A lawyer who knows the courtroom.

Criminal defense is not a paper practice. It is done standing up, in courtrooms, in front of judges and juries, under time pressure, with someone’s liberty on the line.

Michael G. Cashman, Esq. has been trying criminal cases in Massachusetts since 1995. He has done it from both tables. Most of that career has been spent defending people accused of crimes. Part of it — including, until 2026, prosecuting homicides for the Hampden County District Attorney’s Office — was spent on the other side.

He founded Cashman Law Office to practice criminal defense the way he believes it should be practiced: one experienced lawyer who knows the file, who returns the call, and who gives clients an honest assessment instead of a comfortable one.

What it means to have prosecuted

A defense lawyer who has never built the Commonwealth’s case is reading it from the outside. Having spent years as an Assistant District Attorney — running the Sexually Dangerous Persons unit in Worcester County, and first-chairing homicide trials in Hampden County — means knowing what goes into a charging decision, what a prosecutor’s supervisor actually worries about, where the soft spots in a file are, and which weaknesses the Commonwealth already knows it has.

That vantage point shapes how every case here gets worked: what to demand in discovery, which motions are worth litigating, and when an offer on the table is as good as it is going to get.

How this office works

Clients deal directly with their attorney. There is no intake department, no rotating associate, and no question about who is handling the case.

Preparation comes first. Before there is any conversation about how a case should resolve, the reports get read, the video gets watched, the discovery gets audited for what is missing, and the legal issues get identified.

And clients are told the truth. A defense lawyer who only tells you what you want to hear is not doing the job.

Experience

Education

• New England School of Law
  Boston, Massachusetts · J.D., 1994
• Assumption College
  Worcester, Massachusetts · B.A., Accounting

Admissions & affiliations

• Admitted to the Massachusetts bar, 1994

Writing and legal education

Alongside the practice, Michael G. Cashman writes about criminal law and the justice system — books, articles and video commentary intended to make a complicated system legible to the people inside it. Those are collected under Books, Articles and Videos.