The conference room at Marko Law in Detroit is lined by framed reminders of some of Jon Marko’s most significant legal triumphs, the kind of which have led to regular TV appearances, including a 2024 segment on “Dr. Phil,” where he discussed sexual abuse cases involving teachers and other authority figures.
Jon Marko, holding a treasured photo with Geoffrey Fieger. “I learned
so much from Geoffrey during the two years I worked with him. I
wouldn’t be where I am today without him,” said Marko of Fieger, with
whom he stays in regular contact.
By Tom Kirvan
Legal News
Jon Marko didn’t fit the mold of the son of a theology professor at Aquinas College, the Catholic liberal arts school in the traditionally strait-laced community of Grand Rapids.
In fact, after finishing his freshman year of Catholic high school, the somewhat rebellious Marko was summoned with his father to a meeting with school officials, where the rising sophomore was given his walking papers for being a disruptive force in the classroom.
“I was always being told by teachers and authority figures to use my ‘inside voice’ because I was too loud; to not argue with opinions that I didn’t agree with; and to always follow the rules, even if they didn’t make any sense,” Marko said during a recent interview with The Legal News in his downtown Detroit office. “In rather blunt terms, I was told to go elsewhere to finish high school.”
It proved to be a defining moment for Marko, now one of the most prominent and accomplished plaintiff’s attorneys in Michigan.
After being given the educational boot, Marko took the public-school route instead, enrolling at Grand Rapids Central High School, which had a decidedly different racial makeup.
“It was 70 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 10 percent white,” Marko indicated. “It had metal detectors, crowded classrooms, and a regular police presence. It was far different than what I had grown accustomed to, but it was just what I needed to see and experience. It gave me a firsthand view of how certain segments of society have been marginalized and discriminated against, and how important it is to fight for equal justice.”
The educational experience led him to law school at American University in Washington, D.C., which at the time of the Millennium was ranked among the top 20 legal learning institutions in the country, according to Marko, an alumnus of Aquinas with a bachelor’s degree in history.
“As a little boy, I remember watching lawyer TV shows and movies and thinking it’s the coolest profession,” said Marko of his desire to “help people” who have been wronged in life.
At American – where he was classmates with students from such elite academic schools as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Notre Dame, and Michigan – Marko ranked in the top 10 percent of his graduating class, affording him the opportunity to clerk for a respected and revered Maryland circuit court judge while also working on Capitol Hill in a lobbying role for a nonprofit organization.
Near the eve of graduation, Marko said he came across a cover story in the ABA Journal, the monthly flagship publication of the American Bar Association. The headline blared: “Motormouth: Geoffrey Fieger’s fiery tongue has earned him millions.” Marko found the story compelling, so much so that he was spurred to pen a hand-written letter to the famed attorney to see if there would be a future job opportunity with Fieger’s Southfield-based law firm.
Several weeks later, Marko received a call out of the blue from one of Fieger’s legal assistants who related some promising news.
“She said, something to the effect, that Mr. Fieger had read my letter and was impressed with my boldness, and would like to meet me and take me to lunch when I got back in Michigan,” Marko related. “I was so excited about the prospect of meeting him and for possibly working with him.”
It would be a dream deferred for Marko, who first was tasked with a two-year clerkship with Michigan Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Kelly, a former state Court of Appeals judge. At the beginning of his clerkship, Justice Kelly was in the liberal minority on the decidedly conservative high court.
“She told me that ‘We’re going to be writing a lot of dissents,’ which was indeed the case,” said Marko of his first year on the job in 2007.
But a year later, after the Obama tidal wave swept over the nation in the 2008 presidential election, the Michigan Supreme Court took on a different look, as Chief Justice Clifford Taylor lost his re-election bid and Kelly was chosen by her liberal colleagues to replace him as the leader of the state’s highest court.
“I was pretty naïve politically at the time, but I knew we were in the midst of a real sea change on the court,” Marko said. “We weren’t writing dissents anymore.”
While he found his clerkship experience educational and valuable, Marko said it also was “isolating” and “monastic,” as he dealt with the grind of cranking out research work for the state’s chief justice.
“I probably stayed one year longer than I should have,” he admitted, prompting his desire to seek that long-awaited lunch with perhaps the flashiest trial lawyer in the state.
When Marko made a return call to Fieger’s office to cash in that lunch chip, he was greeted with a puzzled response from one of his legal assistants.
“The woman on the phone was someone different than the one who called me originally, so I had to go through the whole story again,” Marko recalled. “I didn’t get anywhere in arranging that lunch, so I decided to try a different approach by contacting Ven Johnson, who was Geoffrey’s righthand man at the time.”
The approach worked, as Johnson – and then Fieger – were impressed by Marko’s perseverance and tenacity, offering him an opportunity to join the firm.
“They normally wouldn’t even consider hiring someone who didn’t have trial experience, but they took a chance on me,” Marko said. “It was a big break for me, and I learned so much during my two years there, working directly with one of the most well-known trial attorneys in the country.”
It would be a world where he suddenly was meeting the likes of famed attorneys Gerry Spence and F. Lee Bailey; where he would be whisked away in a private jet to meet with the families of miners involved in a 2010 West Virginia coal mine explosion, a disaster that claimed the lives of 29 workers; and where he would get an early taste of life as a Fieger associate.
In his first week on the job, Marko was pressed into duty to appear at an October 2011 arraignment for Charles Jones, who was facing a series of felony charges. The Fieger firm was representing Jones and his family whose 7-year-old daughter, Aiyana, was tragically killed by a Detroit Police Officer during a raid on an eastside home. The raid was sparked by a police effort to apprehend Jones, who was being charged with supplying the firearm in the murder of a Detroit teen in 2010.
“It was my first time at a criminal arraignment and I didn’t even know where to stand,” said Marko with a sheepish grin. “I had to ask the prosecutor, who told me to ‘stand over there’ and ‘say not guilty’ when the judge asks.”
Outside the courtroom, where newspaper reporters and TV news crews were seeking comment on the case, Marko became more talkative when it came time to discredit a key witness, Chauncey Owens, against his client.
“Chauncey Owens would ID Geoffrey Fieger as the gunman and me as the hit man if he thought it meant less time in jail,” Marko proclaimed as cameras flashed.
When Fieger got wind of the quote, he was understandably pleased, according to Marko.
“He liked it, particularly the mention of him as the gunman,” Marko said with a smile.
Years later in 2019, the case would have a more than satisfactory ending for Fieger and the family of the 7-year-old girl, as an $8.25 million settlement was reached with the City of Detroit. The girl’s father wouldn’t be so fortunate, as he was convicted of second-degree murder in the earlier slaying of a Detroit teen.
In 2015, Marko decided to form his own firm, a risky proposition that he felt almost duty-bound to take. His practice covers personal injury, civil rights, employment, whistleblower, and catastrophic injury litigation.
One of his early triumphs was a six-week employment discrimination case in Genesee County in 2019 that led to a record-breaking $11.4 million civil rights verdict from an all-white jury after a husband-and-wife pair sued the Michigan Department of Corrections for racial discrimination and retaliation.
“I never knew until they read the verdict whether my clients were going to get justice or not,” Marko indicated. “The state had never offered a single dollar during the entire three-year life of the case. The defendant re-victimized my clients throughout the entire case and trial.
“When we went to the case evaluation, the ‘plaintiff’s’ case evaluator, who was a career employment lawyer in Flint, laughed at me when I asked for a seven-figure award and told me that I would never be able to obtain a result like that in Flint. After it was all over, I sent him a copy of the verdict with a letter thanking him for mis-evaluating the case so badly. I’ve made a career out of taking the tough cases. Some of these civil rights and employment cases take five or six years to finish.”
Now, Marko has been on a decade-long winning streak that has included Michigan’s largest premises liability verdict – $76.7 million – in 2025 for a pipefitter who suffered severe injuries when a defective refrigerant exploded in 2020 while he worked on a repair job at a Kroger store in Oakland County.
Recently, Marko represented a former Michigan inmate who filed suit against a prison health care contractor who refused to pay for surgery to reverse his colostomy. On April 2, a federal civil jury awarded a $307.6 million verdict in the plaintiff’s favor. Marko said the outcome could be considered as a “warning shot across the bow to for-profit health care companies” that derive their money from taxpayers at the expense of “basic human rights and the constitutional rights of everybody.”
Married and the father of four young children, Marko admitted that he is consumed by his work, noting that the “law is a jealous mistress.”
And yet, Marko finds that his most rewarding responsibility is “being a dad” where he can marvel at the growth and development of his children who range in age from 8 years old to 6 months.
“My wife (Natalie) and I really like to travel, but our real love is centered on our kids,” Marko declared. “They are our joy.”
Legal News
Jon Marko didn’t fit the mold of the son of a theology professor at Aquinas College, the Catholic liberal arts school in the traditionally strait-laced community of Grand Rapids.
In fact, after finishing his freshman year of Catholic high school, the somewhat rebellious Marko was summoned with his father to a meeting with school officials, where the rising sophomore was given his walking papers for being a disruptive force in the classroom.
“I was always being told by teachers and authority figures to use my ‘inside voice’ because I was too loud; to not argue with opinions that I didn’t agree with; and to always follow the rules, even if they didn’t make any sense,” Marko said during a recent interview with The Legal News in his downtown Detroit office. “In rather blunt terms, I was told to go elsewhere to finish high school.”
It proved to be a defining moment for Marko, now one of the most prominent and accomplished plaintiff’s attorneys in Michigan.
After being given the educational boot, Marko took the public-school route instead, enrolling at Grand Rapids Central High School, which had a decidedly different racial makeup.
“It was 70 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 10 percent white,” Marko indicated. “It had metal detectors, crowded classrooms, and a regular police presence. It was far different than what I had grown accustomed to, but it was just what I needed to see and experience. It gave me a firsthand view of how certain segments of society have been marginalized and discriminated against, and how important it is to fight for equal justice.”
The educational experience led him to law school at American University in Washington, D.C., which at the time of the Millennium was ranked among the top 20 legal learning institutions in the country, according to Marko, an alumnus of Aquinas with a bachelor’s degree in history.
“As a little boy, I remember watching lawyer TV shows and movies and thinking it’s the coolest profession,” said Marko of his desire to “help people” who have been wronged in life.
At American – where he was classmates with students from such elite academic schools as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Notre Dame, and Michigan – Marko ranked in the top 10 percent of his graduating class, affording him the opportunity to clerk for a respected and revered Maryland circuit court judge while also working on Capitol Hill in a lobbying role for a nonprofit organization.
Near the eve of graduation, Marko said he came across a cover story in the ABA Journal, the monthly flagship publication of the American Bar Association. The headline blared: “Motormouth: Geoffrey Fieger’s fiery tongue has earned him millions.” Marko found the story compelling, so much so that he was spurred to pen a hand-written letter to the famed attorney to see if there would be a future job opportunity with Fieger’s Southfield-based law firm.
Several weeks later, Marko received a call out of the blue from one of Fieger’s legal assistants who related some promising news.
“She said, something to the effect, that Mr. Fieger had read my letter and was impressed with my boldness, and would like to meet me and take me to lunch when I got back in Michigan,” Marko related. “I was so excited about the prospect of meeting him and for possibly working with him.”
It would be a dream deferred for Marko, who first was tasked with a two-year clerkship with Michigan Supreme Court Justice Marilyn Kelly, a former state Court of Appeals judge. At the beginning of his clerkship, Justice Kelly was in the liberal minority on the decidedly conservative high court.
“She told me that ‘We’re going to be writing a lot of dissents,’ which was indeed the case,” said Marko of his first year on the job in 2007.
But a year later, after the Obama tidal wave swept over the nation in the 2008 presidential election, the Michigan Supreme Court took on a different look, as Chief Justice Clifford Taylor lost his re-election bid and Kelly was chosen by her liberal colleagues to replace him as the leader of the state’s highest court.
“I was pretty naïve politically at the time, but I knew we were in the midst of a real sea change on the court,” Marko said. “We weren’t writing dissents anymore.”
While he found his clerkship experience educational and valuable, Marko said it also was “isolating” and “monastic,” as he dealt with the grind of cranking out research work for the state’s chief justice.
“I probably stayed one year longer than I should have,” he admitted, prompting his desire to seek that long-awaited lunch with perhaps the flashiest trial lawyer in the state.
When Marko made a return call to Fieger’s office to cash in that lunch chip, he was greeted with a puzzled response from one of his legal assistants.
“The woman on the phone was someone different than the one who called me originally, so I had to go through the whole story again,” Marko recalled. “I didn’t get anywhere in arranging that lunch, so I decided to try a different approach by contacting Ven Johnson, who was Geoffrey’s righthand man at the time.”
The approach worked, as Johnson – and then Fieger – were impressed by Marko’s perseverance and tenacity, offering him an opportunity to join the firm.
“They normally wouldn’t even consider hiring someone who didn’t have trial experience, but they took a chance on me,” Marko said. “It was a big break for me, and I learned so much during my two years there, working directly with one of the most well-known trial attorneys in the country.”
It would be a world where he suddenly was meeting the likes of famed attorneys Gerry Spence and F. Lee Bailey; where he would be whisked away in a private jet to meet with the families of miners involved in a 2010 West Virginia coal mine explosion, a disaster that claimed the lives of 29 workers; and where he would get an early taste of life as a Fieger associate.
In his first week on the job, Marko was pressed into duty to appear at an October 2011 arraignment for Charles Jones, who was facing a series of felony charges. The Fieger firm was representing Jones and his family whose 7-year-old daughter, Aiyana, was tragically killed by a Detroit Police Officer during a raid on an eastside home. The raid was sparked by a police effort to apprehend Jones, who was being charged with supplying the firearm in the murder of a Detroit teen in 2010.
“It was my first time at a criminal arraignment and I didn’t even know where to stand,” said Marko with a sheepish grin. “I had to ask the prosecutor, who told me to ‘stand over there’ and ‘say not guilty’ when the judge asks.”
Outside the courtroom, where newspaper reporters and TV news crews were seeking comment on the case, Marko became more talkative when it came time to discredit a key witness, Chauncey Owens, against his client.
“Chauncey Owens would ID Geoffrey Fieger as the gunman and me as the hit man if he thought it meant less time in jail,” Marko proclaimed as cameras flashed.
When Fieger got wind of the quote, he was understandably pleased, according to Marko.
“He liked it, particularly the mention of him as the gunman,” Marko said with a smile.
Years later in 2019, the case would have a more than satisfactory ending for Fieger and the family of the 7-year-old girl, as an $8.25 million settlement was reached with the City of Detroit. The girl’s father wouldn’t be so fortunate, as he was convicted of second-degree murder in the earlier slaying of a Detroit teen.
In 2015, Marko decided to form his own firm, a risky proposition that he felt almost duty-bound to take. His practice covers personal injury, civil rights, employment, whistleblower, and catastrophic injury litigation.
One of his early triumphs was a six-week employment discrimination case in Genesee County in 2019 that led to a record-breaking $11.4 million civil rights verdict from an all-white jury after a husband-and-wife pair sued the Michigan Department of Corrections for racial discrimination and retaliation.
“I never knew until they read the verdict whether my clients were going to get justice or not,” Marko indicated. “The state had never offered a single dollar during the entire three-year life of the case. The defendant re-victimized my clients throughout the entire case and trial.
“When we went to the case evaluation, the ‘plaintiff’s’ case evaluator, who was a career employment lawyer in Flint, laughed at me when I asked for a seven-figure award and told me that I would never be able to obtain a result like that in Flint. After it was all over, I sent him a copy of the verdict with a letter thanking him for mis-evaluating the case so badly. I’ve made a career out of taking the tough cases. Some of these civil rights and employment cases take five or six years to finish.”
Now, Marko has been on a decade-long winning streak that has included Michigan’s largest premises liability verdict – $76.7 million – in 2025 for a pipefitter who suffered severe injuries when a defective refrigerant exploded in 2020 while he worked on a repair job at a Kroger store in Oakland County.
Recently, Marko represented a former Michigan inmate who filed suit against a prison health care contractor who refused to pay for surgery to reverse his colostomy. On April 2, a federal civil jury awarded a $307.6 million verdict in the plaintiff’s favor. Marko said the outcome could be considered as a “warning shot across the bow to for-profit health care companies” that derive their money from taxpayers at the expense of “basic human rights and the constitutional rights of everybody.”
Married and the father of four young children, Marko admitted that he is consumed by his work, noting that the “law is a jealous mistress.”
And yet, Marko finds that his most rewarding responsibility is “being a dad” where he can marvel at the growth and development of his children who range in age from 8 years old to 6 months.
“My wife (Natalie) and I really like to travel, but our real love is centered on our kids,” Marko declared. “They are our joy.”
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