Welcome To Sokol Law Office

Jeff has handled numerous IP litigations for my various companies over the past decade. Some cases involved patent or design infringement, while others involved trademark, trade dress, copyright and contract disputes. I trust Jeff implicitly. In each case, Jeff did a great job and produced very favorable results.

As the Vice President of Bend Industries, I saw firsthand how Attorney Sokol’s patent prosecution experience allowed Bend to obtain valuable protection for the concrete building and landscaping blocks we developed. Even more importantly, his litigation experience played a key role in quickly settling a patent litigation brought by our competitor, Anchor Wall Systems. Although AWS’s patent took over 9 years to obtain from the Patent Office and was challenged by another manufacturer, Bend settled the matter. As the AWS patent was ultimately upheld on appeal, Bend’s early settlement saved us years of frustration and expense. Attorney Sokol was even able to have our insurance carrier cover most of our litigation expenses.

Rusch Machine & Design is in a highly competitive metal fabricating industry. Good selling machines are quickly replicated by competitors. The patents Attorney Sokol obtains capture the essence of my designs and keep competitors at bay. His attention to detail and the quality of his work is demonstrated in that I often learn a thing or two about my designs from the patents he prepares and obtains for them.

As a pediatrician, I saw many burns on the forearms of children caused by inadvertent contact with a hot metal rack of conventional home ovens. My company, JAZ Innovations, developed and began marketing a thermal insulation product to secure around the racks to prevent these burns. However, JAZ’s OVEN RACK GUARD product was quickly knocked-off by a significant competitor using inferior materials. Jeff used his experience in trademark, unfair competition, trade dress, patent and copyright law to bring suit and prevent further sale of the competitor’s product. The case was quickly resolved and resulted in a beneficial marketing arrangement with a major home merchandie chain selling our OVEN RACK GUARD product nationally through its many retail stores.

During my 30 year career as an independent marketing research survey expert, I worked on hundreds of cases and almost exclusively with a wide range of law firms and others where the research issue surveyed primarily involved intellectual property matters. Attorney Sokol’s farm silo unloader case stands out as particularly interesting and illustrative of a good working relationship. At the time the matter was on a short time frame - one year. Although short, we worked together through trial. The survey research effort involved a pilot test of two surveys (secondary meaning and likelihood of confusion) to determine efficacy and propriety of the research design, survey instruments and the merit, or lack of, for Attorney Sokol's client. The following main survey provided significant numbers in both surveys. Attorney Sokol used full survey reports on secondary meaning and likelihood of confusion in combination with testimony, charts and photos to identify the many different features in various alternate silo unloader designs. The case culminated in a successful jury verdict in favor of his client on trade dress infringement.

In the mid 2000, Bionix' profitable plastic ear curette line was threatened by several large medical supply competitors. When we noticed that our market share began to decline, Attorney Sokol filed several necessary design patent litigations. Each competitor stopped infringing, and our market share came back to pre-litigation levels.

As a Professor of Design at Purdue University, I have testified as a design expert in various patent litigations. I have worked for top tier law firms with large staffs and resources to call on for trials. Jeff Sokol and his firm were able to successfully balance all the demands of a patent jury trial without all the overhead of a large firm.

I worked with Jeff for many years in the 1990s as J-STAR Industries’ VP of Engineering. J-STAR manufacturered agricultural material handling equipment, serving the dairy and beef feedlot industries. A competitor knocked-off our largest and most successful product line, to the point of encouraging its customers to use interchangeable J-STAR parts to make quick field repairs to its silo unloaders. Multiple patents on our silo product had expired, but Jeff developed an array of evidence and expert reports to establish a product configuration trade dress strategy to stop this blatant copying. Through his expertise, we successfully litigated a jury trial and forced our competitor to change its product. Although J-STAR has since dissolved, I would not hesitate working with Jeff again on an intellectual property matter or litigation.