Non-Compete Lawyer for Oakland County
Somewhere in your files there is an offer letter, a confidentiality agreement, an equity grant, and a bonus plan. In Oakland County the language that actually stops you is usually not in the first one.
It is in the grant. Non-compete defense in Michigan starts with reading all four, because the document you never read is the one your former employer will lead with. The evaluation is free and takes fifteen minutes: (313) 701-2448. If a complaint or an emergency motion has already been filed, make the call today. Those motions get heard in days.
Where you are standing right now
You have an offer and you have not given notice
Most people call after they resign. Before is the only moment when the schedule still belongs to you. There is room then to ask for a written carve-out, to shape the new title and territory so the role sits outside the line your agreement draws, or to move a start date past a vesting cliff. Bring everything: offer letter, handbook acknowledgment, RSU and option grants, the incentive plan, any retention letter. A non-compete review is worth far more now than after a hearing is set, because none of this exists on day three of an injunction fight.
The letter went to your new employer, not just to you
The Oakland County version of a cease-and-desist is addressed to you and copied to general counsel at the company that just hired you. That copy is the point. Many are written to unsettle the new employer rather than to start a lawsuit, and offers get withdrawn over demands that would never survive a hearing. Answering one yourself makes it worse, because every sentence becomes an exhibit. Start with what to do when a cease-and-desist letter arrives.
You were let go, and the covenant came up on the way out
Restructurings at supplier headquarters and finance offices here end the same way: a short meeting, a folder, a reminder that the covenants survive. Michigan has no rule releasing you because the employer ended the relationship. How you left still matters to a judge weighing an emergency motion, and it is your best leverage in negotiating a release. If the termination was itself unlawful, the wrongful termination claim runs alongside.
What Michigan law gives your employer, and what it does not
The statute is MCL 445.774a, the employment provision inside the Michigan Antitrust Reform Act; MCL 445.772 is the broader 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 line of business restricted. All three must hold, and behind them the employer needs something real to protect.
That list is shorter than the demand letters imply. Confidential pricing, cost models, customer data, and goodwill the company paid to build are protectable. Your engineering judgment, your management skill, and your reputation are not. An agreement written so a competitor cannot hire a capable person avoids competition rather than protecting an interest.
Now the part most Michigan readers have backwards. An overbroad non-compete here does not die. 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. Blue-pencilling, lawyers call it. So proving that a three-year nationwide restriction on a Troy finance director is absurd does not end the case; a judge can shrink it and hold you to the smaller version. The flip side: the enforceable version is far narrower than the letter demands, and that gap is where these matters settle.
Two assumptions to drop. Michigan courts have generally accepted continued at-will employment as consideration, so an agreement handed to you in year six is usually not void for lack of it. And the 2024 federal rule banning most non-competes never took effect — a court set it aside — so Michigan law governs today. Do not assume any agreement is unenforceable because of it.
How these agreements are written across Oakland County
Auburn Hills and the Tier-1 headquarters
Stellantis runs its North American headquarters and technology center in Auburn Hills, and BorgWarner, Magna, and Lear keep headquarters and engineering centers along the Telegraph and Woodward corridors. The covenant is rarely the centerpiece here. That is the confidentiality and invention-assignment agreement, covering program timing, piece-price and sourcing data, validation results, and quoting models. That shapes the defense: a court is skeptical that nine years of engineering knowledge is a secret, and receptive to the argument that one cost table is.
Troy, Southfield, and the industries built on non-solicits
In staffing and recruiting the covenant is not a side term. It is the business model. Kelly Services is headquartered in Troy, and the agency and search firms nearby write the broadest non-solicits in the county, reaching clients, candidates, and coworkers at once. Comerica, Flagstar, and the insurers along Southfield’s Northwestern Highway corridor run a similar stack on their producers. The strongest of those clauses sit close to the center of what Michigan protects: a client list the firm paid to build and paid you to service. The weak point is reach: barring contact with every name in a national database, in markets you never worked, protects nothing and invites narrowing. Which brings up the most useful sentence on this page: many readers here can take the competing job as long as the client list stays untouched. The book of business is the fight, and the confidentiality clause outlives all of it.
Corewell Health, Ascension Providence, and clinicians
Physicians get no statutory carve-out in Michigan. A hospitalist leaving Corewell Health in Royal Oak or Troy, or a surgeon leaving Ascension Providence in Southfield, is analyzed under 445.774a like a sales director. A radius measured from every site a system operates can cover most of the county. That is the overbreadth argument. Continuity of care cuts both ways: the system calls it the interest to protect, and a judge may be reluctant to strand a patient panel.
Forfeiture for competition: when nobody sues you and the money just disappears
The employer never files anything. It cancels what has not vested. Restricted stock unit agreements, option grants, incentive plans, and retention awards routinely carry forfeiture-for-competition language, often built around a phrase like “detrimental activity” that reaches further than the non-compete itself, and some add a clawback on shares that already vested.
So read the plan documents, not just the employment agreement: the broader restriction lives there, and so does a different choice of law. Then understand the posture. This is not an injunction the employer must persuade a judge to grant. It is money it keeps by doing nothing, which leaves you as the party who has to act. That is why timing a resignation around a vesting date is worth an hour first. If a separation is on the table, read Michigan severance agreements explained and severance negotiation; if you are being managed out, fired senior professionals covers that pattern.
Garden leave, notice periods, and being paid to sit still
Long notice periods are increasingly common in Oakland County executive agreements, imported from the offshore parents of employers here. A ninety-day provision, sometimes called garden leave, keeps you on payroll, cuts your access, and holds you out of the market while what you know goes stale. Two questions decide whether it helps. Does the agreement credit that period against the restricted period, or does the non-compete clock start only when payroll ends? And must the employer pay for the time, or may it simply bench you? Paid time off the field is a real concession, and stacked on a full non-compete term it can also make the whole restraint look unreasonable.
What you do with company files decides more of these cases than the covenant does
The most damaging thing a departing employee does is forward documents to a personal address, copy a drive, or sync a folder in the last week. It replaces the question of whether the agreement is too broad with the question of what you did, and the second one is where you lose. It does not help that you built the file. You built it for them.
Two statutes travel with these disputes: Michigan’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act, MCL 445.1901 et seq., and the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1836, which gives an employer a path into federal court whatever the covenant says. The DTSA also carries an immunity provision at § 1833(b) for someone who discloses a trade secret in confidence to a government official or an attorney to report a suspected violation of law.
The safe position is dull. Return everything promptly, in writing, and keep a record of what went back and when. If you already sent yourself something, say so to your lawyer first and leave it where it is; deleting becomes its own accusation.
Pontiac, the business docket, and how fast this actually moves
State-law claims against an Oakland County employee are filed in the Oakland County Circuit Court, Michigan’s 6th Judicial Circuit, at 1200 N. Telegraph Road in Pontiac, and covenant disputes often land on its business docket. The Oakland County employment lawyer page covers that courthouse.
There is no deadline in the distance. The deadline is whatever your former employer files. A verified complaint can land with an emergency motion attached, seeking a temporary restraining order sometimes heard within days and occasionally without notice to you, then a preliminary injunction hearing set on someone else’s schedule, with expedited discovery and depositions inside two weeks. Most are effectively decided at that hearing. If you or your new employer have been served, that is a same-day call.
A trade-secret claim can also put the case in federal court in Detroit. Agreements written by out-of-state parents routinely pick another state’s law and courts — Delaware appears constantly in equity plans — and Michigan courts do not always honor them. Argue it early; do not rely on it. For an Oakland University or municipal employee, 445.774a reasonableness still decides it.
Frequently asked questions
My unvested RSUs at an Auburn Hills headquarters are forfeited if I join a competitor. Is that enforceable even if the non-compete is not?
Often, and it is the bad news most people here do not expect. A forfeiture clause is not a restraint a court has to impose. It is a condition on money you have not received yet, and the plan may be governed by another state’s law. Michigan courts have been readier to police restrictions that bar you from working than conditions on unvested pay. Read the grant before you resign, price what you would give up, and factor it into what you ask the new employer for.
My agreement has a 90-day paid notice period. Does that time count against my one-year non-compete?
Read the two clauses side by side; the answer is written there and is often unfavorable. Many Oakland County executive agreements start the restricted period at the end of employment, so a paid notice period is added to the non-compete rather than absorbed into it. Some plans credit it, and some are ambiguous enough to negotiate. If the employer keeps you on payroll but takes your accounts, ask in writing whether the restricted period is running, before your last day.
My agreement with a Troy supplier’s parent company picks Delaware law and Delaware courts. Do I have to fight it there?
Not necessarily, but the clause is not meaningless either. Michigan courts do not automatically enforce a choice of another state’s law or forum for someone who lived and worked here, particularly where the chosen law would override Michigan policy. It is a real argument and an uncertain one, so it gets raised early and is not relied on. Filing first in Oakland County is sometimes the move and sometimes not. That decision needs the actual documents, quickly.
Two colleagues at my Troy staffing firm want to follow me to my new agency. Can I be sued over that?
Yes. Employee non-solicits are often the clause employers press hardest, because the damage is easy to describe to a judge. Recruiting former coworkers is different from their applying on their own, and the difference gets reconstructed later from your texts and LinkedIn messages. Do not encourage, coordinate, or forward openings while the clause is live. Tell your new employer the restriction exists before anyone makes a call, so the hiring decision is documented as theirs.
The severance agreement from my Southfield employer adds a non-compete I never signed while I worked there. Should I sign it?
Not before someone reads it. A new restriction bolted onto a separation agreement is a real restraint, supported by the severance itself as consideration, and it can be broader than anything you agreed to at hire. Weigh what is paid against what the clause costs you in the market you actually work in. This is also the moment an existing non-compete can be narrowed, shortened, or released, because it is the last point at which the employer wants something from you.
Talk to a non-compete lawyer who takes Oakland County cases
Holding an agreement you are worried about, a demand letter, or a summons from an Oakland County employer? Call (313) 701-2448 or schedule a free 15-minute case evaluation. Bring the employment agreement and the equity grants. I will tell you what the restriction is realistically worth before a judge in Pontiac. Termination cases are handled on a contingency fee; non-compete counseling and defense are billed differently, and I explain that first.
I am Warren Astbury. Harvard Law School, J.D. 2009. More than 50 cases tried to verdict across 15 years, all for employees. I do not represent employers.
I take these matters from across the county: a headquarters role in Troy, an office in Southfield, an engineering center in Farmington Hills. Neighboring county? See the Wayne County, Macomb County, and Washtenaw County non-compete pages.