Dustyn Coontz

I'm Dustyn, and I care a lot about defending regular people from the Government. I think our criminal-legal system is deeply flawed in so many ways—from systemic racism to obscenely high sentencing guidelines to mandatory minimum sentences to a pervasive guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude within the system. I'm here to do my part to change all that.

That's why I got into criminal defense.

I am also someone who is ... how should I put this ... a bit of an entrepreneurial control freak, which is why I founded Coontz Law. I realized that in order to best serve the people I'm here to serve, I had to do it my way. This is really to say that I wanted to do it the client's way: by focusing on how I would want to be treated if I were the client or their family member. I'm here to serve regular people, not society's upper crust. I'm here to serve people who are going through the hardest times of their lives, so building a client-centered firm was important to me. And because I'm an entrepreneurial control freak, I had to put my name on the firm and start from scratch to build the firm I want.

• That means building a firm on core values. We defend with VALOR: Veritas (Latin for truth), Audacity, Liberty, Ownership, and Results.
• That means building a firm with great people. We have high standards for who gets hired at Coontz Law and who stays at Coontz Law. We also look outside our tiny bubble of mid-Michigan to find great talent all around the world.
• That means building a firm with great tech. We can hire great talent all around the world because we are a tech-forward firm. We live in an age of powerful cloud computing, e-signatures, virtual meetings, and generative Artificial Intelligence. So we leverage those things to do our important work better.
• That means building a firm with great communication. And that's not something I'm normally good at. Let me put that a different way: I am a great communicator when I communicate, but I don't communicate very reliably. Being ADHD, I lack some executive-functioning skills. My mom called me the "absent-minded professor" when I was a child, and that's pretty apt. I tend to get lost in thought, ideas, and work. That's a good thing because it means I produce really excellent legal work. It's also a bit of a liability at times because it can lead to unread messages piling up and people feeling ignored. And this brings me back to why Coontz Law is built with great people: great communication comes from having great people on the team whose skills complement my own.

So that's me. I'm not everyone's ideal lawyer. Some people want to have unlimited access to their lawyer, and that's not me. Doing great, deep legal work is too important to me. Some people want a lawyer who glad-hands with the powers that be and donates to the prosecutor's reelection fund so they can get the softest plea deal possible, and that's not me. Being free from the politics that plague the criminal-legal system is too important to me. Some people want a buttoned-up fancy lawyer who speaks in watered-down platitudes, and that's not me. Being uniquely me is too important to me: I wear sneakers with my 3-piece suits, have arcade games at the office, and got a custom-made wrestling belt to celebrate my law firm's core values. Some people want a lawyer who pounds the lectern and yells at witnesses like some caricature of a defense lawyer they saw on an episode of Law & Order, and that's not me. Remaining credible in the eyes of jurors, judges, and even the prosecutors and police officers I'm there to defend against is too important to me.

But the things that make my firm and me different make me a really good fit for the right client. To find out if you're the right client, please give us a call or reach out via our website. We can't wait to hear from you and get to work for you.