Butzel attorney Mitchell Zajac named to DBusiness magazine’s ‘30 in Their Thirties’
DETROIT, Mich. – Butzel attorney and shareholder Mitchell Zajac has been named to DBusiness magazine’s 2022 Class of “30 in Their Thirties,” which profiles metro Detroit business professionals who have achieved notable success in their respective fields. Zajac also was named to DBusiness magazine’s Top Lawyers of Metro Detroit, Intellectual Property and Patent Law, 2021 and 2022. He is profiled in the May/June 2022 edition of DBusiness.
Zajac 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.
