One With the Underdogs

Twenty-five years ago, in his first trial as a newly commissioned officer in the U.S. Army JAG Corps, Michael Porter stood in front of a military jury at Fort Riley in Kansas, prosecuting a soldier accused of sexually assaulting a child. 

“Without knowing much, I was being thrust in the cauldron of a high-pressure jury trial—and it was truly sink or swim,” Porter recalls. “Maybe I was too dumb to be afraid, but I jumped in headfirst. I thought all the way through the trial that I was going to lose and disappoint this family.”

The moment he won the case, he says, “I knew what kind of lawyer I wanted to be. It dovetailed with what made me tick as a human in terms of the competitive environment: the necessity of working harder than your opponent, the ability to handle the pressure of a trial, and the ability to stay calm when the stakes were the highest.

“The key to victory in that case, and frankly every trial I’ve had since, came down to preparation.”

Founder and managing partner of Porter Law Group in Syracuse, the 53-year-old Porter now splits his practice between general personal injury and medical malpractice matters, including a high percentage of failure-to-diagnose cancer cases. Humble despite a stack of sizable wins—including six consecutive million-dollar-plus during-jury-deliberation settlements and verdicts in three years—Porter has channeled his propensity for hard work and a lifelong struggle with imposter syndrome into a successful legal career. 

“I think that’s motivated me in anything I’ve ever done in my life,” he says of his self-doubt. “I’m not really capable, I don’t think, of giving myself credit for anything. And I think it drives me to try to be the best I can.”

Adds Porter’s longtime friend and law partner Eric Nordby, with whom he co-founded Porter Law Group in 2010: “Four years in the Army JAG Corps taught Mike that preparation and precision aren’t just professional virtues—they’re moral imperatives when someone else’s life depends on your performance. He learned that excellence isn’t negotiable when the mission matters.”

Growing up in the small town of Tully, a 20-minute drive from Syracuse, Porter learned the value of old-fashioned labor from his grandparents, who operated a modest dairy farm; his dad, a veteran who was a lacrosse and football coach before becoming a school superintendent; and his mom, who was a teacher. A competitive vein ran through the entire family. “Sometimes it’s a burden,” Porter admits. “Sometimes, I think it would be almost luxurious to be lazy. But I just don’t have the gene, and it drives my day. Every day I come to work, it feels the same as it did my first day in the military, when I was trying to prove myself.”

By the time Porter graduated from high school in 1990, his father was superintendent, so he couldn’t get away with much—even if he’d wanted to. Although the two rarely talked about it, his dad had served in combat infantry in Vietnam and, says Porter, “I always knew it was there in the background.”

Originally accepted into West Point, Porter shifted gears when he received a full Army ROTC scholarship to Harvard in exchange for four years of military service. There, he excelled in his studies and as captain of the varsity lacrosse team. Becoming a lawyer was an “afterthought,” but when the opportunity arose upon graduation in 1994, he seized it. And a few months after earning his J.D. from Syracuse University College of Law, Porter was hurling himself out of C-141s at Fort Benning’s airborne training school in Georgia. 

“They called us ‘Five-Jump Chumps,’” says Porter, referring to those who completed the five combat simulations. “I was terrified of it. I can’t imagine anything that, at the time, was more uncomfortable. Snakes and heights: Those were the two things that scared me to death. But the drill instructors convinced you that you were not fit to be an American if you didn’t jump out of that plane. The next thing I knew, I was standing in the door of a C-141 a thousand feet above the Earth, and I jumped. And I did it five times, and it was truly exhilarating. But I’ll never do it again.”

With the drills behind him, Porter was sent to Fort Riley, where he immediately began trying high-pressure, fast-moving cases involving violent crimes, sexual assaults and drug offenses. “Law school was interesting, and I enjoyed some of the topics, but it wasn’t until I worked up a case for trial and stood in front of a jury that I felt the thrill of being a lawyer,” he says. “Protecting the victims of crimes in front of military juries triggered a competitive instinct in me.”

The JAG Corps was also a proving ground for the discipline, focus and meticulous preparation that would stick with Porter long after his military service ended. “In the world of private practice and civil jury trials, I often encounter opponents—or even judges, occasionally—being less disciplined than I was used to back in my military days,” says Porter. “But my approach is always the same: If I’m not ready to honor the jury’s time by putting out proof, in an efficient way, that increases the odds of my client winning, then I shouldn’t be there.”

I don’t like when people are wronged. It triggers an instinct in me to protect them.

Upon exiting JAG as a captain in 2002, Porter returned to Syracuse to work for a large, “white-shoe” civil defense firm. Appearing in the judge’s chambers one week before a jury trial involving an environmental contamination suit against an oil company—his first-ever case in private practice—Porter stood at attention until the judge laughingly chided, “What are you doing, young man? Just have a seat.”

Porter sat, and began speaking with the judge when, from a nearby office, came the sounds of the law clerk strumming a banjo. “And I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore,” Porter laughs.

He won the case, which, he says, “involved what I thought were preposterous claims of environmental contamination. The complainant was, in my view, trying to perpetrate a fraud. We hired an exceptional expert, and he and I were able to expose that fraud and convince the jury that we were right.” 

During his five years working defense, Porter landed one favorable verdict after another. But something wasn’t quite right: “I was having all this success, but it just didn’t feel the same as what I was doing in the military,” he says. “I’ve always sort of aligned myself with the underdog. I don’t like when people are wronged. It triggers an instinct in me to protect them.”

In moving to the plaintiff’s side at a different firm, Porter realized, “If I could help people whose lives were truly derailed, through no fault of their own, it energized me to no end.”

Porter had always wanted to start his own firm, and his wife, Tracy, a licensed clinical social worker with whom he has five children, often joked that he was too stubborn to work for someone else. So in 2010 he opened Porter Law Group, a natural fit for an attorney who empathized with small-town folks like the ones he’d grown up with—people who didn’t have the resources to fight for themselves.

Over the years, he developed a niche representing misdiagnosed cancer patients and their survivors. “We investigate the case and find out that somebody within their medical team failed to report a very concerning abnormality from years before, or some medical provider failed to recommend that they undergo the appropriate screening tests,” Porter says. “The next thing you know, these poor folks find out that they have advanced-stage cancer and there are no treatments. And had that not happened, they could have been cured. In the realm of personal injury litigation, there’s hardly a category of plaintiffs that require more help and protection than those that have had their life taken, or a family member’s life taken.”

“There is something authentic about Mike that clients sense immediately,” adds Nordby. “Maybe it’s because his grandfather worked the soil with his hands and his great-grandmother cleaned hotel rooms to make ends meet. He understands what it means when a family’s entire future hangs in the balance, and that connection runs deeper than any legal strategy. … Mike’s courtroom success reflects not just his skill, but his understanding that behind every case is a family whose world has been turned upside down.”

Porter’s stunning run between 2011 and 2014 began shortly after he struck out on his own. He didn’t even realize he’d secured a half-dozen consecutive verdicts and settlements totaling more than $9 million for his clients until one of his paralegals pointed it out.

The first trial was the most emotionally rewarding. Representing a 17-year-old girl who had suffered a stroke, Porter argued that the hospital’s emergency staff had failed to thoroughly investigate the symptoms, leading to a permanent disability. “On the other side, they didn’t think there was any chance that we could win,” Porter says. “Lo and behold, the jury came back and made a million-dollar-plus award to this young girl and her family. Everybody was surprised by the result, and it sort of triggered this series of consecutive successful jury trial results over the course of the next three years.”

In each of the streak’s six cases, the defense made no offer. In fact, Porter says, “Every time I’ve taken a verdict in my professional career, in private practice, it’s been a case where the other side has offered no money. Every one of those seven-figure-plus verdicts are in cases where somebody didn’t believe in our case. There’s some satisfaction in proving those doubters wrong.”

More recently, in 2021, Porter snared a record-setting verdict on behalf of a soldier stationed at Fort Drum, where Porter himself had once been assigned during his military duty. When the young man went to the emergency room with pain in his right leg after combat training, medical providers concluded he had tendonitis.

But they failed to diagnose an arterial occlusion and, ultimately, the soldier’s leg had to be amputated. “He went from being a fully capable combat infantry veteran, where he served in a foreign combat zone, to being permanently handicapped with an amputated leg. The world and life he once knew was no longer,” says Porter, who felt more pressure than ever at trial. “Truly, his life was on the line: the life that he knew and the life that he was going to live.”

Once again, Porter received no settlement offer. Quietly sitting in the courtroom at the end of the six-day trial, with “the air still and everything on the line,” the jury awarded his client $13.5 million. “And when the jury returned that verdict, I knew we had done right by this family,” he says. “And that case is no different than any case we have, where we don’t put it in suit until I know that we’re right. For the most part, that approach has paid huge dividends for our clients.

“I’ve never thought about doing it any other way than just working as hard as I possibly could. That’s always been the common thread in my life—whether I was a kid playing high school sports, or now running a law firm,” he adds. “I still love the fight.”