The Hopkins Township Board has hired a high-powered attorney to do battle in court with the Gun Lake Tribe of Potawatomis over a 130-acre parcel of land the tribe wants to take into federal trust.

The board voted unanimously in a special meeting May 4 to hire Thaddeus E. Morgan of the Fraser Trebilcock firm in Lansing.

Morgan two years ago was selected by his peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America© 2016 in the fields of commercial and construction litigation.

Morgan currently serves as Fraser Trebilcock’s Litigation Department chair and is the firm’s State Capitol Group voting representative. He has achieved an AV peer review rating, the highest possible by Martindale-Hubbell, and has previously served as assistant attorney general for the State of Michigan.

Besides being selected for the seventh year to the 2013 Michigan Super Lawyers list in the field of Business Litigation, Morgan was designated as the 2015 “Lawyer of the Year” in Lansing for construction litigation by Best Lawyers.

The Gun Lake Tribe has filed a request with the U.S. Department of the Interior to take a 130-acre parcel into a trust for undisclosed purposes. The land, currently being used for agriculture, is zoned commercial. It is located near the corner of 129th Avenue and 12th Street in the township, across the expressway from the Gun Lake Casino.

Township officials have opposed the move on the basis it will remove the land from the tax rolls and cause hardship on Hopkins Township’s coffers.