Butzel attorney Mitchell Zajac named to DBusiness magazine’s ‘30 in Their Thirties’
May 11, 2022Zajac is a member of Butzel’s Litigation and Dispute Resolution Practice Group, one of the firm’s largest practices areas. His practice also includes a focus on automotive, intellectual property, regulatory and emissions compliance, and sports law, to name a few. He is a registered patent attorney with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Before joining Butzel as a summer associate in May 2017, while attending law school full time, Zajac was an engineer at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA). He moved quickly through the ranks at FCA. He was responsible for multiple ground-breaking development projects, led the international engineering team producing the Ram ProMaster City, and had a leading role in FCA’s corporate audit group with responsibilities in safety/regulatory compliance, quality and purchasing.
He has practiced in six federal courts, the U.S. Patent Office, the Court of International Trade, and the U.S. International Trade Commission. Zajac’s career as an attorney builds on his strengths and experiences he gained while at FCA and has helped him to grow his practice beyond the automotive industry. Zajac has helped several clients manage and craft IP portfolios in other unique industries, like medicine, light-weighting, and industrial manufacturing. He also has experience in complex patent, trade secret and commercial litigation cases.
Zajac attended WMU-Cooley (J.D., 2017) after graduating from Western Michigan University with Bachelors’ degrees in Mechanical Engineering and German (2012) and a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering (2013). He was a Rhodes Scholar finalist (2012); interned for Congressman Fred Upton; and was a four-year starter on the Division 1 football team at WMU. Zajac was named to Michigan Lawyers Weekly’s 2020 Class of Up & Coming Lawyers. Moreover, he received the Detroit Bar Association’s “One to Watch” Award in 2019. Zajac has been named to Best Lawyers in America: Ones to Watch, Commercial Litigation, 2022.
He is active in the community. He was elected to the Livingston County Board of Commissioners. Moreover, Zajac is an appointed member on the Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School Board of Directors.
Zajac is an advocate for continuous education and public service. He’s the Association for Child Development (ACD) President, a non-profit organization facilitating ~$30M/annum through the USDA CACF Program providing healthy meals to children across the Midwest. He has helped achieve financial stability, organizational structure, and leads strategic expansion of ACD programs to more children and to provide education to more families. He also dedicates hundreds of hours each year coaching high school football and track in Howell.
About Butzel
Butzel is one of the leading law firms in Michigan and the United States. It was founded in Detroit in 1854 and has provided trusted client service for more than 160 years. Butzel’s full-service law offices are located in Detroit, Troy, Lansing and Ann Arbor, Mich.; New York, NY; and, Washington, D.C., as well as an alliance office in Beijing. It is an active member of Lex Mundi, a global association of 160 independent law firms. Learn more by visiting www.butzel.com or follow Butzel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/butzel_long