false statements to tribunals, offering false evidence, and engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.

What the conduct is not, in practice, is reliably reported by other attorneys who encounter it, reliably investigated by the AGC when it is reported, or reliably resulting in disbarment when it is found. The profession has rules against this. It does not have a culture of enforcing them.

Peer Policing Does Not Work When Peers Protect Each Other

Michigan’s attorney discipline system is complaint-driven. The Attorney Grievance Commission does not conduct proactive audits of attorney conduct. It responds to complaints. The Judicial Tenure Commission operates similarly: it investigates judges, but it investigates judges based on complaints filed with it, not based on independent monitoring of judicial conduct.

The question the profession never answers directly is who is supposed to file those complaints. The answer in practice is: not other attorneys.

Attorneys do not file AGC complaints against opposing counsel as a routine response to misconduct. They file motions for sanctions. They seek relief from the court. They may privately document what happened. What they rarely do is take the separate affirmative step of filing a disciplinary complaint, because doing so escalates a professional dispute into a formal proceeding that will be remembered, that may invite retaliation, and that costs time and professional capital with no direct benefit to the client they are currently trying to help.

This is not speculation about motive. It is the structural consequence of a reporting system that depends on voluntary peer disclosure within a profession defined by ongoing professional relationships. The system was designed in a way that makes non-reporting the rational choice for every individual actor even when reporting would serve the public interest. Then the profession uses the low complaint volume to argue that most attorneys are behaving well.

Judges face the same dynamic, compounded. Other attorneys who appear regularly before a sitting judge have every incentive to preserve that relationship. Filing a JTC complaint against a judge you appear before routinely is an act most attorneys will not take regardless of what they have witnessed. The judge remains on the bench. The public continues to appear before them. The attorneys who know what that judge does in chambers or off the record say nothing, because saying something would cost them something, and the professional culture provides no reward for taking that risk.

What the MBJ Actually Requires

The Michigan Bar Journal’s submission guidelines are publicly available at michbar.org. They were last formally adopted by the MBJ Standing Committee in April 2022. Reading them carefully is instructive, not for what they require, but for what they do not.

The guidelines specify that submissions must address areas of law widely practiced, cover new fields, or otherwise interest the membership. They set word limits. They require footnotes and specify that those footnotes must follow the Michigan Uniform System of Citation. They reserve the right to edit for length, clarity, organization, and style, with substantive changes subject to author approval.

The column guidelines go one step further and make the underlying philosophy explicit: “The Michigan Bar Journal is not a law review. Use footnotes to cite authority only.”

There is no stated requirement that authors support factual claims with primary source documentation. There is no independent editorial review of whether what an author asserts is true. There is no prohibition in the published guidelines on false statements. There is no prohibition on misleading ones.

The guidelines do allow the MBJ to refuse any submission. The stated grounds for refusal address subject matter: whether a piece denigrates the legal profession, promotes an individual’s practice, or falls outside the scope of what members find useful. Accuracy is not a listed criterion for refusal.

Who Is Responsible for What an MBJ Article Says

Under the MBJ’s framework, the answer is the author. Entirely.

The author submits a manuscript. The author signs a copyright license. The author retains a royalty-free right to use and distribute the work. Substantive editorial changes require the author’s approval before publication. After publication, there is no stated correction policy, no formal mechanism for disputed factual claims, and no process by which the Bar Journal revisits content that turns out to be wrong or incomplete.

Roberts Kengis published a piece in the Michigan Bar Journal after leaving the bench in June 2023. The Kengis investigation documented that his departure was not voluntary. He left without completing a full term. Sources with direct knowledge of JTC proceedings confirmed the circumstances. None of that context appeared in his Bar Journal article, which positioned him as a credible institutional voice on judicial welfare and reform. The Bar Journal had no mechanism to require that it did, and no process to flag that it did not.

The Broader Pattern: A Profession That Does Not Police Itself

The Michigan Bar Journal is not an outlier. It is a window.

The legal profession maintains an elaborate accountability architecture on paper. The Attorney Grievance Commission investigates attorney misconduct. The Judicial Tenure Commission reviews judicial conduct. The Attorney Discipline Board adjudicates formal charges. The State Bar sets professional conduct rules and requires annual compliance. Michigan Rules of Professional Conduct 3.3 prohibits attorneys from making false statements of fact or law to a tribunal. MRPC 8.4 prohibits conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.

These rules apply when an attorney is before a tribunal. They apply in formal proceedings. They do not reach what an attorney publishes in the Bar Journal.

This is not a technical oversight. It is a design choice. Publications that want accurate content build processes to produce it: editorial review, source verification, correction policies, standards for what constitutes adequate support for a factual claim. The Michigan Bar Journal has had since at least 2022 to build those processes. The April 2022 guidelines do not include them.

The result is a publication that functions as a credibility vehicle with no credibility verification. An attorney who has been asked to leave the bench can publish in the Michigan Bar Journal and present themselves as a trusted institutional voice. An attorney whose conduct is under investigation can use the platform to shape their professional narrative. An attorney who wants to omit material facts from their public record can do so in a publication that bears the State Bar’s imprimatur, reaches tens of thousands of members, and carries the implicit endorsement of the institution that licenses Michigan lawyers.

What “We Reserve the Right to Refuse” Actually Covers

The MBJ guidelines state that the journal reserves the right to refuse any manuscript. This language is worth examining closely, because it is sometimes read as a broader editorial discretion than the guidelines actually establish.

The listed grounds for refusal in the 2022 guidelines focus on subject matter and professional decorum: pieces that denigrate the profession, pieces that are thinly veiled advertising, pieces that fall outside the scope of member interest. The refusal right is not accompanied by a stated accuracy standard. There is no language indicating the journal will refuse submissions that contain false claims, omit material facts, or mislead readers about the author’s professional circumstances.

Why Credibility Laundering Matters

The phrase “credibility laundering” is not a rhetorical flourish. It describes a specific mechanism: taking a professional narrative that would not survive independent scrutiny and passing it through an institutional publication that confers legitimacy without applying scrutiny. The result is a record that looks vetted and is not.

Readers of the Michigan Bar Journal, including attorneys, judges, policymakers, and members of the public who encounter citations to it, have reasonable grounds to assume that content published by the State Bar’s flagship journal has met some standard of factual review. That assumption is incorrect. The MBJ does not make that promise in its guidelines, and it does not build processes to keep it.

The legal profession has constructed a self-regulatory apparatus that it presents publicly as rigorous. The AGC, the ADB, the JTC, the MRPC, the annual ethics requirements: all of it projects an image of a profession that holds itself to high standards. The Bar Journal is part of that projection. It carries the same institutional name. It attends the same conferences. It is cited in the same briefs.

What it does not do is apply to its own publication the evidentiary standards it teaches attorneys to apply everywhere else.

What Would Change This

The Michigan Bar Journal could require that factual claims in submitted articles be supported by primary source documentation, disclosed to the editorial board, and subject to review before publication. It could establish a correction policy that applies when published content is shown to be inaccurate or materially incomplete. It could require that authors disclose professional circumstances relevant to the credibility of their stated expertise. It could apply to its own platform the citation standards it teaches through continuing legal education.

None of these are novel concepts. Reputable publications build these processes for two reasons. The first is credibility: editorial review, source verification, and correction policies exist because accurate publications earn reader trust that inaccurate ones eventually lose. The second reason is self-protection. Publications with legal exposure, meaning publications that cover attorneys, judges, and institutions with thin skin and litigation resources, build verification infrastructure because it is their first line of defense when a subject threatens to sue. The documentation that an article was sourced, verified, and reviewed is not just an editorial record. It is a legal record. The Michigan Bar Journal, a publication produced by the state’s bar association about and for attorneys, operates without these protections. Whether that reflects confidence or indifference to the risk is not clear from the public record. What is clear is that the processes are absent.

That choice is not irreversible. But until it is reversed, the Michigan Bar Journal remains what its own guidelines describe: a member publication that edits for style, not accuracy, and trusts its authors to be honest without building any mechanism to confirm they are.

The reader who asked how something misleading could be published there now has the complete answer. There is nothing in the rules that prevents it. There never was.

But as someone who has seen the absolute worst of the Michigan Legal System, I can’t say I’m surprised. I have seen some of the most unethical and horrific behavior come out of the Michigan legal community, all the way to the very top. Making false plea deals, traumatizing families, hiding evidence, drinking and driving, benefiting from position to defraud vulnerable populations. I guess I can’t say I’m surprised that the Bar Journal isn’t keen for fact-checking.

Perhaps a form a self-preservation; better not knowing and leaving stones unturned. In short? MBJ’s publication standards are just as low as their profession’s ethical standards.