A federal judge has ordered attorney Mike Morse to comply with an auto insurance company's subpoena, saying that it appears the high-profile lawyer was "at the very center" of an alleged no-fault insurance patient mill scheme.

"He does appear to be, for all intents and purposes on these pleadings and on this record, the epitome of the 'unnamed coconspirator,' " wrote Magistrate Judge Anthony Patti in his opinion and order issued late Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Detroit.

The subpoena from State Farm Insurance seeks various financial documents and communications from Morse going back to 2010.

State Farm wants the documents for its pending civil lawsuit against 18 metro Detroit defendants — medical clinics, doctors, chiropractors and businessmen — that the insurance company claims were involved in fraudulent no-fault auto insurance patient mills that billed for services that either weren't rendered or were not medically necessary.

Although Morse is not a defendant in the lawsuit, State Farm claims that the well-known personal injury attorney had key roles in the scheme and gained financial benefits from it, including through a secret ownership stake in an MRI center and by getting leads for future clients from illegally obtained police reports about car crashes.

“State Farm’s allegations regarding Morse’s involvement in the alleged fraudulent scheme can hardly be described as baseless, and the subpoena targets relevant information," Patti wrote in the opinion, which orders Morse to comply with the insurer's document request.

The opinion is the most direct assessment to date by a judge as to the credibility of State Farm's allegations against Morse.

State Farm says that Morse's firm represented at least 126 of 178 patients at issue in its lawsuit who were represented by an attorney and were treated at the defendants' medical clinics.

Morse denies

Morse's attorney, I.W. Winsten of Honigman, Miller, Schwartz & Cohn, insisted Wednesday that Morse has done nothing wrong, and said that is why Morse hasn't been named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

He said Morse will appeal the order.

In federal court, such orders can be appealed to the district judge on a case, which would in this instance be Judge Avern Cohn.

"The magistrate’s decision was contrary to a host of well settled legal principles, and Mike Morse intends to appeal and obtain its reversal," Winsten said in an email.

Morse is one of Michigan's most visible attorneys with TV spots and billboard ads that call his personal injury law firm the largest in the state.

He has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing. Still, Morse has hired criminal defense attorneys John Shea of Ann Arbor and Henry (Hank) Asbill of Washington, D.C., to provide counsel.

"I want to stress Michael has not done anything wrong here," Shea said Wednesday. "To the extent that State Farm is alleging that Mike Morse is party of a criminal conspiracy, then obviously he requires consultation with people who handle those kinds of matters. ... It doesn’t mean that charges are pending or that charges are imminent."

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'Wheel and spoke' conspiracy

In the opinion, Patti wrote it can "reasonably be inferred" from the evidence presented by State Farm that there indeed was a no-fault insurance scheme involving kickbacks, fraudulently inflated injury claims and unnecessary medical treatment.

"It can also reasonably be inferred from this evidence that Morse is at the very center of this scheme, i.e. the hub of a wheel and spoke conspiracy," Patti wrote.

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The opinion says: "In sum, Morse is alleged to have benefited both coming and going: (1) by being a silent owner in the medical providers which were submitting fraudulent claims; (2) by receiving kickbacks in connection with referrals to providers who submitted fraudulent invoices; and (3) by driving up the value of his clients’ personal injury claims with artificially favorable diagnoses and extensive, albeit unnecessary, treatment records."

The opinion details an alleged past business relationship between Morse and one of the lawsuit's defendants, Jayson Rosett, 51, of Bloomfield Hills.

Rosett pleaded guilty in May in U.S. District Court to a tax crime and admitted to owning a business called Accident Information Bureau that collected accident victims' information from police reports that had been illegally obtained from Detroit Police before they were made publicly available. The reports were stamped "unapproved."

State Farm has alleged that Rosett emailed and even hand-delivered thousands of these unlawfully obtained police reports to Morse’s law firm to solicit the crash victims as clients, then refer them to the medical clinics that are defendants in the lawsuit.

Rosett also owned his own physical therapy clinics, and in exchange for Rosett's police reports, an employee at Morse's law firm directed chiropractors who treated the firm's clients to also refer those people to Rosett’s clinics, according to State Farm allegations that the judge cited.

State Farm claims that by 2011, Rosett was hand-delivering police reports to Morse daily.

"In an August 12, 2011, email, Morse told Rosett, 'Let’s do the police report thing. Just get them to me and I will get you more active treating patients. It will work,' " the judge's opinion says.

However, Morse has contended in court filings that there is no evidence that he knew his law firm received any illegally obtained police reports from Rosett, as he regularly receives police reports that are stamped "unapproved" from insurance companies when handling clients' lawsuits, as well as through Freedom of Information Act requests.

The judge's opinion also rehashes State Farm's claim that Morse once had a secret ownership stake in an MRI center through his now-former brother-in-law that provided magnetic resonance imaging services to his law firm's clients.

Billing records show that that now-closed MRI Center, Horizon Imaging, charged some of the highest rates in metro Detroit at over $5,000 per image to patients paying with no-fault auto insurance. Hospitals usually accept well below $1,000 per MRI for patients paying with private health insurance.

ContactJC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jcreindl. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.