Three careers of showing up on hard days.

Before he argued in Cook County courtrooms, Michael Anderson answered calls on Chicago streets as a police sergeant. Before that, he jumped out of airplanes for the U.S. Army. Family law is his third career built around the same job description: stay calm, read the situation completely, act for the people counting on you.

The service years

Michael served as a U.S. Army Paratrooper, then as a Sergeant with the Chicago Police Department. For two years he was a representative for the Chicago Police Sergeants Union, standing up for fellow officers in disputes that shaped their careers and pensions. That work taught him two things a family lawyer needs daily: how high-stakes hearings actually move, and what a rotating schedule does to a household.

The legal training

He earned his J.D. from The John Marshall Law School in 2017, making the Dean’s List multiple times and winning the CALI Award in Evidence, the top mark in the course that governs what a judge will actually hear. He spent two years in the school’s Veterans Clinic helping veterans appeal denied disability benefits. His B.A. in Accounting from Northeastern University came first, and it never stopped working: in divorces involving pensions, businesses, or financial affidavits that do not add up, he does the arithmetic himself.

The practice

At Davis Friedman he handles all aspects of family law for families across Lake County, the northern suburbs, and greater Chicago: custody and allocation of parental responsibilities, relocation, child support and its modification, property division, and complex financial matters. He negotiates first and hard, because most families are better served by a settlement they shaped than a ruling they received. When negotiation fails, his courtroom years take over. Since 2022 he has been selected annually to the Super Lawyers Rising Stars list, a peer-reviewed designation held by a small fraction of Illinois attorneys.