"Anyone who wants to get Jack Kevorkian will have to come through me," said Mr. Fieger, who at 42 still looks like the football lineman he was in high school.

That has not proved easy. There have been three murder charges against Dr. Kevorkian, who has assisted in 16 suicides since June 1990. Mr. Fieger (pronounced FYE-gur) has got all three dismissed.

In May, a Wayne County Circuit Court judge ruled that a hastily enacted Michigan law outlawing assisted suicide was unconstitutional. (In June, an appellate court reinstated the law, but further court challenges are certain.) The challenge was not filed by Mr. Fieger, though he insists, too, that the law is unconstitutional and wants a courtroom showdown.

'I AM THE BEST'

"Let's get it on," he said in a recent interview. "Let's have a Scopes trial and really show the entire country what's going on here. No jury in the country will convict Jack Kevorkian."

Whatever else he is, Geoffrey Nels Fieger is not conventional. He has, all who have encountered him will readily testify, a healthy ego. "I am the best there has ever been, or ever will be," he said when asked about his legal skills, then ticked off an impressive list of million-dollar-plus malpractice judgments.

He takes a dim view of most everyone, especially those arrayed against Dr. Kevorkian. Mr. Fieger, who earned two degrees in theater at the University of Michigan before taking up law, often uses blistering invective to describe his opponents.

He called Gov. John Engler, who supports a ban on assisted suicide, "a truly goofy, stupid man, certifiably evil." He called an Oakland County Circuit Court judge who tried to stop Dr. Kevorkian a "vile, malignant legal lunatic."

And after Mr. Fieger pinned a clown nose on a picture of the Oakland County prosecutor, Richard Thompson, at a televised news conference, many reporters dismissed Mr. Fieger himself as a clown whose antics might be damaging his client and drawing attention away from a serious moral and legal issue.

IDEAL LAWYER FOR DOCTOR

Yet that view is not supported by many Michigan lawyers. They call Mr. Fieger shrewd and highly skilled -- an ideal lawyer for Dr. Kevorkian, who has, after all, deliberately sought maximum attention.

"Geoff Fieger and Jack Kevorkian were made for each other," said Art Jelkinen, a lawyer who has been up against Mr. Fieger in a malpractice case. "Mr. Fieger knows enough law to make himself a very dangerous adversary. He's not a brilliant legal mind, but he knows the law. And the day of the gentleman lawyer is down the tubes."

Of his experience opposing Mr. Fieger, and the settlement he made for his client, Mr. Jelkinen, said, "I got out of it by paying $200,000." Another lawyer in the same case refused to settle; "he thought he could beat Geoff Fieger," Mr. Jelkinen added, "and lost a very large judgment."

Another adversary, Carl Marlinga, the prosecutor of Macomb County, said he had once thought that Dr. Kevorkian would be better off with a Thurgood Marshall, "some distinguished jurist to intelligently put forth arguments."

"But over the months," he said, "I decided that Geoff Fieger is probably the better attorney for him. Dr. Kevorkian wants confrontation; he wants to be recognized as a pioneer in this area. Geoffrey Fieger really fulfills those needs. He'll make this a spectacular, controversial issue."

Not surprisingly, Mr. Fieger agrees. "Jack Kevorkian has been charged with murder three times -- has been attacked by the entire Legislature, the Governor, the Attorney General of the State of Michigan -- and Jack Kevorkian is walking around free," he said. Then he burst into laughter. "Tell me what Clarence Darrow or Thurgood Marshall could do that I could not."

While attacks by his enemies seem merely to amuse Mr. Fieger, what he does not like is any implication that he has latched onto Dr. Kevorkian as a vehicle to win attention and new clients for the firm he inherited from his father, Fieger, Fieger & Schwartz. "This hurts my business," he said, referring to his representation of Dr. Kevorkian.

While Mr. Fieger refuses to say whether he is representing Dr. Kevorkian without a fee -- the unwealthy 65-year-old client lives in a spartan apartment in another Detroit suburb -- he does confirm that it has cost him some money to do so.

He also does not deny that he loves the attention. But Mr. Fieger says that for him this is a matter of principle and politics. He grew up in a solidly liberal household. His mother was a senior organizer for a teachers' union; his father used to go down to Mississippi to volunteer his legal services in the civil rights struggles of the 1960's.

"I think the essence of the profession of law is to be the bulwark against intruding upon the individual, to be that bulwark against which the government cannot intrude," he said. "But that isn't what has been happening. The judges and lawyers have become part of the political system.

"Suddenly there's someone like me who stands up and says, 'I am really going to be the advocate that I think the practice of law is all about, and say what I think.' "

DRIFTED INTO A CAREER

Mr. Fieger says he never wanted to be a lawyer. He was still drifting after earning a master's degree in speech when he enrolled at the Detroit College of Law in 1976. "It was like trying a food you never knew you liked," he said.

By the time he graduated he was steering malpractice cases to his father's firm;  in 1982, he says, he won his first million-dollar judgment, on the misuse of anti-psychotic drugs in the nation. Now, he says, the law "is my avocation as well as my vocation." Indeed, his resume says, "Mr. Fieger has no hobbies other than kicking the bejesus out of opponents in court."

His association with Dr. Kevorkian began almost by chance. Mr. Fieger and his wife, Keenie, were at an outdoor function one blistering August Saturday in 1990 and decided to cool off at Mr. Fieger's nearby air-conditioned office. While they were there, the telephone rang.

It was Jack Kevorkian, who had been representing himself until then but knew of Mr. Fieger as a highlly successful malpractice lawyer.

THE BIG CONNECTION

Dr. Kevorkian, describing the telephone call in a rare dual interview with Mr. Fieger, said he told the lawyer: " 'I want to come over and see you. I don't know what I am doing.' "

Dr. Kevorkian added: "I didn't know much about lawyers, so I brought my sister. She's a good judge of character. I liked the way he looked. I liked the way he talked." The two have been together ever since.

"I have learned not to second-guess him," Dr. Kevorkian said. "Whenever I have had doubts, Geoff has proven to be right." He said this was especially true of advice that he stop discussing the suicides with reporters.

Nor, Mr. Fieger says, does he counsel Dr. Kevorkian as to whether to assist in any particular would-be suicide. "He only calls me after the fact," the lawyer said. "I never know in advance."

The two men now have far more than a business relationship. "He is one of my best friends, and I think that I am one of his," Mr. Fieger said one afternoon, sitting with Dr. Kevorkian at the lawyer's lakeside home, 40 miles north of Detroit.

And the doctor added, "I like to say that Clarence Darrow was the Geoff Fieger of his time."

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