He opened this firm in 1974 and has spent every year since on the same side of the same kind of case.
Member - founded the firm in 1974
Jeffrey A. Cooke opened Cooke Law Firm in Lafayette in 1974 and has practised personal injury law there ever since. He took his B.A. at Purdue in 1967 and his J.D. at the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1970, and has been admitted to the Indiana bar since 1970. He served as City Attorney for West Lafayette from 1976 to 1980 and as Indiana State Coordinator for the National Board of Trial Advocacy. The Indiana Trial Lawyers Association named him its Trial Lawyer of the Year in 1998 and gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award in April 2013. He is AV Preeminent peer-review rated by Martindale-Hubbell and is listed annually in Super Lawyers.
You can see what the firm handles, read the questions people actually ask, or check the awards and admissions against their sources.
Indiana, 1970
University of Connecticut School of Law, Hartford, J.D., 1970
Purdue University, West Lafayette, B.A., 1967
Personal injury
Wrongful death
Auto accidents
Unsafe construction site accidents
Brain and spinal cord injuries
Plenty of lawyers have long careers. What is unusual on this record is the narrowness of it: a firm opened in 1974 to do personal injury work, which has never taken anything else, run by somebody who was City Attorney for West Lafayette on the side in the seventies and who the Indiana Trial Lawyers Association eventually gave both its Trial Lawyer of the Year award and its Lifetime Achievement Award. Peers and judges rate him AV Preeminent, which is their assessment rather than his claim.
01
He opened the office in Lafayette four years after being admitted, and set it up to do personal injury work exclusively, a choice most young firms cannot afford to make and most never revisit. Fifty-two years later the firm still takes no other kind of case.
02
Four years acting for a municipality across the river. Public-body work is a different discipline to plaintiff-side injury litigation, and it is the kind of thing that teaches a lawyer how institutions actually decide, which is useful information when the opponent is an institution.
03
An award given by the state's plaintiff-side trial bar to one of its own. It is a peer judgement about courtroom work rather than a marketing placement, which is the only kind of recognition worth putting on a page like this.
04
The same association, fifteen years later, for the body of the work rather than a year of it. He was still practising then and is still practising now.
05
A role in the certification body for trial advocacy in the United States. None of it ever appears in a client's file, and it is the sort of thing a lawyer does because they take the standards of the work seriously.
The firm’s other attorney is J. Aaron Cooke, member - joined the firm in 1997.
He has been admitted to the Indiana bar since 1970. That is the published fact; the arithmetic from there is yours to do, and this site does not do it for you because a rounded figure quietly becomes a claim.
Yes. Both attorneys practise. Which of them handles a given matter is a fair question to ask on the first call.
Anonymous peer review by other members of the bar and the judiciary, across legal ability and general ethical standards. Martindale-Hubbell facilitates the process; the ratings reflect the opinions of other lawyers and judges rather than of clients.
His B.A. is from Purdue, across the river in West Lafayette, in 1967. His J.D. is from the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1970. He came back and has practised in Lafayette since.
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