Non-Compete Lawyer for Wayne County
You have a non-compete and a decision to make. Maybe there is an offer from a competitor on your phone and you are still at your desk.
Maybe you already resigned and a letter from your former employer’s law firm landed at your house, copied to your new employer. Maybe you were fired and are now being told your industry is off limits. Three Wayne County problems, handled three different ways. Michigan neither voids these agreements automatically nor enforces them. Non-compete defense in Michigan turns on whether the restriction is reasonable and whether the employer has a real interest behind it. The call is free and takes fifteen minutes: (313) 701-2448. If a lawsuit or a motion for a temporary restraining order has been filed, call today, not next week.
Which of these three is you
Still employed, weighing an offer
This is the one page on this site where being still employed is the right time to call, not a reason to wait. Before you give notice you have room: structure the new role so it sits outside the restriction, ask for a release or a narrowing, time the move. After you resign, the schedule belongs to someone else’s lawyer.
A cease-and-desist letter arrived
Addressed to you, often copied to the new employer, always with a deadline the letter invented. Most never become lawsuits: filing is expensive and puts a template agreement before a judge. But ignoring one is how people end up before a Wayne County judge on an emergency motion with no time to prepare. Read what to do first when a cease-and-desist arrives, then call.
Fired, and now told you cannot work
Common downtown and in Dearborn: a termination, a severance agreement slid across the table, a reminder that the non-compete survives. Michigan has no flat rule that firing you without cause kills the agreement. But how you left matters to a judge weighing an emergency request, and to your leverage in negotiating a release. If the firing was itself unlawful, the wrongful termination claim and the non-compete fight run in parallel.
What Michigan law actually requires
The statute is MCL 445.774a, the employment carve-out 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 three things: duration, geographic area, and the type of employment or line of business restricted. All three must hold, and the employer needs something real to protect.
What counts as real is narrower than the letters suggest. Trade secrets, confidential pricing and customer information, and customer goodwill the company paid to build are protectable. Your general skill, your experience, and your professional reputation are not. A restriction written to keep a competitor from hiring a good employee is not protecting an interest. It is avoiding competition.
Now the part Michigan readers get wrong most. An overbroad non-compete here is usually not thrown out. The statute says that if a court finds an agreement unreasonable in any respect, it may limit the agreement to make it reasonable and enforce it as limited. Lawyers call that blue-pencilling, and it cuts both ways. An employer can draft broadly knowing the worst case is a trimmed agreement rather than a dead one, so “this is ridiculous” is not by itself a defense. But the real enforcement zone is also far smaller than the letter demands: a three-year, statewide, any-capacity restriction on a Detroit account executive might survive, if at all, as a one-year bar on calling the same customers. That gap is your negotiating room.
Two assumptions to drop. Michigan courts have generally treated continued at-will employment as adequate consideration for a non-compete signed after hire, so one sprung on you mid-employment is usually not void for that reason. And a federal rule that would have banned most non-competes was set aside before it took effect and is not in force; Michigan law governs your agreement today.
How non-competes land across Wayne County
Downtown Detroit: mortgage, fintech, and inside sales
Rocket Companies and the lender, servicer, and fintech ecosystem around it run the densest restrictive-covenant practice in the county, and the agreements are rarely pure non-competes. They are stacked: a short non-compete, a customer non-solicit, a coworker non-solicit, a confidentiality clause covering “any information not publicly known.” A loan officer moving to another lender is usually not blocked from the job. What the old employer wants is the borrower pipeline and the referral partners in the CRM. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and the finance offices downtown follow the same pattern.
Henry Ford Health, the Detroit Medical Center, and clinicians
Michigan has no statutory carve-out for physician non-competes. A cardiologist, a CRNA, or a physician leaving a hospital-employed specialty practice is analyzed under 445.774a like a salesperson. The restriction is usually a radius from each facility, which in a county with Henry Ford and DMC locations from Detroit to Dearborn to Taylor can swallow most places a clinician could work. Patient continuity cuts both ways: it is why a system says it needs the restriction, and why a judge may hesitate to cut patients off from their doctor. The notice and records provisions often matter more to the exit.
Ford, Dearborn, and automotive engineering
Engineers and program managers at Ford’s Dearborn headquarters and Rouge operations, and across the supplier base in Livonia, Canton, and Downriver, usually sign an invention-assignment and confidentiality agreement first, a non-compete second. The employer’s stronger claim is the confidential one, not where you work: validation data, tooling and sourcing costs, a launch calendar, supplier quoting. No court will treat everything you learned in nine years as a trade secret. A specific cost model carried to a competitor is another matter.
Staffing, recruiting, and DTW-area freight
Recruiters and staffing account managers in Livonia, Southfield, and the western suburbs live under the broadest non-solicits in the county, because the candidate and client database is the business. Freight brokers and logistics sales staff in the DTW corridor around Romulus face the same structure, and both industries sue fast, because the harm they claim is easy to describe. The question is which accounts you can touch, and for how long.
The non-solicit is usually the real restriction
Most readers arrive worried about the non-compete and leave knowing the non-solicit is what will bind them. A clause barring you from soliciting customers you personally served in your last year or two is the kind of restraint Michigan courts are comfortable with. A clause covering every account in a national database is not, though a court may narrow it to the accounts you handled and enforce that.
So a great many people here can take the new job. What they cannot do is call their old book of business. If the new employer will put you on new accounts or a different territory for a year, the dispute often evaporates. Confidentiality clauses survive all of it, usually with no time limit and no geography.
What you do with company files decides the case
The most damaging thing a departing Wayne County employee does is forward documents to a personal account, copy a drive, or sync a folder on the way out. It turns a fight about the employer’s overbroad agreement into a fight about your conduct, which is the fight you lose. Documents you wrote yourself count.
Two statutes travel with these cases: 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 the employer a route into federal court whatever the non-compete says. The DTSA also carries an immunity provision, § 1833(b), protecting someone who confidentially discloses a trade secret to a government official or an attorney to report a suspected violation of law.
The strongest position is the boring one. Return everything promptly, in writing, and document what you returned and when. If you already forwarded something, tell your lawyer before anyone else, and do not delete it.
Where a Wayne County case gets filed, and how fast it moves
State-law claims file in the Wayne County Circuit Court, Michigan’s 3rd Judicial Circuit, at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, 2 Woodward Avenue in Detroit. A complaint against a Detroit, Dearborn, Livonia, Westland, or Canton employee goes there, with the emergency motion. The Wayne County employment lawyer page covers the 3rd Circuit and its jury pool.
The clock is nothing like a discrimination case. No limitations period is running in the background. The deadline is your former employer’s motion. It can file a verified complaint and move immediately for a temporary restraining order, sometimes heard within days and occasionally sought without notice to you, then a preliminary injunction hearing on a compressed schedule. The first two weeks decide most of these cases. If you or your new employer have been served, that is a same-day phone call.
A DTSA claim also gets the employer into federal court at the Theodore Levin U.S. Courthouse in Detroit. When the parent company sits outside Michigan, the agreement usually picks another state’s law and courts; Michigan courts do not always honor those clauses. Raise it early; do not count on it. For a public employee at Wayne State University, the test is still 445.774a reasonableness.
Equity, bonuses, and the lever that is not a lawsuit
Sometimes the employer never sues; it just cancels something. Forfeiture-for-competition language sits inside restricted stock unit grants, option agreements, deferred bonus plans, and retention awards: compete, and the unvested piece disappears. Read the grant agreements, not just the employment agreement; the restriction is frequently broader there. See Michigan severance agreements explained before you sign, and fired senior professionals if you are being managed out.
What to do this week
- Find the actual documents: offer letter, handbook acknowledgment, equity grants, bonus plan. Restrictive covenants hide in all of them.
- Do not reply to the letter yourself. Every explanation becomes an exhibit, including the accurate ones.
- Do not quit the new job because a letter told you to. Until a court orders otherwise, you can keep working.
- Write down the dates, and list coworkers who left for competitors and were never pursued.
- If you have been sued or served, call the same day. A non-compete review is most useful before a hearing.
Frequently asked questions
I’m a loan officer in downtown Detroit with a twelve-month non-compete covering all of Michigan. Can I take a job at another lender?
Often yes, with limits. A statewide bar on a loan officer whose business is a personal referral network is broader than the interest behind it, and a Michigan judge may narrow it rather than enforce it as written. Narrowing is not erasing. What usually survives is the customer non-solicit: your borrower pipeline and referral partners at the old lender are likely off limits for the stated period. Take the job and leave the CRM alone.
I’m a physician leaving Henry Ford Health or the DMC. Can the health system stop me from treating my own patients?
Michigan has no special rule for physicians, so your agreement is judged under the same reasonableness test as any other. A radius measured from every campus in a system with locations across Wayne County can be genuinely overbroad, and continuity of patient care is an argument a judge will hear. It is not a trump card: a court can shrink the radius and then enforce it. Do not take the patient list, which belongs to the practice.
My former employer filed in Wayne County Circuit Court and there’s a hearing next week. What actually happens?
The employer will be asking for a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction to stop you working while the case proceeds. It has to show a protectable interest, a reasonable restraint, and irreparable harm, fast and on real evidence. Expect expedited discovery and possibly a deposition within days. Most of these cases effectively end at that hearing, one way or the other.
I’m a recruiter at a Livonia staffing firm. My agreement bars me from contacting anyone in the company database. Is that enforceable?
A database of candidates and clients the firm built and paid for is close to the center of what Michigan lets an employer protect, so the non-solicit here is stronger than most. Its reach is the weak point: barring contact with thousands of people you never worked with, in markets you never covered, protects nothing. Expect a court to narrow it to the clients and candidates you personally handled, then enforce that.
Before I resigned from a Detroit sales floor I emailed myself files I had written. How bad is that?
Bad, and fixable if you move now. It does not matter that you wrote them: they were made for the employer, and forwarding them turns a winnable argument about an overbroad agreement into a trade-secret case under Michigan’s Uniform Trade Secrets Act or the DTSA. Do not delete them: deletion after a dispute starts becomes its own accusation. Tell your lawyer what you sent, then return everything and document it.
Talk to a non-compete lawyer who takes Wayne County cases
Holding a non-compete, a cease-and-desist letter, or a summons from a Wayne County employer? Call (313) 701-2448 or schedule a free 15-minute case evaluation. I will tell you what the agreement is likely to be worth in front of a judge. Termination cases are handled on a contingency fee; non-compete defense is billed differently, and I will explain how before you commit to anything.
I’m 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.
I take these cases from across the county: an agreement signed in Detroit, a plant or office in Dearborn, a supplier or staffing firm in Livonia. Working in a neighboring county? See the Oakland County, Macomb County, and Washtenaw County non-compete pages.