Michael Burg's first jury verdict came from a dead dog.
The dog was a German shepherd that had died in a kennel. Its owners reached Mr. Burg through the manager of a Burger King, in the first years of a solo practice he ran from an executive suite in Denver. His father, a liquor salesman in Chicago, had paid for the desk. A landlord supplied the secretary. A fraternity brother, Dale Coplan, sent what clients there were. Most of the work was collecting debts.
Mr. Burg took the dog case to trial and the jury awarded the couple more than $10,000. [Michael: what he remembers about that trial, and what he did with the money.] It was a small verdict in a small case, according to Colorado Super Lawyers, which reported the episode in 2019. It was also, by his own account, the work he had wanted since he was 12.
Fifty years after he passed the Colorado bar, on his second attempt, Mr. Burg is the founder of Burg Simpson Eldredge Hersh & Jardine, a firm that says it has more than 65 trial lawyers in eight offices across seven states and has recovered more than $2 billion for clients. Mr. Burg himself has argued more than 175 jury trials, the firm says. This fall, he is still trying them.
His record includes verdicts that judges later cut and an appeals court later restored, a settlement of more than $3 billion for women who said birth control pills harmed them, and a book, Trial by Fire, in which he describes his career as a battle against corporate greed. [Michael: what he would say the through-line is, in his words.]
He grew up in Chicago. In the telling that Super Lawyers and his publisher have both repeated, he was a scrappy Jewish kid who was bullied and learned to fight young. He played junior high basketball and thought about the NBA. At 12, he found a biography of Clarence Darrow on his parents' bookshelf and decided what he would do for a living. "At 12 years old, I want to be a trial lawyer," he said last October on a podcast about personal injury law.
He moved west to Denver, partly, he has said, to get away from the winters. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Denver in 1972 and a law degree there in 1975. He failed the Colorado bar exam once. He passed it in 1976.
His first job was at a Denver firm, Atler, Zall & Haligman. Super Lawyers reports that he left after a dispute over pay with the managing partner. Law Week Colorado, in a 2022 profile, put it more plainly: he was fired. [Michael: his account of why he left.] He opened his own practice. For a stretch, Super Lawyers reported, he made more money acting in television commercials and industrial films than he did from the law, and he moved to Los Angeles to see whether acting could be his life. [Michael: the commercials, which ones, and what brought him back.]
In 1984 his younger brother, Peter Burg, also a University of Denver law graduate, joined the practice. The two decided to stop defending insurance companies and start suing them. Later, after a case win, Bill Simpson, the son of Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, merged his firm into theirs. The firm took both names. A print of the boxer Jack Dempsey hangs in Mr. Burg's office, a gift from Simpson.
Alan Simpson told Super Lawyers that Mr. Burg "loves the combat of the courtroom." Michael O'Donnell, a lawyer who has worked with him, said: "He's fearless." Judge David Herndon, who presided over the Yaz and Yasmin birth control litigation in federal court in Illinois, called Mr. Burg "a superb lawyer who pays great attention to detail."
The cases people ask him about fall into two groups. One is the mass torts, in which he sat on the leadership teams of Ortho Evra and Yaz and Yasmin, the birth control cases that settled for more than $3 billion on behalf of more than 10,000 women. The firm helped secure a $143 million settlement after the 2018 gas explosions in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts. In 2024, the firm's Ohio office, with shareholder Seth Katz as a court-appointed co-lead counsel, was part of the $600 million East Palestine derailment settlement. Katz, not Mr. Burg, led that case.
The other group is the trials that Mr. Burg tried himself.
In November 2019 a Maricopa County, Arizona, jury awarded $58.5 million to families who had donated the bodies of relatives for what they believed was medical research. The company that took them, Biological Resource Center of Arizona, sold the bodies in parts. Fifty million dollars of the verdict was punitive damages. The trial judge cut the punitive award to $8.5 million. In 2022 the Arizona Court of Appeals held that the trial court had lacked jurisdiction to do so and reinstated the full $58.5 million, according to the firm. Mr. Burg told Colorado Lawyer magazine that the practice "should not occur in a civilized society." The company closed. [Michael: the moment in that trial he thinks about now.]
On Dec. 13, 2024, after a five-day trial before Chief Judge Philip A. Brimmer of the U.S. District Court in Denver, a jury awarded $55.5 million to Georgina Perez, who was burned by a Crock-Pot Express multicooker. Fifty million dollars of that was punitive damages against the two companies that made and sold the cooker, Newell Brands and Sunbeam. Mr. Burg led the trial team. In a statement released by the firm, he said the jury "sent a message to the defendants" about profits and safety. On May 29, 2025, Brimmer applied Colorado's caps on noneconomic and exemplary damages and reduced the judgment to about $9.1 million. [Michael: his view of the caps, in his own words. The defendants have also sought a new trial; confirm the status of that motion and any appeal before publication.]
Mr. Burg has lost, and he says so. [Michael: a trial he lost that taught him something, and what it was.] "Nobody does it alone," he told Super Lawyers in 2019. "The key is to make it look easy."
He says the firm tries its cases. "We take every case as if it's going to go to trial," he said on the podcast last fall. "I'm only as good as my next case." In an era when most civil cases settle, the stance has a cost, and it also has a record. The firm's hedge-fund case against UBS, which Mr. Burg has said ran for nine years and went through four judges, settled in September 2015, as jury selection was about to begin.
In 2016 BenBella Books published Trial by Fire: One Man's Battle to End Corporate Greed and Save Lives, written with Josh Young. The trial lawyer Mark Geragos called Mr. Burg's courtroom work "the stuff of legend" on the cover. [Michael: whether a new edition is planned.]
The honors came in the usual order. The Clarence Darrow Award, in 2013. Induction into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame in April 2016, which the firm says made him the first Colorado lawyer and the only University of Denver graduate to be inducted. A lifetime achievement award from the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association, presented in May 2022. "I'm not done yet," he told Law Week Colorado that year. "I consider myself a trial lawyer who is there to fight on behalf of individuals against giant corporations."
Asked what shaped him, Mr. Burg has pointed to something his father said, the same man who bought the desk. "Don't chase the money," Mr. Burg quoted him as saying. "Be the best." [Michael: what he is working on now, and what a Monday looks like at 50 years.]
Photographs courtesy of Burg Simpson. [Interview date and place.] Quotes are from published interviews and firm statements unless noted. Burg Simpson is a client of Oliver & Ginger.
Sources
Colorado Super Lawyers, "Get Back Up," March 28, 2019 · Law Week Colorado, March 7, 2022 · Burg Simpson, Why Choose Burg Simpson · Michael S. Burg bio · Best Lawyers profile, Feb. 2018 · Personal Injury Mastermind podcast, Ep. 360, Oct. 30, 2025 · Colorado Lawyer, "A Triumph for Justice," June 30, 2020 · Burg Simpson, appeals court reinstates $58.5 million judgment, Feb. 16, 2022 · Perez v. Sunbeam Products, No. 1:21-cv-01915 (D. Colo.), order of May 29, 2025 · Burg Simpson press release, Jan. 8, 2025 · Courthouse News on East Palestine settlement · Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame, April 2016 · Trial by Fire, BenBella · Full notes: research_notes/michael_burg_profile.md