business litigation

That Delivery App Listing You Never Agreed To? Michigan Law May Have Something to Say About It.

Kent County restaurant owners: if DoorDash, Grubhub, or Uber Eats is listing your restaurant without your permission, you may have real legal leverage — and you may not have to pay out of pocket to use it.

It usually starts with a phone call from an angry customer.

They ordered through an app. The food arrived cold, forty minutes late, and it wasn’t what they thought they were paying for. Or the item they ordered has been off your menu since last spring. Or they were charged $19 for a sandwich you sell for $13. They don’t blame the app. They blame you — because as far as they can tell, you chose to be on that platform.

But you never signed anything. Nobody asked. Somewhere along the way, a delivery platform simply built a page for your restaurant: your name, your logo, photos of your dining room, a menu scraped from who-knows-where, and prices you never set. To anyone scrolling their phone in Grand Rapids or Kentwood or Rockford, it looks like a partnership. It looks like you want them ordering this way.

What it actually costs you

Restaurant owners across Kent County describe the same pattern:

  • Your reputation takes the hit for someone else’s service. Every late delivery, every wrong order, every soggy container becomes a one-star review with your name on it.
  • Your prices get distorted. Inflated menu pricing makes you look expensive to customers who have no idea a third party added the markup.
  • Your customers get pulled away from your own channels. Orders that would have come through your phone line, your website, or your front door get intercepted — often at a worse margin, sometimes at no margin at all.
  • Your brand gets used without payment or permission. Your trademarks, your logo, your photographs, your goodwill. Built over years. Borrowed for free.
  • Your kitchen gets whipsawed. Orders arrive for items you no longer make, at prices you didn’t set, with drivers you’ve never met walking into your lobby.

And your customers lose too. They pay more than they should, get an experience you’d never have signed off on, and walk away thinking less of a restaurant that did absolutely nothing wrong.

This is not just frustrating. In Michigan, it may be unlawful.

Here is what a lot of restaurant owners don’t know: Michigan has specific statutory protections that address exactly this conduct. They are not vague. They are not buried in general fraud law. The Legislature addressed this problem directly.

Those protections can carry real consequences for a platform that ignores them, including:

  1. Statutory damages — meaning a restaurant may be entitled to recover a minimum amount set by law, and in some circumstances punitive damages on top of it.
  2. Attorney fees paid by the platform — Michigan law may require the offending delivery service to pay a prevailing restaurant’s reasonable attorney fees. That changes the economics entirely. It means a single independent restaurant doesn’t have to fund a fight against a multibillion-dollar platform out of its own thin margins.

That last point matters most. These companies count on the assumption that a neighborhood restaurant will never find it worthwhile to push back. Michigan law was written to change that math.

If this is happening to you, let’s talk.

I’m evaluating these claims for restaurants in Grand Rapids, Wyoming, Kentwood, Grandville, East Grand Rapids, Ada, Rockford, Lowell, and throughout Kent County — independents, small groups, and family operations alike.

If you have found your restaurant listed on a delivery platform you never authorized, or you’re fielding complaints about an app you never joined, I’d like to hear about it. An initial conversation costs you nothing, and it will tell you quickly whether you have something worth pursuing.

Contact me here.

Bring what you have: screenshots of the listing, examples of wrong menu items or inflated prices, any customer complaints or reviews tied to app orders, and any correspondence you’ve had with the platform. If you don’t have all of that, come anyway. We’ll sort it out together.

This post is general information about Michigan law and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every situation is different, and legal claims are subject to deadlines — if you think this applies to your restaurant, don’t wait to ask.

Banks and Stolen Money/Westbrook Law of Grand Rapids, Michigan

It is surprisingly common for company bookkeepers, controllers and accountants to steal company funds and funnel the money to their banks and other creditors.  Today’s Ponzi schemes (think Bernie Madoff, or the closest local analogue, CyberNET) also cannot survive without using bank services like credit accounts, deposit accounts and wire transfer facilities.  More than once in my practice I have faced the questions: when the fraudster no longer has the ill-gotten funds, what can the victim do?  Do the banks and other creditors have to account for the stolen funds?  These are simple questions with complex answers.

In the case of CyberNET (also called Cyberco), the company was engaged in a Ponzi-like scheme amounting to a $100 million fraud on its creditors, mostly consisting of equipment leasing companies.  CyberNET’s line bank, Huntington National Bank, saw warning signs that CyberNET’s business was not what it appeared to be.  It even went so far as to tell CyberNET to find a new bank, and negotiated accelerated paydowns of its $17 million line of credit to CyberNET.  That credit line was fully repaid just before an FBI raid of the company effectively shut it down. The creditors left holding the bag asked the question: would Huntington have to account for any of the tens of millions it received that were proceeds of the fraud?  The answer was yes, but not without a complicated and protracted legal fight.

Michigan law and the bankruptcy code each provide specific means of recovering stolen money and fraudulent transfers of funds.  In Huntington’s case, while the bank successfully defended claims that it had “aided and abetted” the CyberNET fraud, it ultimately lost in an adversary proceeding in bankruptcy court on theories of avoidance of fraudulent transfers.  These theories depended upon the bank failing to prove that it accepted the illegitimate funds “in good faith.”  The judgment against Huntington, totaling over $80 million, is currently on appeal to the Sixth Circuit.

An avoidance theory may also be useful outside the bankruptcy context, where defrauded parties may be able to make use of Michigan’s Uniform Fraudulent Transfers Act to pull back ill-gotten funds that were subsequently transferred to a bank, creditor or another.  In that instance, the pivotal questions are again the recipient’s “good faith,” along with an inquiry whether the recipient “gave value” for the transfer.

Even negligence and unjust enrichment theories may be relied upon to hold recipient of stolen or fraudulently obtained funds accountable.  In Michigan, for example, a common-law “duty of inquiry” exists whereby a bank must conduct a “reasonable inquiry” to ensure that when it receives funds from a third party that does not owe it money (through, e.g., a company check stolen by its bookkeeper), that the presenter is authorized to use those funds.  Otherwise, it accepts third-party funds at its own peril.  It cannot simply look the other way and accept what it should know are stolen or ill-gotten funds.

Litigating against banks is never a simple proposition, and should not be done lightly.  Banks are accustomed to fighting lawsuits and can afford teams of skilled attorneys.  However, in the right case, and pursuing the right legal strategy, they are not untouchable–as the Huntington case clearly shows.