In addition to being a partner at Kirk, Huth, Lange & Badalamenti in Clinton Township, Michael Taylor is the mayor of Sterling Heights, Michigan’s fourth-largest city with a population of more than 133,000 people.
A lifelong Macomb County resident and a 2008 graduate of Wayne State University Law School, Taylor’s initial foray into politics came in 2009, when he was elected to the Sterling Heights City Council. In October 2014, following the death of mayor Richard Notte, Taylor was appointed to fill out the remainder of his term. He won the ensuing mayoral election in 2015 and was subsequently reelected in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023.
Now in the midst of his fifth two-year term, Taylor reflected on his legal and political careers.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why did you decide to become a lawyer?
MT: During high school I was more interested in politics than a lot of my peers. I guess I thought that if I was going to go into politics, having a law degree might be a good background. My dad was a CPA, my brother was going into financial planning ... I thought we didn’t have a lawyer in the family and that might be a good fit. And, honestly, by the time I was done with college, I wasn’t ready to get a job in the real world. Law school seemed to be the best option. So I committed to that.
Q: What was your first job out of law school?
MT: My first job was with a small firm called Burket Savage. They were two attorneys looking for an associate. I was in the right place at the right time. They hired me right out of law school. I think my first day was like Sept. 1, 2008. In the summer of 2008, when I was studying to take the Bar exam, I wanted any job that would pay me. The financial system was collapsing, the real estate market was collapsing, layoffs were going through the roof, interest rates were high. I bought a house with my wife before I graduated from law school and so I wanted any job working as a lawyer that would pay me.
Q: What brought you to Sterling Heights?
MT: My wife and I were looking for houses in Macomb County. She was from Oakland County [and] I was from Macomb County. It was early 2008, we had just gotten married, and we were looking to set roots somewhere. I knew I would be staying in Macomb County and working in Macomb County, so we were looking in places like Warren and Fraser and Roseville.
I came across a house in Sterling Heights that was being foreclosed on, a very nice-looking house for a price that you didn’t really see a lot of in Sterling Heights. It was a bit of a fixer-upper, but we made an offer and closed on it pretty quickly. I wasn’t even looking in Sterling Heights, to be honest. It was sort of just by chance that I found this house and we bought it, and we’ve been here ever since.
Q. Why did you decide to run for city council?
MT: In eighth grade, I won a writing contest about what you would do if you became president of the United States. I had in my mind this idea of running for office, and my thought was I’d run for Congress — everybody hates Congress, and I can show up when I’m a young man and say, “Look, I’m an alternative. I’m not from Washington, D.C. I’m not entrenched in that.” Then I started realizing what it actually takes to run for Congress and why people in Congress are so entrenched. So I was like, maybe it’s not the right time to do that.
My advisor [at Kalamazoo College] was an economics professor named Hannah McKinney. At the time, she was vice mayor of Kalamazoo. A lot of her economics and public policy classes were from a local government perspective. When you think about politics, you think about what’s going on in Washington, but there’s so much happening at the local level.
I maintained a relationship with Dr. McKinney throughout college and was really interested in her classes. I probably took seven, eight, nine classes that she offered. Then I started thinking running for a local office [and] running for city council is something that’s achievable at a young age and it was always in the back of my mind. In 2009, kind of at the last minute, I decided to try to get my name on the [Sterling Heights City Council] ballot and that’s what happened.
Q: Was it a close election?
MT: Not really. There were nine candidates running for six spots — six incumbents and three non-incumbents. I came in fifth place, so I beat one of the incumbents. I had a relatively healthy cushion.
Q: How does being a lawyer help you be mayor — and vice versa?
MT: I don’t often think about how being mayor helps my legal career. I think a lot about how being a lawyer helps me in my political career. The type of practice I have is complementary to being a mayor. I like to advise people, I like to counsel people, [and] I like to help them solve whatever problems they have. Most of my clients are regular folks. I have very few institutional or business clients and even the business clients, I’m dealing with the business owner. So my law practice is all about working with people, helping people, solving problems for people, and that’s the job of a mayor, too.
A mayor, first and foremost, is being that person constituents can contact whether they have a sidewalk in front of their house that needs to get fixed, or their local street has some potholes, or they need help with a garbage pickup, or they have questions about their water bill. In my law practice, I like to say to my clients, “I should be your first call. Whenever you have a problem, call me and we’ll fix it, and if I can’t fix it, we’ll get you to somebody else in my office who can or refer you to the right attorney.” That’s how I feel about being mayor, too.
Q: Are there situations when you need to take off your lawyer hat or your mayor hat?
MT: It’s not possible to take off the mayor hat. My legal career pays the bills. It’s what I do every single day. I spend most of my professional time practicing law. I have also committed to being mayor of Sterling Heights. That’s not something that you can turn off and on. There are times when I have to devote time to that. I think of Sterling Heights as my biggest client, my number-one client, my top-priority client. When the city needs me, I’m here. If the city doesn’t need me, I’m focused on my law career.
Q: What achievement as a lawyer or as mayor are you most proud of?
MT: One thing that I’m very proud of is [when] I became mayor in 2014, I was the youngest mayor of any city in the country with more than 100,000 people. The mayor I dethroned from that perch was (former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and current U.S. Secretary of Transportation) Pete Buttigieg. Anytime you can get yourself in the same conversation as a guy who ran for president and has become a cabinet secretary, I think that’s pretty cool. Honestly, just the fact that I’ve been able to win every election that I’ve run in. I usually do so pretty overwhelmingly and get a lot of support from the public. The fact that I’ve been outspoken about some national political issues that do not necessarily align with my constituents here in Sterling Heights, yet they still vote for me, I’m proud of that. I’m proud that I’m able to earn trust and serve in this role.
In my legal career, I’m not likely to argue in front of the Supreme Court, but I’m helping families every day and I’ve become successful at that. I’ve had big cases, I’ve had big wins, I’ve had big settlements, but every lawyer can recall the big cases. I’m proud that I found my way into this niche of working in probate and estate planning.
Q: What’s most challenging about having these two jobs?
MT: There are 24 hours in a day, and I need to use some of those to sleep. The challenge at this time is work-life balance. I have three young children. I have a wife. I have two jobs that really demand close to full-time hours. It’s tricky at times balancing all that. I’m lucky I have a very supportive wife, and my kids have always been supportive of me being involved in the city and they like that aspect of it.
I’ll give you an example: I have a deposition at 12:45 p.m. today for a fairly big file I have in my office. I sent out a subpoena deuces tecum and they sent me two hours of videos and a bunch of pages of notes that I’ve got to read. I get this dumped on me late last night, so I get up early this morning to watch two hours of videos and take notes to prepare. And in the middle of deposition prep, I’ve got my office hours at city hall. It’s the reality of what I deal with every single day.
Q: How much coffee do you go through in a day?
MT: I don’t keep track. I start drinking coffee first thing in the morning. I’m usually the first one in my office and by the time the staff gets there, I’ve usually had two Keurig cups. Then the staff makes a pot and then I usually drink that until it’s gone and then I’ll have one or two in the afternoon.
Q: What’s your advice to anybody considering running for local office?
MT: I get asked for advice from a lot of people, especially younger people. The best advice I can give them is that they have to be authentically themselves. When I ran for office the first time, I didn’t have a consultant, I didn’t have a media person, I didn’t have somebody writing my campaign literature for me. I think if you want to get involved, you have to be authentic, you have to have an idea of what you want to do, and you have to come up with a plan for how you’re going to do it. Be who you are and if you lose an election because you were authentic the whole time and genuine and people just didn’t buy it, that’s something that anybody can live with. I’d rather lose an election doing what I think is right in my mind than win because I had some polls that said this is what the people want.
Q: Public office isn’t for everyone. For lawyers who want to get involved in their communities in other ways, what would you recommend?
MT: I would recommend applying for a board or commission. That’s probably an underserved area of most cities. You can serve on the planning commission or zoning board of appeals. Every city has different types of boards and commissions that they offer. That’s one way to really get involved in the actual business of the city.
Also, cities typically have a community foundation — a charitable foundation they support and work with to do good in the community. There’s a big mental health crisis in the country [and] the opioid epidemic is still going on. We would love it if somebody called our city attorney or city manager and said, “Hey, I’m a lawyer. I practice in this area of law. Can I help with your drug-free coalition?” The training lawyers have is invaluable in helping cities.
Q: What do you find most rewarding about practicing law?
MT: I really enjoy the type of work that I do. You can really lean into your role as an advisor. You’re dealing with regular people — you’re not necessarily dealing with government entities or institutions, [but] with regular husbands and wives. A lot of times, it’s widows and widowers. As lay people, they come in most of the time without very much knowledge about the estate planning process or, if they do, it’s from a bad experience going through it with a loved one, so I can really lean into giving advice.
On the probate side, I do a lot of litigation. You’re dealing with families that are usually in distress over the loss of a loved one, they’re fighting over money, and they’re bringing decades of emotions and hard feelings. It doesn’t happen very often, but every now and then we can help lead to a reconciliation. When that happens, it’s very, very rewarding.
Q. Do you have a final message for readers?
MT: Pay attention to what’s going on at the local level [of government.] If you’re unhappy with what’s happening in Washington, D.C., and Lansing, there is an alternative. The alternative is giving more power and authority to local governments. Maybe saying “power” and “authority” isn’t the right way of saying it. All of the issues that impact you, impact you right where you live. I think cities should be empowered to fight climate change. I think cities should be empowered to work on clean energy issues. I think cities should be empowered to work on safety and security issues. I think cities should be the first and last stop for dealing with a lot of the issues that Washington and Lansing can’t figure out, and lawyers have the training and expertise to help make that a reality.
Lawyers can play a big part in addressing some of the issues that plague us that are not getting solved at a national level. If we put more of an emphasis on empowering local governments to help be a part of these solutions, lawyers can play a big part in that, and I hope they will.