Insurance folks tired of hearing about personal injury law firms going after those “greedy insurance companies” might want a ringside seat for this one. Two high-profile Boston-area personal injury law firms are going after each other over allegations of trade secret theft, breach of loyalty, conspiracy, unfair competition and more.
One firm is accusing the other of stealing its business model that has been the key to its nationwide success. The other insists that it didn’t steal anything, and it would never do business the way the accuser does.
In one corner is Sokolove Law, which back in the 1980s was among the first law firms to advertise on television and use a toll-free phone number. The firm has represented thousands of clients all across the country and recovered more than $10 billion over decades. Sokolove now consists of 64 employees and more than 140 co-counsel firms.
“This case is about the wholesale theft of a business model,” Sokolove asserts in his opening salvo filed on August 13. Sokolove maintains that his competitor Jason Stone Injury Lawyers built its recent success “not on innovation or hard work, but on trade secrets and proprietary information” stolen from Sokolove.
In the other corner are Jason Stone Injury Lawyers and Keith Glover, a former Sokolove employee who went to work for Stone in 2017 and who, Sokolove alleges, took with him the “secret sauce” behind Sokolove’s success when he left Sokolove in 2015.
Jason Stone asserts that his business model is nothing like Sokolove’s which Stone argues is more a telemarketing and lead generating firm than a traditional law firm like his. Stone alleges that Sokolove’s lawsuit is part of an unfair campaign Sokolove has been waging against his firm.
Former Employee
Sokolove posits that the so-called scheme was orchestrated by Glover, a former mattress salesman who Sokolove says he trained to become a six-figure legal operations professional. Glover “repaid this trust” by allegedly copying Sokolove’s entire digital operations playbook and delivering it to Stone when he became Stone’s director of operations eight years ago, according to Sokolove’s lawsuit.
Sokolove has built its business to accommodate other firms around the country that seek it as co-counsel to benefit from its marketing, case intake, client service and claim management processes. Sokolove made its name locally in auto accidents and nationally in mesothelioma cases, but its portfolio today also includes many other types of personal injury cases.
Sokolove operates a remote call center with more than 100 agents who are continually trained in new case types such as birth injury, disability denial, firefighting foam, lung cancer, nursing home abuse, dangerous drugs, workplace injury, and other marketing campaigns. For training, Sokolove uses a combination of intake scripts, PowerPoint presentations, quizzes, and links to internal documents. Sokolove has four private, internal-use Google sites to support its business.