What does a college dropout do after three years as a fake lawyer when he’s scared of being caught and sent to jail? Become an investment banker, of course! That’s where we find Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) at the beginning of Suits Season 4. He’s working as a partner at ​​Sidwell Investment Group, a firm that just so happens to employ Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) as its attorney. It wouldn’t be Suits without a few conflicts of interest, right?

When Season 3 ended, Mike and Harvey were being blackmailed. In fear of being reported to the New York State Bar — which would then reveal that he’s not a member of said Bar — Mike left Pearson Specter. Unfortunately, that didn’t change much. In the three months that passed between seasons, Eric Woodall (Željko Ivanek), the corrupt US attorney, got a job in the Securities and Exchange Commission, and his sights are still set on the Pearson Specter firm.

In true Suits fashion, that’s only one of quite a few dilemmas throughout the season, but one of the biggest issues in Suits Season 4 is what Mike’s absence means for the firm and for Harvey.     

What’s Mike’s new job?

Mike decides to leave Pearson Specter in order to save it from the legal ramifications of it becoming known that he isn’t a lawyer. That’s why we find him working at Sidwell at the beginning of Season 4. 

Mike doesn’t take to the finance job as naturally as he did lawyering. In fact, he gets reprimanded by his boss, Jonathan Sidwell (Brandon Firla), for focusing on people and not profits. The biggest fumble is with his client Walter Gillis (Michael Gross) and his company, Gillis Industries. In an effort to help Walter save employee jobs, Mike wants to initiate a takeover. He goes to Harvey for legal advice, as Pearson Specter is the firm on record, but Harvey thinks Mike’s plan is dumb and doesn’t hesitate to say so. 

Things get more complicated when one of Harvey’s other clients wants to initiate a hostile takeover of Gillis Industries. Harvey has to decide whether to drop Mike, his friend, as a client — or drop this other, very large revenue-driving client. Who’s this other client? Just someone named Logan Sanders (Brendan Hines), a married man that Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle) once had an affair with. Conflict. Conflict. Conflict.

To simplify things, Logan offers Mike $30 million if he walks away from the Gillis takeover, which Mike turns down since he knows Logan only wants to strip the company for parts. Harvey tries a different way to initiate a hostile takeover on behalf of Logan, but Mike gets wind of this scheme and is able to stop it.

Logan doesn’t take no for an answer, though, and wants to get rid of Mike entirely. When he tells Harvey that he’s hiring a team of private investigators, Harvey knows he has to act fast to keep Mike’s fraud from coming out. In order to get him pulled off  Gillis’ portfolio, he tells Walter Gillis, whose son died of a drug overdose, that Mike used to sell drugs. 

Even though Walter isn’t one of Mike’s clients anymore, he still wants to protect the employees and stop the hostile takeover, so he purchases 100,000 company shares using Sidwell Investment Group funds. Jonathan tells him he has a week to pay it back or he’s fired. 

Mike’s ongoing feud with Harvey gives him an idea: He goes to Charles Forstman (Eric Roberts), who has his own feud with Harvey, for the money. Harvey warns Mike that Forstman doesn’t do anything without getting something in return, but Mike doesn’t feel he has any other options.

What’s happening at Pearson Specter?

Mike left Pearson Specter, in part, to ensure that if his secret was found out, the firm wouldn’t suffer any consequences. But even though he’s gone, it’s not exactly smooth sailing for them. Now that Eric Woodall is working at the SEC, he’s in a position to make Pearson Specter hurt even more than he could as a US attorney — and he’s determined to do so. 

Woodall sends Jeff Malone (D.B. Woodside) to do a review of the firm. Luckily for Harvey and Jessica Pearson (Gina Torres), Jeff has no interest in doing Woodall’s dirty work. In fact, he’d rather work for them. Jessica isn’t so sure about hiring Jeff because — surprise! — she’s actually in a romantic relationship with him. But she comes around, and Jeff becomes a senior partner at the firm. Because who doesn’t love a good office romance/conflict of interest? 

It’s good that Jeff is on board because Woodall does exactly what they suspected: He starts subpoenaing the firm’s clients through SEC prosecutor Sean Cahill (Neal McDonough). Jeff and Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman) work together on the case, but it doesn’t take Jeff long to learn the Pearson Specter way — also known as finding the barely legal way to do things.

For example, when a shareholder sells their shares in Gillis Industries, Jessica and Harvey want to purchase and “park” them for Logan to buy later, but Jeff says this will raise flags with the SEC. He instead proposes a method that’s not exactly ethical but should, according to him, fly under the radar. Cahill is keeping a close eye on them, though, and accuses the firm of collusion. Worried that the shares will inevitably get seized by the SEC, Louis releases them — and they’re promptly purchased by Charles Forstman on behalf of Sidwell Investment Group. 

With Forstman getting involved, alliances shift and Mike finds himself on the same side as Harvey and Logan. They were going to buy a block of Gillis shares together, but after Rachel kisses Logan, she convinces Mike to persuade Harvey to drop Logan as a client once the deal is done. Logan finds out about the plan and refuses to move forward with their deal.

Surprisingly, Louis is the one who saves the day — again! He goes to Forstman to commiserate with him over their shared Harvey grudges, and Forstman agrees to sell his shares of Gillis Industries directly to Logan. This ends the takeover, saving the employees and Mike’s borrowed funding. Louis wants to be rewarded for saving the day with his firm by being made a named partner, but Jessica shoots him down. 

What else happens in Season 4?

With the Gillis issues wrapped, Forstman tells Jonathan Sidwell about the deal he cut with Mike — i.e., that Mike agreed to cut his boss out of the commission when he accepted money from him. It’s the final straw for Sidwell, and he fires Mike. 

If losing his job weren’t bad enough, Mike also finds out that Rachel kissed Logan. He asks her for a break, which thankfully doesn’t last long, since they begin working together again. See, when Forstman agreed to sell his shares to Logan, he only agreed if Louis would send the funds to the Cayman Islands. And when Forstman heard Mike was fired from Sidwell, he offered him a job with a $1 million signing bonus. In order to save Mike from working for someone like Forstman (and to ensure that his own role in tax evasion will be kept secret), Louis hires him back at Pearson Specter.

But Mike working for Forstman is the least of Louis’ worries. Sean Cahill serves the firm with a search warrant for all files involved in the Gillis case. Knowing it will eventually come out, Louis goes straight to the SEC offices and confesses to Eric Woodall — but Woodall tells him that neither he nor Forstman are targets. When Louis heads back to the firm and fills Jessica, Harvey, and Mike in on what he did and what his confession got him (nothing!), they deduce that Woodall and Forstman must be in bed together. They bring their documents and their hunch to Cahill, who ends up dropping the charges.

It works out OK for the firm — but not for Louis. Jessica feels they have to fire him for being untrustworthy, but before they get around to doing so, they find a resignation letter on his desk. Still, Louis always figures out a way to land on top. When Mike stops by to check in on Louis, he asks about a golden key, something he would have known about if he’d actually gone to Harvard Law. It’s a lightbulb moment for Louis, one he’s been so close to experiencing for four seasons. He marches back into the law firm and tells Jessica that he’ll expose them unless he’s made a named partner. And just like that, Pearson Specter is now Pearson Specter Litt.

As a named partner, Louis now has to keep Mike’s secret too. But going from resigning to named partner in a day looks a little suspicious, especially to Jeff. Jessica tells him a half truth, that Louis knew a secret about the firm. But she says he knew about Daniel Hardman’s embezzling — not Mike’s fake law degree. Later, when Jeff tells Jessica that he loves her, she decides to tell him the full truth. Unfortunately, he went drinking with Louis before she could, and he let it slip that he learned about Hardman two years earlier. Jeff can’t trust Jessica, so he ends their relationship and resigns.

Does Donna go to jail?

One of Harvey’s Harvard professors, Henry Gerard (played by Gabriel Macht’s father, Stephen), has retained his services. Professor Gerard was employed by Liberty Rail to create a compensation formula after a train derailment, but he’s being accused of bribery after the TSA found $25,000 in his luggage. Harvey believes Gerard’s story that he won the money in a poker game; after all, Gerard teaches legal ethics. But Mike quickly determines that it’s a lie, and that the money was a bribe from a student. 

Gerard is so impressed with Mike that he can’t believe he doesn’t remember having him as a student — so he looks into his student records and realizes he wasn’t one. (Gerard gave a guest lecture at Pearson Specter in Season 3, one of the times when Louis almost sussed out Mike’s secret.) Harvey asks the student who bribed Gerard to sign an affidavit stating it was a loan, and Harvey even pays the loan back to convince Gerard to keep Mike’s secret.

While working on the compensation plan for Liberty Rail, Gerard is approached by an employee who claimed that the derailment was due to faulty equipment. Gerard wants Mike to help him convince Harvey to take on the whistleblower as a client. Harvey refuses, so Mike takes the case on himself. 

There’s very little proof to support the employee’s claim, so Donna impersonates a National Transportation Safety Board employee to gain access to Liberty Rail’s facility and find corroborating documents. Mike tries to use the documents to force a settlement, but opposing counsel Evan Smith (Tricia Helfer) shows him footage of Donna and says she’s going to the district attorney with it.

The DA files charges against Donna for intent to commit fraud. Harvey and Mike realize there is only one witness against her, though, and they can weaponize a lawsuit against Liberty Rail. They’re able to get enough people to threaten a suit, and when they bring it to Evan, she’s willing to help “silence” said witness. The case is dropped, and Donna avoids going to jail. Harvey says he’s just happy that he could help her: “You know I love you, Donna,” he tells her.

Donna wants to explore what he means by this, but almost immediately Harvey goes back to being cold and distant. So when Louis’ longtime assistant dies, Donna decides to go work for him instead. 

While things aren’t going well for Harvey and Donna, they’re pretty great for Mike and Rachel. As the season ends, he proposes and she says yes. You would think this could be a conflict of interest at the office, but at Pearson Specter Litt, they never met a conflict they didn’t like.

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