Non-Compete Lawyer for Macomb County
The agreement ran three pages and came in the stack with the I-9 and the direct-deposit form. Two years, the whole state, any business that competes with the company.
Nobody negotiated it. Nobody read it. Now a shop up Van Dyke will not return your calls, or a letter has arrived telling you to quit the job you started. Non-compete defense in Michigan begins by separating what that paper says from what a judge in Mount Clemens would enforce. The call is free and takes fifteen minutes: (313) 701-2448. If a complaint or a motion for a temporary restraining order has been filed, call the same day. Those motions get heard in days.
The Macomb County version of this problem
Elsewhere these agreements are drafted for one executive by a firm billing by the hour. Here the common document is a form. Somebody bought it online or lifted it from a customer’s contract, changed the company name, and handed it to everyone from the receptionist to the mold maker. It bars “any competing business” for two or three years across Michigan or the Midwest, with no attempt to say what the company needs protected.
That cuts two ways. A document that broad sits outside what MCL 445.774a supports, and it hands you real arguments. But it is rarely the only claim: the same letter almost always alleges you took something — drawings, a CAD library, a quote file — and that claim does not depend on the form being well drafted.
What Michigan law requires, and what a judge can do to an overbroad agreement
The statute is MCL 445.774a, the employment provision inside the Michigan Antitrust Reform Act; MCL 445.772 is the general ban on restraints of trade. An employer may obtain an agreement protecting its reasonable competitive business interests, enforceable only if reasonable as to duration, geographic area, and the type of employment or line of business restricted. All three must hold, and behind them the employer needs something real to protect.
Read that list against your letter and the gap shows. Trade secrets, confidential pricing and cost data, and goodwill the company paid to build are protectable. Your general skill, your experience, and your reputation in the trade are not. That matters here, where so much of the workforce sells exactly that: the ability to run a machine, program a path, build a fixture, weld to spec. An agreement written to stop a competing shop from hiring a good toolmaker avoids competition rather than protecting an interest.
Now the part Michigan readers have backwards. An overbroad non-compete here usually does not get thrown out. The statute tells a court that if it finds the agreement unreasonable in any respect, it may limit the agreement to make it reasonable and enforce it as limited. Lawyers call it blue-pencilling. Showing a judge that a three-year statewide bar on a Sterling Heights CNC programmer is unreasonable therefore does not win the case. It invites a smaller version you are then held to. What survives, though, is far short of what the letter demands, and that space is where these matters resolve.
Two things people assume and should not. Continued at-will employment has generally been treated by Michigan courts as adequate consideration, so a form pushed on you in year seven is not void merely because your pay did not change. And a federal rule that would have banned most non-competes never took effect; a court set it aside. Nothing you signed is dead because of it.
Three versions of this call
You have an offer from another shop and have not given notice
This is the one page on this site where calling while still employed is the right move. Before you resign the timing is yours. There is room to ask for a written release or a narrowing, or to shape the new role so it sits outside the line your agreement draws. A non-compete review costs an hour now, and none of it exists once a hearing date is set.
A letter arrived from a lawyer you have never heard of
Addressed to you, copied to the shop that hired you, with a deadline the letter invented. Most never become lawsuits: filing puts a downloaded form in front of a judge who will read it. But ignoring one is how people end up in Mount Clemens on an emergency motion with no preparation. Do not answer it yourself; every sentence becomes an exhibit, the true ones included. Start with what to do when a cease-and-desist letter arrives.
You were laid off, and the agreement came up anyway
Supplier work here is cyclical. A program ends, a plant retools, and the company that let you go writes a month later to say the covenant survives. Michigan has no flat rule releasing you because the employer ended the relationship. How you left still matters to a judge weighing an emergency request, and it is leverage in negotiating a release. If the termination was itself unlawful, the wrongful termination claim runs alongside, and neither settles without the other.
Where these agreements come from across Macomb County
Tooling, machine, and fabrication shops
The supplier base along Van Dyke, Groesbeck, and Mound, from Warren and Center Line up through Shelby Township, is where most of these disputes start. The stated worry is the customer list, which turns out to be four or five OEM purchasing groups and a couple of Tier-1 buyers every shop in the county knows. The identity of a customer that advertises for suppliers is not a secret. What can be confidential is the layer underneath: the piece prices you quoted, your burden rates, which programs run at what margin.
Cleared work at General Dynamics Land Systems and the Detroit Arsenal
General Dynamics Land Systems in Sterling Heights and the contractor base around the Detroit Arsenal and TACOM in Warren add a layer. A clearance is not a non-compete and does not create one; 445.774a judges your agreement like anyone else’s. But cleared and export-controlled work limits what you may say about your own job, which shapes how a defense is written and what can be filed publicly. A federal civilian employee at the Arsenal, rather than a contractor employee, runs on different rules entirely.
The plants, the engineering centers, and the hospitals
Engineers and salaried staff at the GM Global Technical Center in Warren, and program and quality people around Stellantis Warren Truck and Sterling Heights Assembly, usually signed a confidentiality and invention-assignment agreement before any non-compete. For them the stronger employer claim is the confidential one, not where you work: launch timing, validation results, sourcing, tooling costs. No court treats nine years of engineering judgment as a secret. One cost table walked across the street is another matter.
Clinicians get no statutory carve-out here either. A hospitalist leaving Henry Ford Macomb in Clinton Township, or a cardiologist leaving McLaren Macomb in Mount Clemens, meets the same reasonableness test, usually through a radius from each site that across a county this compact reaches most places a clinician could practice.
Drawings, CAD files, and quoting data
The most damaging thing a departing Macomb County employee does is forward files to a personal email account or copy a drive on the last Friday. It converts a fight about the employer’s overbroad form into a fight about your conduct, and the second fight is the one you lose. It does not help that you drew the part or wrote the program. You built it for them.
Two statutes ride along with a suit like this: Michigan’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act, MCL 445.1901 et seq., and the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1836, the second of which opens a federal courthouse door the non-compete alone would not. The DTSA’s § 1833(b) also immunizes a disclosure made in confidence to a government official or an attorney to report a suspected violation of law.
Return everything promptly in writing, and record what went back and when. If something already sits in your personal account, tell your lawyer and leave it where it is. Deleting after a dispute starts becomes its own accusation, and in a case built on file metadata that one sticks.
Mount Clemens, and how fast this actually moves
State-law claims against a Macomb County employee are filed in the Macomb County Circuit Court, Michigan’s 16th Judicial Circuit, at 40 N. Main Street in Mount Clemens. The Macomb County employment lawyer page covers that courthouse. Its juries come from a county where a great many people have worked in a shop and know the difference between a trade and a trade secret.
No limitations period runs in the background the way one does in a discrimination case. The deadline is whatever your former employer files: a verified complaint with an emergency motion stapled to it. A restraining order can be heard inside a week, sometimes before anyone has heard from you at all. The injunction hearing follows on a schedule set by someone else, with depositions taken in the days between. Whatever is decided there usually holds for the rest of the case. Served, or your new employer served? That is a call the same day. A trade-secret count can also pull the case into federal court in Detroit, and if an out-of-state parent bought the shop the agreement may name another state’s law and courts, which Michigan courts do not always honor.
What to do this week
- Pull every document you ever signed for this employer: the offer letter, the handbook receipt, any confidentiality or invention-assignment form. The restriction often sits in one you do not remember.
- Do not reply to the letter yourself, and do not have your new employer’s HR manager reply either. Do not quit the new job because a letter told you to; until a court orders otherwise, you can keep working.
- List coworkers who left for competitors and were never pursued. Selective enforcement is a real argument.
- If an exit package is in play, read Michigan severance agreements explained first.
Frequently asked questions
I’m a journeyman tool and die maker in Warren. My shop’s agreement bars me from any competing business in Michigan for two years. Can they hold me to that?
As written, almost certainly not. Your trade is general skill and experience, which Michigan does not let an employer own, and a statewide ban on every competing business is broader than any interest one shop can point to. The bad news is how that gets fixed: a judge can narrow the agreement instead of voiding it, so you may end up bound by something smaller rather than by nothing. Expect the real fight to be about specific customers and specific files, not about whether you may run a machine.
My employer says its customer list is a trade secret, but it’s four OEM purchasing departments everyone in Macomb County already knows. Is that a real claim?
Standing alone, weak. A buyer who runs supplier portals and attends the same shows as everyone else is not confidential information, and no court is impressed by a list anyone could rebuild from a trade directory. What may well be protectable is the information under the names: your quoted piece prices, burden and tooling costs, margin by program. That is what employers actually fight over, and separating the two early usually decides the case.
I hold a security clearance and work for a defense contractor in Sterling Heights. Does that change my non-compete?
Not the enforceability analysis. Your agreement is measured against MCL 445.774a like anybody else’s, and a clearance neither creates a restriction nor excuses one. What it changes is the handling: cleared and export-controlled work limits what you can describe about your own duties, which affects your résumé, your interviews, and public filings. A federal civilian employee at the Detroit Arsenal is in a different posture entirely.
My Clinton Township employer is handing out non-competes now, six years after I started, and says sign it or you’re done. Do I have to sign?
You are not forced to, but understand the trade. Michigan is at-will, so an employer may generally condition continued employment on signing, and Michigan courts have generally treated continued employment as adequate consideration — meaning you usually cannot void it later by saying you got nothing for it. This is a negotiation moment most people waste. Ask in writing for a shorter term, a defined geography, or a carve-out for earlier work.
The letter demands my new employer’s name and access to image my personal laptop. Do I have to agree to that?
Not because a letter says so. A demand letter carries no power to order anything, and handing a personal device to your former employer’s consultant gives away everything else on it. The honest part: if the case is filed and there is evidence that company files touched your device, a court can order forensic imaging, and refusing then looks worse than agreeing now. The usable middle is a neutral examiner and a written search protocol.
Talk to a non-compete lawyer who takes Macomb County cases
Holding an agreement you are worried about, a demand letter, or a summons from a Macomb County employer? Call (313) 701-2448 or schedule a free 15-minute case evaluation. Bring the agreement and the letter. I will tell you what the restriction is likely to be worth before a judge in Mount Clemens. Termination cases are taken on a contingency fee. Non-compete counseling and defense run on a different arrangement, explained up front.
I am Warren Astbury. Harvard Law School, J.D. 2009. More than 50 cases tried to verdict over 15 years, all for employees. I do not represent employers.
These come in from across the county — a shop or engineering center in Warren, an assembly plant or defense contractor in Sterling Heights, a hospital or supplier office in Clinton Township. Work a county over? The Wayne County, Oakland County, and Washtenaw County non-compete pages cover those.