Overdue Process

Liisa Speaker keeps the book that steered her toward law in a case outside her office door. She came across it nearly 40 years ago, while looking for a history fair project the summer before ninth grade: A “Scottsboro” Case in Mississippi: The Supreme Court and Brown v. Mississippi. The book chronicles the brutal police interrogation of three Black sharecroppers accused of murdering a white planter in 1934. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the trio’s coerced confessions were unconstitutional and reversed their convictions and death sentences. 

The story was dramatic enough. But “the history and development of procedural due process”—an esoteric topic for a teen, even a precocious one—reeled Speaker in. She ended up winning third place in the national high school competition.

Before that, she recalls, “I was pretty sheltered. I had no understanding how much injustice was in the world. Once I was working on that project, I really wanted to go to law school.”

Now 54, Speaker is founder of the Lansing boutique Speaker Law Firm, where she unflinchingly pursues appeals while fighting to hold family law and child welfare judges accountable—and even to overhaul the state’s family court system.

“Working with Liisa on the dedicated family court legislation is refreshing,” says Kristen Robinson, a domestic relations litigator with Mellin Robinson, working with Speaker to pass House Bill 5445. “She is what I call a ‘doer.’ When tasks are being doled out, she steps up every time to get things done.”

“We’re very determined. We don’t give up,” Speaker says. “Sometimes when people come to us, they’ve really been broken down. They didn’t have a good result in the trial court, and they are very despondent. We let them know we care, and we keep fighting for them. And that gives them hope.

“Every appeal is an uphill battle,” she adds. “There is no such thing as an easy appeal.” 

An only child, Speaker was born in Lansing but raised in the Upper Peninsula’s remote Copper Country, reading and playing outdoors to entertain herself. In the early 1980s, the summer before she entered sixth grade, the depressed economy propelled the family to Houston. 

Speaker quickly immersed herself in academic competitions, including the project that kick-started her legal career. The rest of her history fair entries focused on legal topics too, and, in college, she took a law class during study abroad at the University of Salamanca in Spain. She zeroed in on appeals as a student at University of Texas School of Law, while helping an established attorney write a brief involving checkerboard jurisdiction between federal, state and American Indian law. 

“I just super-enjoyed it and I was like, ‘Maybe I should do more of this,’” says Speaker.

Upon graduation, she deliberately sought jobs that would allow her to take on the occasional appeal. In 2001, after two years at the 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth, she joined a Dallas firm, where she did mostly civil litigation and appeals. When her Texas-born husband decided to earn a Ph.D. in math, he agreed to apply only to schools in their home states. Michigan State won out. 

Early on, Speaker practiced mostly commercial and real estate litigation at a couple of small firms. Eventually, she brought in enough appellate work—in personal injury, probate and some family law—to keep herself busy. By the spring of 2007, she’d worked up the courage to strike out on her own. 

The day she opened her own appellate advocacy firm, with Jodi Latuszek, the calls came pouring in. For almost a decade, Speaker argued all types of cases before the Michigan Court of Appeals, Michigan Supreme Court and 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, all the while wishing she could concentrate more on family appellate work. That desire started in 2007, when two adoption cases fell into her lap.

“That’s when I started thinking about how to dive in more narrowly than just working on any appeal that came through the door,” Speaker says.

“When Liisa takes on a case,” says Jordan Ahlers-Smith, an associate at Speaker’s firm, “it’s because she genuinely cares about the person we are representing and wants to personally ensure that they are receiving the best possible outcome. I don’t think any type of case exemplifies this more than the adoption cases she works on.” 

Take, for example, the Baby Boy Doe appeal Speaker won in 2022. Surrendered at a local hospital under the Safe Delivery of Newborns Law, the child had been adopted a year and a half before the alleged biological father filed a motion in the safe delivery court. From there, custody became an issue. A trial court denied his request for custody, but the Court of Appeals overturned that decision. Speaker argued on behalf of the adoptive parents, detailing the statutes the dad had ignored, and the Michigan Supreme Court reversed the decision, allowing the couple to keep the child. 

“In my opinion, the Court of Appeals did not follow the law at all,” Speaker says. “We never did find out if the guy was actually the biological father because he didn’t file properly. If you file properly, you’d get DNA testing.”

Her associate watched the whole process unfold over the course of two years. “That case came with a lot of scrutiny from both the courts and the media,” Ahlers-Smith recalls. “And Liisa handled it professionally and always with the best interests of our clients in mind.”

Only about 10% of Speaker’s appeals involve child welfare cases, but they require a lot of time and weigh heavy on her heart. In one, instead of sending a child to his father’s house when the mother’s home was deemed unsafe, a judge terminated the rights of both parents. Speaker fought for the dad and lost in the Court of Appeals, but won at the Michigan Supreme Court, and the man was reunited with his son. 

Speaker has no beef with family law and child welfare judges in general. 

“Some judges make mistakes,” she says. “I get that. Everybody is human. There are some areas of law that are gray, and maybe there are two reasonable decisions of how to handle it. … But there are so many courts that kind of skip all the statutory requirements and are like, ‘Well, this feels like the right thing to do, so I’m just going to change custody.’ And that’s just wrong. If they’re making decisions without evidence, and just based on how they feel, that’s not good for families and it’s certainly not good for children.”

In some courts, the same issues tend to surface again and again. Speaker filed eight appeals cases—“a pretty incredible amount for a small county,” she says—against rulings by a now-retired family law judge in rural southern Michigan. The state Court of Appeals reversed, vacated or remanded all of them. 

In 2021, Speaker’s experiences prompted her to write Kids Caught in the Middle: How Families are Harmed When Judges Don’t Follow the Law. At the request of her publishing company, she geared the book toward not just attorneys, judges and legislators, but to parents who feel lost in the system.

“Often, clients are emotional following a trial at the circuit court level,” Robinson says. “The client recognizes something went wrong or that the laws were not applied correctly, but they can’t identify which legal principles support their position. Liisa and her team are excellent at drafting legal arguments. She is also an ethical and compassionate attorney who truly cares about her clients and works hard to help them when their case has been wrongly decided at the trial level.”

The imbalance sometimes keeps Speaker awake at night. “When there are judges who just don’t follow the law—when it’s clear and it’s just not being followed—that really upsets me,” Speaker says.

It’s why Speaker and other members of the Family Law Section of the state bar, which she chaired in 2024-25, are working to pass HB 5445. The idea is to ensure judges are qualified and versed in the specifics of family law. The attorneys are actively meeting with legislators to push for mandatory training for family law judges —40 hours of family law, 40 hours of child welfare, and 16 hours of domestic violence—plus the creation of a nonrotating Family Division bench to reduce backlogs and ensure a consistent “one family, one judge” process.

“We have judges who come onto the court who have never sat on a parental rights termination case, and then within two weeks of them coming onto the bench, are deciding whether to permanently sever a parent’s right to their child without ever having any experience or training in that area,” notes Speaker, who also chairs the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers’ amicus committee. “That is just not right.”

Currently in Michigan, she says, “Many judges say, ‘I just want to be a judge, so I’m going to take that first opening,’ which happens to be in the Family Division. And then they take the first opening that comes in civil or criminal. Oftentimes, they are leaving a family in the middle of a case, like in a motion to change custody. I have colleagues who have had four or five judges during the course of a single proceeding regarding one motion to change custody, which obviously creates a lot of delay for the family, a lot of expense, a lot of uncertainty. 

“This is not the way it should be.”

Despite her penchant for procedural details, colleagues say Speaker isn’t the typical appellate practitioner. Friendly and easy to talk to—some even say bubbly—she says, “I’m much more social and outgoing than most appellate attorneys who like to be in their office and not talk to people all the time. I’m out there.”

The vibe at her firm could be considered unusual, too, with staff members frequently bringing their dogs to work and taking turns when canines don’t get along. Speaker’s own rescue beagle mix, who shares the family’s riverfront home with a Russian tortoise and a big fluffy feline, is an exception. 

“I don’t bring my dog because of her howling. I just couldn’t take it,” Speaker says. “I’ve had her for four years and every time she howls, I’m like, ‘What is that noise coming out of you?’”

Dogs aren’t the only thing that attracts young lawyers to Speaker Law Firm, says Ahlers-Smith. “I tell people a lot that Liisa is the best boss I have ever had and likely ever will have. She’s an excellent mentor, and I know for a fact that I would not be half the attorney I am today if not for accepting a job with her seven years ago.”

Though the work comes with restless nights and inevitable losses, Speaker knows she’s doing her job when clients tell her she’s the first attorney to take the time to understand their ordeal—something that happens a lot. “If you had told me in law school that I would be doing this kind of law, I would’ve thought that you were on drugs. It was the furthest thing from my mind. But I’ve found something that I care about deeply in helping families and children improve their situations.”

Her appeals practice, in fact, has brought her full circle—back to that fortuitous history fair project. 

“I think when I got really into family law and started to do things like writing a book and working on legislation, it made me start thinking about the thing that got me interested in law in the ninth grade, which was this sense of justice and doing what’s right for people.”