Non-Compete Lawyer for Washtenaw County
In Ann Arbor the restriction rarely arrives alone. It comes in a packet: a non-compete, an invention-assignment clause, a confidentiality term with no end date, a non-solicit, and a definition of “competitor” wide enough to cover most places you would want to work — with a university intellectual-property policy on top of it if you are at U-M.
Non-compete defense in Michigan starts by reading those together, because the clause that stops you is often not the one labeled non-compete. 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.
Three ways this starts in Washtenaw County
You have an offer and you have not given notice
Almost everyone calls after resigning. Before is the only point at which the calendar still belongs to you. There is room then to ask for a written narrowing, or to shape the new role so it sits outside the line your agreement draws. A non-compete review beforehand is worth more than anything filed after.
A letter arrived, copied to the company that just hired you
The Ann Arbor version is addressed to you and copied to your new employer’s general counsel — or, at a venture-backed company with none, to a founder and sometimes an investor. That copy is the strategy: a thirty-person company with no employment-law budget may withdraw an offer over a demand that would never survive a hearing. Most never become lawsuits: filing puts the agreement before a judge who reads it. But ignoring one ends in an emergency hearing you had no time to prepare for, and answering it yourself is worse: every sentence becomes an exhibit. And do not quit the new job because a letter told you to; until a court orders otherwise, you can keep working. Start with what to do when a cease-and-desist letter arrives.
You were fired, or your appointment was not renewed
Michigan has no rule releasing you because the employer ended the relationship. That surprises people here, where so many jobs run on term appointments, and a non-renewal is not a termination — though the covenant usually does not distinguish. How you left matters to a judge weighing an emergency motion, and it is leverage when you ask for a release — see Michigan severance agreements explained. If the exit was unlawful, the wrongful termination claim runs in parallel.
What Michigan law requires, and what a judge can do with a bad agreement
The statute is MCL 445.774a, the employment provision inside the Michigan Antitrust Reform Act; MCL 445.772 is the general prohibition 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 a real interest: trade secrets, confidential technical and pricing information, goodwill it paid to build. Your skill, training, publication record, and reputation do not qualify.
Here is the part Michigan readers have backwards. An overbroad non-compete 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 — blue-pencilling. Proving that a three-year nationwide bar on a mid-level engineer is absurd therefore does not end the case; it invites a smaller version you are held to. The flip side is the useful one: what a judge will enforce is far narrower than what the letter demands, and that gap is where these matters settle.
Two assumptions to drop. Michigan courts have generally treated continued at-will employment as adequate consideration, so an agreement handed to you in year five is usually not void because your pay did not change. And a 2024 federal rule banning most non-competes was set aside by a court before it took effect and is not in force; Michigan law governs today.
The definition of “competitor” is the clause to read first
Most Washtenaw agreements do not name companies. They bar you from any entity “engaged in the business of” something, then define that business in a sentence describing an entire industry: software, medical devices, mobility, data analytics, digital ordering. Read literally, an Ann Arbor engineer’s agreement covers every employer in the region. That breadth is evidence of unreasonableness — but a court can narrow the scope instead of discarding it, cutting it down to the product or customer set you actually worked on. So the early question is not whether the clause is too broad. It is what the narrow version looks like, and whether the job you want sits inside it.
University of Michigan and Michigan Medicine: the IP policy behind the covenant
Researchers, labs, and spinouts
Universities generally claim inventions made with institutional resources through an intellectual-property policy rather than a negotiated contract, and you accepted that policy as a condition of employment. When a researcher or faculty member leaves for a company or founds one, the fight is far more often about who owns a discovery and its data than about where that person may work.
Separate what travels with you from what does not. Published work is public. Lab notebooks, raw data, cell lines, code on institutional systems, and unpublished results are the institution’s; taking them converts a licensing conversation into a trade-secret case, and if any of it is human-subjects or patient data, a privacy problem too. For public employees — U-M, Eastern Michigan University, county government, the city of Ann Arbor — enforceability is still decided by MCL 445.774a reasonableness.
Physicians moving across town
Michigan has no statutory carve-out for physician non-competes; a clinician is analyzed under 445.774a like anyone else. There are essentially two large systems here, Michigan Medicine and Trinity Health Ann Arbor, with the affiliated IHA physician group alongside. A radius drawn from every site a system operates does not merely limit your options here; it can eliminate them, a real overbreadth argument. Continuity of care cuts both ways: it is why a system says it needs the restriction, and why a judge may hesitate to strand a patient panel mid-treatment. Academic physicians carry a second layer, since a faculty appointment and a clinical role often have different terms.
Toyota R&D, Domino’s, and the downtown software sector
York Township, Ann Arbor, and the holdover clause
Toyota Motor North America’s research and development operation in Ann Arbor and York Township runs on pre-production work, which changes what is being protected. The stronger claim against a departing R&D engineer is rarely the non-compete; it is the confidentiality and invention-assignment agreement covering unreleased program data, validation results, and supplier evaluations. Watch for the holdover clause, sometimes called a trailer: a term assigning the employer any invention you conceive for months after you leave, if it relates to the company’s business. Michigan has no statute limiting those agreements the way several other states do, so the language largely governs.
Domino’s, startups, and hospitality
Corporate staff at Domino’s headquarters in Ann Arbor Township sign covenants aimed at other national brands. A narrow restriction naming a real competitive set is what Michigan courts are most comfortable with; the same agreement stretched to cover any food business is not. Venture-backed companies downtown hand every employee the same package regardless of role, from an out-of-state template: check whether invention assignment reaches side projects done on your own equipment, whether confidentiality ever ends, and how long you have to exercise vested options. Ann Arbor’s hospitality groups hand covenants to managers and chefs too — recipes and vendor terms can be confidential, the ability to run a kitchen is not.
Notebooks, data, and files you must not take
The most damaging thing a departing Washtenaw County employee does is forward documents to a personal account, copy a drive, or sync a repository in the final week. It replaces the question of whether the agreement is too broad — which you can win — with what you did, which you lose.
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 route into federal court. 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 legal violation.
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 there — deleting it after a dispute starts becomes its own accusation.
Ann Arbor, the 22nd Circuit, and how fast this moves
State-law claims against a Washtenaw County employee are filed in the Washtenaw County Trial Court, Michigan’s 22nd Circuit, at 101 E. Huron Street in Ann Arbor. The Washtenaw County employment lawyer page covers that courthouse and its jury pool, among the most educated in the state and unimpressed by a restriction nobody can explain.
No limitations period runs quietly 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 attached, seeking a temporary restraining order sometimes heard within days and occasionally without notice to you, then an injunction hearing on a compressed schedule with depositions in between. Most of these cases are effectively decided at that hearing. Served? That is a same-day call. See also Michigan employment claim deadlines.
A trade-secret count can also put the case in federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan, which sits in Detroit and at the federal building on East Liberty Street in Ann Arbor. When the employer’s parent is out of state the agreement often picks another state’s law and courts, and Michigan courts do not always honor those clauses — raise it early, do not rely on it.
Frequently asked questions
I’m a research scientist at the University of Michigan leaving to join a startup. Who owns the work I did in the lab?
Generally the university, through its intellectual-property policy, for anything invented using institutional resources — and possibly through a sponsored-research or material-transfer agreement too. That ownership question is usually the real dispute, not where you may work. Published papers are public and your skills are yours, but notebooks, data, samples, and code written on university systems are not. If the startup’s business touches your research, sort the licensing path before you resign.
My Ann Arbor software employer defines “competitor” as any company engaged in the software industry. Can that be enforced?
Not as written — a definition covering an entire industry is broader than any interest one company can point to. The catch is the remedy. Michigan lets a court narrow an unreasonable agreement and enforce the narrowed version, so the likely outcome is not that you are free but that you are bound to something smaller: the product line or customer set you actually worked on. Get that narrow version defined early; your new role may already sit outside it.
I’m a physician leaving Michigan Medicine for Trinity Health Ann Arbor. Can patients follow me?
Patients choose their own doctors, and no agreement can make that unlawful. What a covenant can restrict is your soliciting them — contacting the panel, mailing an announcement, using contact information that belongs to the practice. Have your new employer handle notification the way departing-physician rules contemplate, and leave the patient list alone. A radius covering every site of a system this large is a real overbreadth argument, but expect a judge to shrink it rather than erase it.
My agreement at an Ann Arbor engineering employer assigns inventions I come up with for a year after I leave. Is that enforceable in Michigan?
Michigan has no statute limiting employee invention-assignment agreements the way some other states do, so the wording carries most of the weight. A short holdover clause, tied to work you actually performed and to the employer’s real line of business, has a fair chance of holding up. One reaching every idea in an industry for a long stretch after separation is more vulnerable and can be narrowed. Document what you invent at the new job, and with whose resources.
I manage a restaurant for an Ann Arbor hospitality group and my agreement bars me from any food business in Washtenaw County for two years. Will they really sue?
Sometimes, and the honest problem is cost rather than law. Running a kitchen is general skill Michigan does not let an employer own, and a two-year county-wide ban on a manager is broader than the interest behind it — though recipes, vendor pricing, and a customer database may be protectable. But an employer absorbs litigation more easily than you can, and that asymmetry is why a narrowed written resolution early beats being right later.
Talk to a non-compete lawyer who takes Washtenaw County cases
Holding an agreement you are worried about, a demand letter, or a summons from a Washtenaw County employer? Call (313) 701-2448 or schedule a free 15-minute case evaluation. Bring the whole packet — the employment agreement, the invention-assignment form, any policy you clicked through, the equity documents. I will tell you what the restriction is realistically worth before a judge in Ann Arbor. Termination cases are handled 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. Employee-side only — I have never represented an employer.
These come in from across the county — a lab or software company in Ann Arbor, an engineering campus in York Township, a corporate office in Ann Arbor Township. Work a county over? See the Wayne County, Oakland County, and Macomb County non-compete pages.