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Michael "Mike" V. Ciresi is a prominent trial attorney and former Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate for the United States Senate from Minnesota. Ciresi gained his public reputation by litigating several high-profile mass tort cases.

Most famously, he was counsel to the State of Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota against the American tobacco industry, suing in 1994 as the second of eventually 46 states to join in the tobacco litigation. Ciresi's Minneapolis law firm, Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi [1], of which he is the chairman, settled with the tobacco companies in 1998 with an agreement for the tobacco defendants to pay the state of Minnesota $6 billion, and to pay Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi a separate fee of $566 million over two years, in lieu of the state of Minnesota and Blue Cross paying a contingency fee. The law firm donated $30 million to the Minneapolis Foundation in 1998, a contribution made possible by the settlement fee; at the time, the gift was thought to be the largest contribution from a law firm to a community foundation. From that fee, Ciresi was said to have personally been paid $55 million.

Ciresi served as counsel to the Government of India against Union Carbide over the Bhopal catastrophe. He was counsel to women rendered infertile by the Copper 7 IUD and to the families of women killed by the Dalkon Shield IUD.

Ciresi ran in the 2000 Senate primary for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), spending several million dollars of his own money on the campaign. Ciresi ran as a self-described progressive moderate, and was endorsed by the Sierra Club and the Minnesota Nurses' Association. Ciresi narrowly lost out to Mark Dayton, an heir to the founders of Target Corporation, in the four-way DFL primary. Dayton then came from behind in the polls to defeat first-term incumbent Republican Senator Rod Grams to win the general election.

Dayton announced in early 2005 that he would not seek a second term. Although Ciresi indicated an interest in the race and registered the domain name ciresiforsenate.com within 48 hours after Dayton's announcement, he announced on February 7th that he would not seek the nomination[2]. He would have faced Hennepin County district attorney Amy Klobuchar and Ford Bell in the DFL primary.

On February 11, 2007, Ciresi announced that he would form an exploratory committee in advance of a possible 2008 Senate run after learning that Al Franken announced his February 14 departure from Air America Radio on January 29, 2007. Ciresi told the Star Tribune that he would abide by the DFL's endorsement in 2008. The launch of this committee make Ciresi's and Franken's some of the earliest-formed Senate campaigns in history. They were formed nearly 21 months before election day, 2008.

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