Attorney Profiles

Michael Kanovitz is a partner at Loevy & Loevy where he concentrates in constitutional law, class actions, and whistleblower protection under the federal and state False Claims Acts.  He was recently recognized for his outstanding litigation and trial skills in the Law Bulletin's prestigious 40-under-40 attorneys to watch.

Presently, Mr. Kanovitz is lead counsel in two of the largest civil rights class actions suits in the county.  Last month, Mr. Kanovitz secured a settlement in Dunn v. City of Chicago for three classes of persons who were abused while in the custody of the Chicago Police Department.  The settlement provides $16.5 million in compensation to victims and has produced substantial changes in the Department's  treatment of arrestees.  In Young v. County of Cook, Mr. Kanovitz proved at a jury trial that the Cook County Jail abused over 500,000 citizens by using violence and  intimidation when strip searching them.  The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently rejected the jail's attempt to appeal those findings.  

On the national scene, Mr. Kanovitz is handling several cases against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for depriving American citizens of their civil rights to due process in the name of the war on terror.   In Vance et al. v. Rumsfeld, Mr. Kanovitz represents two whistleblowers who were detained and tortured by U.S. officials after they reported on government corruption in the Iraq war.  The case is the first in the nation to have survived a motion to dismiss such claims against Mr. Rumsfeld.  In Doe v. Rumsfeld, Mr. Kanovitz is working with the Government Accountability Project (GAP) in Washington, D.C. on a case involving the civil rights of an American contractor who was held incommunicado by the U.S. military for over nine months.   Experts in constitutional law and legal educators have described these cases as groundbreaking. 

In other civil rights litigation, Mr. Kanovitz recently obtained a $16 million jury verdict for a wrongfully-convicted man who was incarcerated for five and one-half years the largest per-year recovery on record.  The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed the jury's verdict in May of 2010.

Mr. Kanovitz particularly enjoys using his trial skills to assist qui tam whistleblowers with their False Claims Act cases when the government declines to intervene.  Presently, he represents more than a dozen whistleblower clients in state and federal False Claims Act suits in jurisdictions across the country. 

In addition to his litigation work, Mr. Kanovitz is co-author of the textbook Constitutional Law, which is published by Lexis/Nexis and is now in its Eleventh Edition.  The book is used to teach law enforcement officers throughout the country about the United States Constitution.

Mr. Kanovitz is a graduate of Brandeis University and the Cornell Law School, having received honors with both degrees.