How a Michigan DUI Affects Your Job and Career
Many of the people who call us after a first offense DUI arrest don’t ask about jail right off the bat. They want to know what happens Monday morning.
That is a fair question, and the honest answer is better than most people expect. A single Michigan DUI usually does not cost someone their job. The reason has to do with how the records work, which almost nobody knows going in: a conviction lands on two separate records, and Michigan’s public criminal history search leaves the driving record out of it entirely.
Of course, there are exceptions, and they are specific ones — commercial drivers, licensed healthcare and other professionals, and anyone whose contract requires them to disclose a DUI conviction. Those situations need to be planned around early and handled carefully.
We defend DUI cases and handle driver’s license restoration, which means we work with both of those records from the first day of a case because both of them matter.
Why Does a DUI Show Up in Two Different Places?
An OWI, which is the Michigan legal term for what almost everyone just calls a DUI, is both a criminal offense and a traffic offense at the same time. One incident, two consequences. A conviction winds up on a person’s criminal record managed by the Michigan State Police, and also lands as a separate entry on the driving record kept by the Secretary of State.
These are different files, kept by different agencies, and they must be searched separately. We cannot stress that last part enough, because it is a critical thing to understand about a DUI and your job. There is no such thing as a universal background check. What somebody finds out about you depends entirely on which record gets pulled.
Of the two, the driving record is the more permanent one. The Secretary of State tells drivers that points come off a record 2 years after the conviction, that most convictions stay on for at least 7 years, and that a conviction for drunk or impaired driving remains permanently.
Do not confuse the points with the conviction. They are two different things. Operating while intoxicated carries 6 points, and operating while visibly impaired carries 4 points, and when those points expire, the underlying DUI conviction is still sitting right there where it always was.
Will My Employer Actually Find Out?
Nobody is required to call your boss. Not the court, not the police, not the prosecutor. That surprises people, and it is worth saying plainly.
There is one exception worth knowing about. The Secretary of State sells subscription services that let an organization subscribe to a driving record and be notified when certain changes are made to it. If your employer is already enrolled in something like that, they can learn about a conviction without anyone having to check. Otherwise, absent a contract or an employment condition that puts the duty on you, the information only moves if you are the one who moves it.
Michigan’s public criminal history search is called ICHAT, and it is run by the State Police. The State Police say that felonies and serious misdemeanors punishable by 93 days in jail or more must be reported. This is entirely separate from a Michigan Secretary of State driving record.
The simple fact is that the only way to really know what’s on your record is to order a copy and review it. Records have errors in them. They always have. This means that before you volunteer anything to anyone at work, let us look at what your records actually say, rather than what they ought to say.
Who Is Legally Required to Report a Conviction, and How Fast?
There are several groups here, and most of those duties are written right into the law.
Health professionals are the clearest case. A licensee or registrant licensed under Michigan’s Public Health Code must notify the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs of any criminal conviction within 30 days, and failing to give that notice draws administrative action all by itself. Read that again, because it is the part that costs people: the failure to report is its own problem, separate from and on top of whatever the conviction was. The clock runs on the conviction, not the arrest. In our experience, how that disclosure gets presented usually matters every bit as much as the conviction being disclosed.
For what it’s worth, the same thing applies to lawyers, except that in those cases, the rule for lawyers requires just about everyone to report the conviction. This includes the lawyer handling the DUI case, the lawyer convicted, and the court where the case was handled.
Of course, the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) also requires people holding professional licenses in other occupations to report a DUI conviction.
Commercial drivers carry the duty that almost nobody has ever heard of, and it is a federal one. A CDL holder who is convicted of a traffic offense, in ANY vehicle and setting, parking violations aside, must notify the employer in writing within 30 days of the conviction. If the license is suspended or the commercial privileges are disqualified, that notice is due before the end of the business day after the driver receives notice of it.
That is a regulation, and not something buried in a company handbook that somebody might overlook.
Everybody else is a contract question, and contracts vary. Some agreements require you to disclose an arrest. Others only reach a conviction. Some say nothing at all. Before you say a word to anyone at work, find your handbook or your employment agreement and read what it requires — and if you are not sure what it requires, that is worth a phone call to us before you act on a guess.
Why Can’t a Plea Bargain Save a CDL?
For most of our clients, the goal is either to get the case dismissed or, if the evidence is strong enough to survive a legal challenge, to at least get the charge reduced to something less serious. Negotiating a High BAC charge down to impaired driving softens the license consequences and other penalties a great deal.
That strategy does not do the same work for a commercial driver.
Michigan law suspends the commercial vehicle group designation for a full year on a conviction under the operating while intoxicated statute, and that group designation is the thing that makes a license a CDL in the first place. The impaired driving subsection is on that list. Put another way, the very reduction that protects everybody else does not protect the CDL, because both the charge you were arrested on and the lesser charge you pleaded down to still require the suspension, and neither the court nor the Secretary of State can do anything about that.
There are five specifics here that a commercial driver needs to have straight:
- That 1-year loss applies whether the person was behind the wheel of a commercial truck or the family car on a Saturday night.
- The 3-year suspension people have heard about is narrower than they think it is. It requires a commercial vehicle that was carrying hazardous material placarded under the federal rules.
- A second qualifying conviction, counting anything after January 1, 1990, means revocation for life, with a chance to apply for reissue of a CDL after 10 years.
- A traffic offense committed by a CDL holder while operating a commercial vehicle can NEVER be set aside.
- The federal rules make the driver tell the employer in writing within 30 days of the conviction.
That combination is why we treat a commercial driver’s case as a dismissal fight from day one rather than focus on plea negotiations. It is a different case with a different objective, and it has to be approached that way from the very beginning.
Can I Still Drive for Work on a Restricted License?
Yes, and the restricted license is broader than most people assume. But the specifics depend on what you are convicted of, so let’s walk through them from most serious to least.
A first-offense OWI suspends the license for 180 days. The Secretary of State will then issue a restricted license, but only after 30 days. This means no driving for the first month, and then being able to drive on a restricted license for the remaining 5 months.
A High BAC first offense is a 1-year suspension with no driving at all for the first 45 days, with a restricted license issued thereafter, although it requires use of an ignition interlock. This means that a person will spend 10.5 months on a restricted license using what some call the “blow and go.”
A first-offense impaired driving conviction only results in a 90-day restricted license, and there is no mandatory “no-driving” window. That doubles to 180 days when a controlled substance, by itself or together with alcohol, caused the impairment.
As for what a restricted license lets you do, it expressly permits things like driving in the course of your employment, and it covers travel between home, work, court-ordered treatment, the probation department, court-ordered community service, a school where you are enrolled, regularly occurring medical treatment for a serious condition, and the interlock provider. For most working people, that covers the day.
There is one place it gets narrow, and it goes back to the commercial driver rules above. On these suspensions, the Secretary of State cannot issue a restricted license that covers a commercial vehicle. There is no work-around version of a CDL. It is not that it is hard to get — it simply does not exist.
Does a Set-Aside Really Clear Everything?
Not everything, and this is the part that can affect employment questions years down the road.
Michigan allows a first violation OWI conviction to be set aside, and that provision took effect February 19, 2022. The waiting period is 5 years, and it does not run from the conviction date, which is what people assume. It runs from the last of sentencing, completion of probation, discharge from parole, or completion of imprisonment. Whichever of those comes last is where your clock starts. A conviction involving injury or death is never eligible.
Here is the piece that gets missed. A set-aside order does not allow the conviction to be taken off the Secretary of State driving record. The law forbids that.
Thus, the criminal record clears, but the driving record does not, and an employer who pulls that record still sees the conviction sitting there. Our page on Michigan DUI expungement covers the eligibility rules in more detail.
None of that is a reason to skip the set-aside. It is a reason to understand exactly what you are buying with it, so that five or six years from now you are not blindsided by a records check you thought you had taken care of.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will a DUI show up if my employer runs a background check every year?
It depends entirely on which check they run, and when. A criminal history search and a driving record search return different information, and Michigan’s public criminal history search excludes traffic records. As a general matter, the employers most likely to find a DUI are the ones who put people on the road for a living, because those are the employers who pull the driving record.
Can my employer fire me over a first-offense DUI?
Whether an employer may act turns on the employment relationship and any contract governing it, and employment law is outside what our firm handles. What we can tell you is what we see in these cases, which is that disclosure handled well is a very different conversation from disclosure skipped. Where a contract required disclosure and the person said nothing, that silence becomes a second problem stacked on top of the first one — and the second problem is often the harder of the two to explain.
Does hiring a lawyer keep my employer from finding out?
No lawyer can hide a public court record, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you. What a lawyer changes is what ends up on that record in the first place. The difference between the offense you were arrested for and the offense you are ultimately convicted of can make a great deal of difference to the employment (and other) consequences.
This is what we mean when we say that success in a DUI case is best measured by what does NOT happen to you.
Call Now to Discuss Your Situation
If you are facing a DUI anywhere in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, or one of the surrounding counties, talk to us before you talk to anyone at work. Once something has been said at the office, it cannot be unsaid, and we would much rather have that conversation with you first.
Our consultations are free, confidential, and handled over the phone right when you call. Call us Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. You will reach a friendly and helpful person who will help you get real answers. If you are calling after hours, our answering service is available, and you can also reach us through the contact form or the chat box on our website.
Because we handle driver’s license restoration as well as DUI defense, we see where a second or third conviction eventually leads, and we see it constantly. Protecting your driving privileges now means a lot less hassle than winning them back later.