Mike GriecoFounding Partner at Gould Grieco & Hensley

Mike Grieco has always been drawn to work that helps people through the hardest moments of their lives. He clerked at a law firm before ever deciding to go to law school. This experience ultimately shaped the kind of lawyer he wanted to become.

“What attracted me to law in general was the ability to help people and have some sort of justice and recovery through our work,” Mike says.

That purpose remains at the center of his practice. As a Founding Partner of Chicago-based plaintiffs’ litigation firm, Gould Grieco & Hensley (GGH), Mike represents individuals and entire communities facing circumstances most people never expect. Some clients have suffered catastrophic injuries. Some are survivors of sexual abuse. Others are communities discovering an institution or company they trusted may have been harming them for decades.

The circumstances vary, but Mike often finds a common thread: people facing problems too complex and powerful to take on alone. For him, the role of a trial lawyer runs deeper than pursuing a claim. It is about uncovering the truth, holding institutions accountable, and driving lasting legal change.

“An important aspect of being a trial lawyer is making [our] community safer,” he maintains.

Taking a Different View of Trial Lawyers

For many people, their understanding of personal injury trial lawyers is shaped long before they need one.

“People think that trial lawyers are just billboards and advertisements, but they are real people, real fighters, and real litigators that are taking on the hard cases,” says Mike.

The difficulty is also compounded by a significant imbalance: an individual going up against a corporation or institution with vastly greater financial and legal resources. “Those that come to us don’t have money to pay an hourly rate against Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies,” explains Mike. “Our job is to investigate those cases and take them on.”

For Mike, taking on that responsibility is deeply personal.

“The first call means the world to me, [because] somebody is coming to me and entrusting to me their life-altering injury,” Mike says.

That trust, Mike believes, should shape how clients are represented throughout the lifecycle of their case.

“I wish people knew that trial lawyers truly care. Especially at my firm, we put the client and litigation first, and we love to help people,” he says.

Protecting Children in the Digital Age

Now more than ever, children find friendship, entertainment, and community online. But as technology becomes more embedded in their lives, new risks have emerged, and the safeguards designed to protect them have not always kept pace. GGH is a leading law firm in coordinated national litigation against a major online gaming platform, representing thousands of survivors alongside co-counsel.

“These cases involve an online gaming system where minors – 30 million alone in the United States, and many more worldwide – have been exposed to people who groomed and then sexually abused them, in many instances, through the game,” he explains.

The lawsuits allege the platform failed to implement basic safeguards within its reach, including age gating, content moderation, identity verification, and parental controls. One federal complaint filed in 2025 alleges those failures enabled the grooming, exploitation, kidnapping, and rape of a 13-year-old girl. GGH now holds a seat on the executive committee overseeing the federal multidistrict litigation, helping lead legal strategy on behalf of thousands of children and families nationwide.

Building cases of this scale requires more than establishing what went wrong. GGH has retained leading experts to examine the standards of care that should have governed these online platforms and the protections that should’ve existed decades ago. Discovery has also surfaced former employees with firsthand knowledge of company practices and decision-making.

“I think that is what has turned the tide: the people working for those entities that both knew that there was a wrong being perpetuated by the company and now want to speak up,” says Mike.

For Mike and the GGH team, however, holding one platform accountable is only part of the goal. The litigation also seeks to drive broader change, including advancing legal and legislative reforms that strengthen protections for children and help prevent the same failures in the future.

“The litigation makes not only the company and gaming platform safer for children but also establishes a process and standard of care that should have been the standard for all tech companies.”

When an Entire Community is Harmed

That same pursuit of accountability extends to cases where the harm reaches entire communities. In toxic exposure litigation, the danger can persist for years, sometimes without the people affected even knowing they were at risk.

In one matter, GGH represented residents of a Chicago suburb where a commercial facility had been releasing a cancer-causing gas into the air for years as part of its routine medical equipment sterilization process. After residents developed serious illnesses, including breast cancer and lymphoma, hundreds of people brought their claims forward. The plant ultimately closed amid regulatory and community pressure, and the litigation resulted in a $408 million global settlement, with GGH serving as plaintiffs’ liaison counsel.

“Those cases have a particular significance, because not only do they affect one person, but they affect [entire] communities,” Mike says. “Air and drinking water should be clean, not contaminated, and that’s something to be safeguarded.”

Another case started with a public records request that produced dozens of documents. What GGH found inside pointed to decades of chemical dumping behind commercial facilities, contaminating the groundwater of a neighboring small town.

“We were able to find the evidence, including [former employees] who were told by the company that they shouldn’t dump those chemicals,” Mike recalls. “They had knowledge that this was a dangerous practice, that [the chemicals] were getting into the groundwater and endangering people.”

Pursuing accountability can be particularly difficult in communities that economically depend on the very companies being challenged. In many small towns, a large industrial facility may also be one of the area’s largest employers. “A lot of times, people in small towns don’t have the resources, don’t know lawyers, [or] don’t want to challenge the entity that is potentially doing this,” Mike says. “It takes a large effort to get people together for a common cause and right their wrongs when, for decades, they didn’t even know the company had been poisoning them.”

Justice Measured in More Than Dollars

For Mike, a successful outcome is more than the amount he recovers.

“Winning is about justice. It’s about financial compensation. But it’s also about validating the client’s story and what they’ve suffered,” says Mike. “People have lived with these harms for years, sometimes decades, and nobody has validated their truth until they came to our law firm to ensure their story is heard.”

At GGH, that pursuit of justice also means looking for opportunities to create change beyond the individual case. “What sets my law firm apart is that we are demanding there also be non-economic policy, reform, or change as part of settling the case or a verdict. I think that is most meaningful and impactful.” Mike says.

Fueling the Fight for Justice

Pursuing impact of this scale requires significant resources. Complex litigation can span years, with experts, investigators, records and testing costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per case — expenses GGH fronts long before any recovery is secured. “If we’re [going to] take on a case, we’re going to make sure that we put 110% effort into it from an intellectual, litigation, and financial perspective,” Mike asserts.

That long-term investment requires financial partners who understand the unique demands of plaintiffs’ litigation. For GGH, that partner is Esquire Bank, whose leadership includes former plaintiffs’ trial lawyers. “A lot of financial institutions are just banks that don’t understand the plaintiffs’ practice, the challenges, the ups and downs, and the cases,” Mike explains. “Esquire has a much deeper appreciation for our cases. They understand what the case value is, what the case horizons are, and what the cases take financially to get the best recovery for the client.”

A Safer Future

For Mike, the ultimate measure of his work is not only what the case delivers for the person who brought it, but what changes because they did. “The person’s voice is heard, they’re compensated, and they get justice. But [more importantly], nobody else is injured because of what happened.”