Eli Savit, Dema Law, and the Government Money Nobody’s Explaining

Last week, The Detroit News found that Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit, now running for Michigan Attorney General, has spent years doing private legal work for a firm called Dema Law while holding elected office. That part is true, but it is not really the story.

“Candidate had a side job” is not even a good headline, really. I do not care that Savit had a second income stream. Neither should you. But what I do care about, and what did not survive the paywall, is what kind of firm Dema Law actually is, who it represents, and what it means that a sitting prosecutor’s outside income came from a firm paid a percentage of government litigation recoveries, in states where he is not licensed, while he is running to become the person in Michigan who hires and oversees exactly that kind of firm.

So my friends, here is that story, built properly.

What Dema Law Actually Is

Dema Law is not a general practice firm that happened to hire a prosecutor for weekend overflow work. Founder John K. Dema built the firm’s reputation representing sovereign governments, including some of the earliest examples of private counsel handling natural resource damages litigation for a government on a contingency basis. Today the firm advertises more than $3.5 billion in client settlements and states directly that its clients include government agencies and attorneys general offices.

Dema’s government practice predates Savit by decades. That matters for fairness. It does not make the current overlap between his elected office and that practice any less worth documenting.

The Government Clients Savit Personally Worked For

According to his own campaign biography, Savit worked as an environmental lawyer on behalf of Maryland, New Jersey and Puerto Rico in litigation against companies including Shell, Exxon and DuPont. Dema separately states it represents all three jurisdictions in environmental litigation, including New Jersey PFAS matters and MTBE litigation across all three. Those two accounts line up. Savit is not disputing that he did this work. The dispute, to the extent there is one, is over what it means that he did.

Dema’s own biography of him did not undersell the connection. It identified him as the serving Washtenaw County Prosecuting Attorney, described him as having particular expertise representing sovereign and non sovereign governmental clients, and highlighted his scholarship on government-initiated litigation and the perspective he gained supervising public interest litigation and outside counsel. It listed a Dema email address and phone number for him.

That does not prove Savit personally pitched Maryland, New Jersey or Puerto Rico as clients. His campaign says he did not. But it does establish that his elected position and governmental litigation experience were part of how a private firm presented him to the public while he held office. That is a fact independent of anyone’s intent.

How Firms Like Dema Get Paid

In August 2023, Maryland entered a Special PFAS Litigation Counsel contract with a three firm team: Kelley Drye, John K. Dema PC and Sher Edling. State records describe a process where a committee interviewed applicants, solicited formal proposals from finalists and selected that team, which Maryland notes already represented the state in other litigation. Depending on the size of the recovery and how far the litigation had progressed, the outside counsel fee ranged from 1 to 20 percent of net recovery, with recoveries up to $100 million paying 4 percent before discovery, 18 percent before trial, and 20 percent once trial began.

New Jersey’s arrangement is larger. In August 2026, a federal court approved $195,122,093 in attorneys’ fees for New Jersey’s “Special Counsel,” a team expressly defined to include Dema Law, following PFAS settlements with a discounted cash and noncash value of roughly $1.49 billion. The court describes the underlying retainer agreements as contingency fee arrangements. That fee was awarded to the entire special counsel team, not to Dema alone, and there is no public evidence that Savit personally received any percentage of it.

What We Don’t Know, and Why That’s the Actual Problem

The Campaign Money

People associated with Dema Law have also given to Savit’s campaigns. Transparency USA’s compilation of Michigan campaign finance filings shows $8,000 from John Dema, $5,000 from John T. Dema, and $3,500 from Scott Kauff in the current Attorney General cycle, for $16,500 total. Dema’s site lists John T. Dema and Scott Kauff as members of its team and identifies John K. “Jack” Dema as its founder. That figure comes from an aggregator rather than the underlying state filings, and it should be checked against Michigan’s own campaign finance records before anyone treats it as final.

The relationship reportedly goes back further. A 2020 analysis of Washtenaw County campaign finance records found that Jack Dema gave Savit’s prosecutor campaign $4,000 and John Dema gave $3,000 in 2019, the same year Dema says Savit began working with the firm. That number also needs verification against primary filings before it is treated as settled.

None of this proves anything on its own. Lawyers contributing to a former colleague’s campaign is not evidence of corruption. Combined with an undisclosed pay amount, a firm that markets sovereign government representation using his title, and an office that will soon control government litigation contracts, it becomes a disclosure question the public is entitled to ask.

The Ethics Rules Nobody’s Applying Yet

Michigan Rule of Professional Conduct 1.11 exists, according to its own stated purpose, to prevent a lawyer from exploiting public office for the advantage of a private client. Nothing here establishes that Savit violated that rule. But Dema’s own description of him, a sitting prosecutor with particular expertise representing sovereign governmental clients, sits close enough to that language to make the question a fair one to ask rather than an accusation to make.

A second rule may matter more once the dates are pinned down. Michigan Rule of Professional Conduct 7.5(c) bars using the name of a lawyer holding public office in a firm’s communications during any substantial period the lawyer is not actively and regularly practicing with the firm. Savit’s campaign says he stopped doing Dema work over a year ago and dropped the “of counsel” title as of 2025; the firm’s biography page for him has since been removed. Gongwer has reported that a Savit opponent, Mike Cox, produced a screenshot he said showed that biography remaining active until late 2025. That gap, if it exists, does not by itself establish a violation. It does mean the exact date Savit last performed Dema work, the date the “of counsel” relationship formally ended, and the date Dema stopped publicly using his name and title are not a technicality. Under Rule 7.5(c), those dates are the rule.

A separate and structurally similar matter is already in motion. Michigan’s Department of State found sufficient evidence in July 2026 to support a potential campaign finance violation over Savit’s use of a county vehicle and gas card for campaign activity. That matter was headed toward informal resolution as of this writing. It is not a final determination that he violated the law, and Clutch is treating it as a separate open question, not as evidence about the Dema Law relationship.

Why This Would Matter More If He Wins

The Michigan Attorney General’s office already hires private firms to do exactly the kind of work Dema does. The current AG’s 2024 climate litigation request for proposals expressly sought private firms to represent Michigan on contingency, and the department retained DiCello Levitt, Sher Edling and Hausfeld, compensated only from any financial recovery. Sher Edling was also part of Dema’s team on the Maryland PFAS contract, which means the same firms circulate through this small, lucrative corner of government litigation.

If Savit becomes Attorney General, he would run the office that solicits, evaluates, selects and supervises firms doing the same sovereign environmental litigation he was paid to perform for Dema. Michigan’s own procurement instructions say proposals are evaluated for actual, apparent, or potential conflicts of interest, and the state reserves the right to disqualify a bidder over one; a newer state RFP reportedly goes further, requiring bidders to identify not just actual but apparent and potential conflicts and describe how they would avoid them. That raises direct questions nobody has answered. Would an Attorney General Savit recuse from decisions touching Dema, or firms like Sher Edling that worked closely with Dema. Who would make that call in his place. How long would any recusal last.

None of this is a verdict. I am not telling you Eli Savit did anything illegal, and I am not telling you Dema Law bought an Attorney General. What I am telling you is that “prosecutor had a side job” was never the interesting part of this story, and the outlet that broke it stopped one question short of the one that actually matters. Where does the money, the government relationships and the public power in this state actually meet, and who is watching that intersection when nobody is asking.

Until Washtenaw County, Dema Law and the Savit campaign answer the questions above, that intersection stays exactly where it has been for the last five years. Unlit.