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By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan criminal defense attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 24, 2026. A first operating-while-intoxicated charge in Michigan is a misdemeanor, and it moves on two separate tracks at the same time. The criminal case runs through the district court covering the place of arrest, and…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan family law attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 22, 2026. Most of what is written about adoption in Michigan concerns getting to the order. Less is written about what the order does once it enters, and that is where the legal consequences actually live.…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan personal injury attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 20, 2026. Michigan pays personal injury protection benefits through the injured person’s own policy, which works until there is no policy to look to. That situation is more common in Detroit than the design of the…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan family law attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 17, 2026. Michigan’s spousal support statute is short, old, and permissive, and it contains no calculation of any kind. People arrive expecting a formula like the one that governs child support and find instead a sentence…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan criminal defense attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 15 2026. Arraignment is the shortest hearing in a Michigan criminal case and frequently the one that decides the most. A defendant learns the charge, enters a plea, and finds out whether they are going home,…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 13, 2026. Michigan’s default rules for an estate were written with a first marriage in mind, and they change their arithmetic the moment a family includes children who belong to only one spouse. The changes are…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan estate planning attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 11, 2026. Families put a Northern Michigan cottage into a trust or a limited liability company to share it across a generation without a partition suit. The structure solves the ownership problem well. It also moves…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan family law attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 8, 2026. Michigan courts decide contested custody by working through 12 lettered factors set out at MCL 722.23, running from (a) to (l). The statute assigns them no weights, so no single factor decides a case…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan family law attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 3, 2026. A Michigan custody order is built to last, and the statute that allows it to be changed is arranged as a series of thresholds rather than a single question. A parent asking for a…

By Kelly M. Neumann, a Michigan Social Security Disability attorney and Principal Attorney at Neumann Law Group. Last updated October 1, 2026. A lumbar MRI shows a disc. It does not show pain, and the rules Social Security applies to a Michigan disability claim are written around that gap. The agency has a two-step method…