Joe Rodkey graduated summa cum laude in 1989 from St. Francis University with a B.A. in Political Science.
In 1992 he graduated cum laude from The Dickinson School of Law of the Pennsylvania State University where he was also a member of the Woolsack Honor Society.
Joe Rodkey is a former partner of the global law firm Reed Smith, LLP where he practiced out of the Pittsburgh office for over 16 years. As his extensive experience indicates, through his private practice, Joe offers clients big firm talent and expertise at small firm rates. For Joe, every case is personal.
As a partner in Reed Smith’s commercial litigation group Joe handled a wide range of cases all over Pennsylvania and in federal and state courts across the United States. For example, Joe has litigated cases not only in most counties in Pennsylvania, but also in West Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Virginia, Ohio, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts. In these cases, Joe represented many of the nation’s largest corporations, businesses and financial institutions in a wide variety of corporate, litigation, collection, arbitration and government regulatory matters. As a result, Joe has years of experience with complex business litigation including, intellectual property, trade secret, non-compete, corporate disparagement, unfair competition, contracts, distributor agreements, leases, shareholder and bond holder disputes and injury defense. In addition, Joe has extensive experience in assisting clients in navigating the new federal obligations placed on parties with regard to electronically stored information (ESI) and data preservation (including forensic data recovery).
Joe represented the founding partners of Superior Well Services, Inc. (“SWSI”) when they broke from Haliburton in the mid-1990’s and were sued by Haliburton in federal court in Pittsburgh in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent them from starting the business that is now SWSI. Joe has represented SWSI ever since on a variety of litigation matters as well as providing general legal advice and counsel and in drafting agreements and contracts.
In fact, just this year Joe was appointed special arrangement counsel by Liberty Mutual to defend SWSI against the claims of defamation brought against SWSI by a competitor following a surface explosion at a Greene County, PA well site in Hotwell, Inc. v. Superior Well Services, Inc., Case # 1573 of 2009 (Westmoreland County, PA). This case recently settled (with no cash changing hands) after the Court indicated it agreed with most of the motion to dismiss filed by SWSI.
In other matters, in 2004 Joe was an integral part of the litigation team that represented the bond holders in the well publicized trial over the sale of the assets of Weirton Steel (the 5th largest integrated steel maker in the nation and 2nd largest producer of tin) in the largest bankruptcy in West Virginia history.
More recently, in Nucor Corporation v. Bell and SeverCorr, LLC, 482 F. Supp. 2d 714 (D.S.C. 2007), Joe represented an individual and his new employer, SeverCorr, LLC (owner of the brand new billion dollar SeverCorr mini-mill in Columbus, MS) against a panoply of claims including, breach of a non-disclosure and non-solicitation agreement the individual signed years after he commenced employment, theft of trade secrets and other claims brought by Nucor (the nation’s 2nd leading steel maker) in federal court in Charleston, SC. Joe was successful in gaining an early dismissal of the breach of non-disclosure and non-solicitation agreement for lack of consideration. In another episode of the Nucor litigation, Joe helped defend an individual accused of wiping allegedly relevant data from a computer. After a Daubert hearing on the qualifications of the parties’ computer forensics experts, the court excluded testimony of the opposing expert that a particular program to wipe data had been downloaded, installed, and used on Joe’s client’s laptop computer. Although the laptop had large blocks of “zeros” that the expert theorized could have been created by use of a secure delete function of the program, the court found that the version of the program placed on the laptop did not have a secure delete function. Nucor Corp. v. Bell, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 86328 (D.S.C. Jan. 11, 2008).
In another high profile case featured in the Wall Street Journal and other major media outlets, in 2005 Joe was second chair for the defense team representing Allegheny College and several individual defendants that obtained summary judgment for numerous individual college administrators and a defense verdict for the College and its counselor after a two-week jury trial in Mahoney v. Allegheny College, AD 892-2003, a college student suicide liability action of national importance.
Throughout Joe’s career he has also represented many insured’s of major insurance carriers in serious accident cases involving personal injury and property damage arising out of crane accidents, industrial accidents and explosions and fires and products defect claims.
In addition, over the years, Joe has assisted many clients in disputes over non-compete agreements, intellectual property, valuable trade secrets, confidential and proprietary information and good will in Pennsylvania and in other states. For instance, in International Settlement Design, Inc. v. Hickey, 25 Pa. D&C 4th 506 (Allegheny County 1995), Joe defended two individuals who left their employer to start their own business against claims from their former employer including breach of a non-compete agreements, theft of trade secrets and commercial disparagement. Joe busted the covenants not to compete convincing the court to rule that the agreements were so grossly overly broad that they should not be enforced at all and got that order affirmed on appeal. In addition, the court agreed with Joe’s argument that the customer lists and other information at issue were not trade secrets. Joe has also litigated non-compete cases for a large public company in Fort Lauderdale, FL in 2006.
Other of Joe’s reported commercial cases include, Latuszewski v. VALIC Financial Advisors, Inc., 2005 WL 1367809 (3rd. Cir. 2005), where Joe represented the former employer and convinced the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals to affirm the District Court’s grant of a preliminary injunction that protected the unauthorized disclosure and use of the former employer’s trade secrets and Arnold v. Pennsylvania, Dept. of Transp., 477 F.3d 105 (3rd Cir., 2007), where Joe helped a private construction company beat back a media outlet’s attempt to pierce a court ordered confidentiality agreement to attempt exploit confidential information disclosed in court proceedings.
Prior to the Hotwell, Inc. defamation case against SWSI, Joe had substantial prior experience in First Amendment practice. Joe has represented media outlets in a number of high profile press access to court proceedings and records cases, including U.S. v. Wecht, 484 F.3d 194 (3rd Cir., 2007) and U.S. v. Wecht, 537 F.3d 222 (3rd Cir., 2008), where, in connection with the government prosecution of famed forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, Joe helped one of Pittsburgh’s largest media outlets gain access to information improperly sealed by the government and successfully challenged a local gag order on attorney speech. In addition, in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gilbert Martinez, No. 724 WDA 2004 (Pa. Super. 2007), Joe represented a major media outlet in convincing a court that certain letters delivered to a judge before a high profile criminal defendant was sentenced fell within the scope of “judicial records” accessible to the public.
In addition to handling various pro bono cases, Joe’s public service has also included a six year appointment by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to serve as a Hearing Officer (akin to the role of administrative judge) entrusted to adjudicate claims of attorney misconduct brought by the Pennsylvania Disciplinary Board in the Western Pennsylvania region.
As the above brief description shows, the breadth of Joe’s practice demonstrates that he has the experience and ability to litigate cases in any part of the country – because he has done it many times before.
90% of Practice Devoted to Litigation
