Pushed out by a Southfield employer? Get a Southfield employment lawyer who has tried 50+ cases.
Need a Southfield employment lawyer? Here’s the local landscape. Southfield has one of Michigan’s densest concentrations of corporate HQs, professional services, and large employers. The cases I see most from here are executive and senior-professional terminations — the kind where the employer has sophisticated counsel, severance language is designed to extinguish claims, and non-competes are enforced aggressively against departing executives and salespeople.
What employment cases look like in Southfield
Southfield is Lear Corporation’s HQ, Federal-Mogul (now Tenneco), Stellantis North American HQ functions, IBM, AAA, dozens of law firms and accounting practices, and the Northland-area healthcare and office cluster. The disputes that come from this kind of workforce have predictable patterns: executive terminations under ‘restructuring’ or ‘culture fit’ pretexts, severance disputes with onerous release terms, non-compete TROs against departing executives, and ADA-accommodation refusals at corporate-office employers.
My client list contains employees and no one else — in fifteen years I have never taken the employer’s side, and I never will. Because I accept only cases I believe a jury would award, the evaluation call delivers value either way: a serious strategy, or a frank assessment and a no-cost referral.
The eight fact patterns that turn into real claims
Southfield’s towers hold corporate headquarters, regional offices, and the executives and professionals who staff them — and the employment disputes that come out of them are correspondingly high-stakes. The eight patterns below, each linked to a fuller page, cover nearly everything I see from this market.
Wrongful termination
At the executive and professional level, terminations are engineered — a reorganization announced, a role ‘consolidated,’ a calibration score adjusted — often within weeks of a complaint, a medical disclosure, or a leave request. Unwinding that engineered narrative is what wrongful termination litigation does.
FMLA retaliation
Even C-suite-adjacent employees get punished for taking federally protected FMLA leave; the retaliation just wears better tailoring — a diminished portfolio, a missed promotion cycle, a quiet exit package. Adverse action on the heels of leave is unlawful regardless of how it’s packaged.
Pregnancy discrimination
For professional women in corporate Southfield, the pregnancy penalty often looks like a derailed trajectory: the leadership-track role reassigned during maternity leave, the post-announcement demotion styled as ‘support.’ Federal and Michigan law treat firing, demotion, and constructive pushout alike.
ADA accommodation
White-collar accommodation requests — modified schedules, remote arrangements, leave extensions for treatment — are usually low-cost and plainly reasonable, which makes denial or retaliation legally precarious for the employer. The ADA requires genuine engagement, not a form-letter no.
Race, gender, age discrimination
In corporate environments, discrimination operates through succession planning, compensation bands, and reduction-in-force lists. When race, gender, or age predicts who advances and who is ‘impacted’ — or when reporting bias triggers reprisal — those decisions are actionable.
Whistleblower retaliation
Executives and finance professionals who flag fraud, compliance failures, or illegal directives are precisely whom Michigan’s Whistleblowers’ Protection Act protects — and precisely who must mind its 90-day filing deadline, which runs faster than most internal investigations.
Non-compete defense
Non-compete and non-solicitation covenants are standard in Southfield executive agreements, and employers enforce them hard when leadership departs. Michigan’s strict reasonableness doctrine gives departing executives real leverage: overbroad covenants get narrowed or voided.
Severance review and negotiation
Executive severance is a negotiation, not an ultimatum — release scope, equity vesting, bonus proration, references, and restrictive covenants are all on the table. I review and negotiate these packages as a discrete service; no litigation is required to materially improve one.
Where Southfield employment cases get filed
Oakland County cases over $25,000 are filed in the 6th Circuit Court in Pontiac. Smaller statutory claims go to the 46th District Court on Evergreen in Southfield. Non-compete TROs are typically filed in 6th Circuit and move fast — usually a TRO hearing within days. Federal claims go to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in Detroit.
I’m in those courts regularly. My office is in downtown Detroit, roughly 20 minutes from Southfield — close enough that in-person meetings are easy when they make sense, and most case work is handled by phone and email between hearings.
The local context
Cases I’ve handled or evaluated involving employees of: Lear Corporation HQ, Tenneco, Stellantis HQ functions, IBM Detroit, AAA, Providence Hospital, large law firm and accounting offices throughout the Northland and Telegraph corridors.
The employer names appear because sophisticated clients ask a sophisticated question: do I already know their company’s playbook? For most large Michigan employers I do — prior matters against their HR organizations and their outside counsel mean the strategic groundwork is already laid.
Free case evaluation. Straight answer either way.
Fifteen-minute call. I’ll ask the right questions, tell you whether your case is worth pursuing, and either explain what I’d do or refer you to someone who can.