The Rockweiler

Neil Rockind has always had a soft spot for people who have everything stacked against them. His grandparents were Holocaust survivors who came to the United States in the midst of World War II, leaving behind everything they knew—including his grandfather’s medical education in Vienna, which wasn’t recognized in his new home country.

“They were underdogs,” Rockind says. “I could always relate to that.”

The American legal system creates its own underdogs: From the prosecution’s chance at a second closing argument to the way prosecutors are depicted as heroes in movies and TV, the deck is often stacked against defendants, he says.

“The system is really slanted against the accused, even though we say that the system is entirely designed to protect them,” adds Rockind, who has been working as a criminal defense attorney for nearly 25 years.

“My approach is such that I feel like I have enough ability, enough talent, enough passion, enough commitment that there are times where I can be an equalizer.”

“That’s important, finding your voice. One of the things I learned early on is you really have to be yourself.”

Growing up in West Bloomfield, Rockind always loved a good argument. 

“For as long as I can remember,” he recalls, “I liked to argue so much that my family would point at me and go, ‘This one’s going to be a lawyer.’”

As Rockind grew, he relished picking apart arguments, exploring contrarian positions and looking for fallacies. He was drawn to depictions of lawyers on TV and in movies, fierce and clever advocates. “I always wanted to be in a courtroom before I knew what it really involves,” he recalls.

Later, when he learned what it takes to do the job well—being prepared, being thorough, and choosing the right approach for each trial—his passion deepened. “You have to know when to push forward and when to take your foot off the gas pedal,” he says. “An effective trial lawyer is someone who is able to know all that.”

By the time he was finished with his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, he was ready to head straight to law school at Wayne State University, where he eagerly debated with professors and fellow students. “It’s one of the things that gave me the feeling that I wanted to do this in some form professionally,” he says, “because I liked the battle.”

He started fighting them on the other side of the courtroom. When he finished law school, at the urging of a family friend, he jumped into a job at the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office.

He was thrown into the deep end of trial work: sitting in on thousands of preliminary examinations in felony cases, handling motion hearing after motion hearing, running a docket dealing with dozens of lawyers, judges and witnesses—and developing the best strategies to pursue his case. And he watched others. A longtime “trial nerd,” he would wander into other courtrooms to see the many different ways skilled prosecutors and defense attorneys operated.

“That’s important, finding your voice,” he says. “One of the things I learned early on is you really have to be yourself.”

For Rockind, that meant fine-tuning his approach to each witness and jury to best allow them to tell their own story. His doggedness earned him a nickname as a young lawyer that stuck throughout his career. “I forgot which lawyer made the comment, ‘We’ve got the Rockweiler over here,’” Rockind recalls. “I think it’s because I was just aggressive.”

But that’s not to say he’s just a rabid dog in the courtroom.

“One thing I think I brought to the table is a wide range. I could amp it up, I could tone it down. I could be quick, I could be slow, I could be soft,” he recalls. “I was trying, when I was in the prosecutor’s office, to figure out which would work for me.”

He soon was trying cases with high stakes, bizarre facts and everything in between. Examples include the prosecution of someone who stalked a radio DJ, someone who sexually assaulted a woman in a care home, and a pastor who set up a camera in his church’s bathroom to take clandestine videos of parishioners. In his most notable case at the prosecutor’s office, he was assigned to the team prosecuting Dr. Jack Kevorkian for violating an injunction by continuing to facilitate assisted suicides.

“It was so interesting to be in the middle of that, in the eye of that storm,” he recalls.

It was so memorable, Rockind says, that he can picture the courtroom in detail—one scene in particular. “At one point in court, Kevorkian sieg heiled everyone,” he recalls. “I wasn’t going to hide my displeasure, my anger or offense. I shouted, ‘How dare you make that gesture?’”

And Rockind loved being up against Geoffrey Feiger. “No one expects me to win an objection. If I win one, I’ll be ahead of the curve,” Rockind says. (He would later go on to defend Feiger in an investigation brought by the Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox alleging state campaign finance violations. “I always thought Geoffrey was such a talented lawyer, and when the opportunity came to defend him, I didn’t hesitate,” Rockind says, adding Feiger was ultimately not charged.)

Retired Oakland County Judge Denise Langford Morris, who is now a mediator at JAMS, presided over their head-to-head case. She says her courtroom was a circus of media and protestors. She recalls Rockind and Feiger really “getting into it, ferociously arguing on behalf of their respective clients over the term ad hominem,” she says. “It was really incredible, because everyone in the courtroom was just locked in. They weren’t cursing, but they were using the English language like you wouldn’t believe.”

When he was an assistant prosecutor, a trend was developing homicide prosecutions for unintentional car accidents. “Those sorts of cases really stood out in my mind,” Rockind says. “There wasn’t specifically criminal intent, but people were being prosecuted for negligent homicide or manslaughter or second-degree murder.”

Rockind says he has enormous respect for public servants who work as prosecutors. But he eventually found himself drawn to the other side of the aisle. 

“When lawyers are coming to me and asking me for plea bargains or to resolve cases and I’m sympathetic to those positions and begin to lose the nerve to say no and watch people go to jail. That’s when you say to yourself, ‘OK, am I in the right role?’” he recalls.

After four years in the prosecutor’s office, Rockind left to start his own firm, where he now employs two associates and a paralegal.

Some of his cases have involved high-profile clients who put him in the middle of major media stories. He helped Kimberly Mathers avoid jail after she plead guilty to disorderly conduct in court and later represented her through her divorce with rapper Eminem, including seeking $10 million in compensation for emotional distress from the artist’s depiction of violence toward her. In another, Rockind obtained the only dismissal defending one of the participants of a 2004 brawl between several NBA players and fans that became known as the “Malice at the Palace.”

But the trials that stand out for Rockind are those that pushed him to overcome big obstacles.

He represented the manager of a Harley-Davidson dealership who wanted to buy the business from the owner, and had a deal in place to do so, but the owner backed out and subsequently accused him of embezzlement. All of the employees and several past employees—more than a dozen people—were lined up against the manager. The evidence was on their side, but a crucial moment came when the prosecutor asked Rockind’s client a question, and he told a compelling story that nearly brought him to tears on the witness stand.

“You could hear a pin drop in the courtroom—even the air conditioning units took a break,” Rockind recalls. “There wasn’t anyone in the courtroom who wasn’t looking at him sympathetically.”

It helped sway the jury. “When you’re in court, sometimes the best question is the one you don’t ask,” Rockind adds.

In another case, Rockind defended a 70-year-old man who faced multiple felony charges for hitting a state trooper riding a motorcycle on a highway entrance ramp and dragging his body for miles before stopping. Rockind argued his client didn’t realize he had hit the trooper, but it was a case where he felt all the cards were stacked against them: It was the focus of intense press coverage and local judges had even attended the funeral.

“I knew we were really bucking the system,” Rockind says. Throughout the trial he would informally poll people he interacted with outside the courtroom. It was clear that it was possible to pay respect to the tragedy of the trooper’s death while proving his client didn’t commit a crime. Rockind successfully threaded that needle, while also spending hours studying the science to cross-examine witnesses and establish that hindsight isn’t 20/20.

But finding the balance meant Rockind couldn’t come on too strong. “It was finding the right speed, right tempo, right tone,” he says. “As we pointed stuff out, people slowly began to see it wasn’t the client’s fault.” He was acquitted of all charges.

Recently, he defended a client accused of threatening the superintendent of the Oxford Community School District—a district reeling from a 2021 school shooting that killed four students and injured seven others. His client was tried in the same court as both the shooter’s and shooter’s parents cases started, and it was a delicate exercise to find an impartial jury in a community that had already experienced such trauma.

“I believed in my heart of hearts that I should win that case,” Rockind says. “But I thought there was a decent chance that we wouldn’t.”

Rockind broke down what his client had said, and explained the anger and disappointment he and others in the community felt over the handling of the shooting. In the end, the jury voted to acquit.

Rockind has come to appreciate the unique place the legal system has in society.

“Jury trials are really the most significant example of daily democracy,” he says. “You have 12 jurors and each person gets a vote, and their vote is not representative of anybody other than themself. The CEO of the largest corporation has no more say in that jury room than the 18-year-old college kid or the retired machinist. They all have an equal vote.”

In his free time, Rockind hosts a podcast, Killer Cross Examination. The show started as an outlet to talk through some of his favorite cases but became an opportunity to interview the likes of F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Lisa Bloom and Daniel Webb. As a self-described trial junkie, Rockind says the chance to talk through legal issues with some of the greatest minds in his field keeps him fired up.

“I think it’s part of what feeds me and what energizes me,” he says. “It’s like going to lawyer fantasy camp.”

Steve Fishman, a criminal defense attorney in Detroit who has known Rockind for years, says some people are born trial lawyers—and Rockind is one of them.

“He’s very good on his feet, and he’s very well-prepared all the time,” Fishman says. “He speaks in English, not lawyerese, and he’s consistent with his own personality, which is a big deal.”

Rockind knows he’s in the right place: standing between a client and the power of the state. “I always identified with the little guy,” he says.

It brings forth memories of childhood, when he was the kid rushing to defend a classmate being bullied. “My blood boils when I see that,” he says. “To this day, in my role as a defense lawyer, I want to be the person that stands there and says: Not for this person.”