Theodore C. Theofrastous Cleveland, Ohio

Neutral and Expert Services

Neutral and expert services.

Theodore C. Theofrastous accepts appointment as arbitrator, mediator, early neutral evaluator and special master, and accepts engagement as an expert witness, in matters involving technology, intellectual property, licensing, venture finance and research institutions.

Admitted in Ohio and the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio (1999). Author of “International Commercial Arbitration in Europe: Subsidiarity and Supremacy in the Light of the Delocalization Debate,” 31 Case W. Res. J. Int'l L. 455 (1999), written as Editor-in-Chief of that journal.

Subject matter

  • Technology licensing and transfer agreements, including university and research-institution licences
  • Intellectual property ownership, assignment, inventorship and scope-of-licence disputes
  • Joint development, sponsored research and collaboration agreements
  • Venture finance and shareholder disputes in early-stage technology companies
  • Valuation disputes where comparables are absent, disputed or misleading
  • Artificial intelligence and data disputes, including training-data provenance, model licensing and governance obligations
  • Nonprofit and research-institution governance

Procedure

Needs your input — blocking This section states how you conduct a proceeding: whether you take appointments through panels (AAA, CPR, JAMS, FINRA, a court roster) or by party agreement only, your practice on pre-hearing conferences, written versus live evidence, reasoned awards, and whether you take sole-arbitrator, panel or chair appointments. It also states your compensation basis and cancellation terms. I have not drafted it, because inventing procedural commitments for a neutral would misrepresent how you actually run a case.

Availability

Needs your input — blocking Current availability, geographic scope, and whether you sit remotely. This depends on the capacity figure that also drives How I Work.

Disclosure

The following affiliations are disclosed as a standing matter so that parties may evaluate them before appointment rather than discover them afterward. This list is not a substitute for case-specific conflicts disclosure, which is made in every matter.

Standing disclosure

  • Partner, Kohrman Jackson & Krantz LLP; Chair, Intellectual Property, Technology & New Ventures; Chair, AI Strategy, Risk Management & Compliance.
  • General Counsel and Chief Innovation Officer, BRITE Energy Innovators (Warren, Ohio).
  • Faculty appointments at Case Western Reserve University: Adjunct Professor of Law and Engineering; Distinguished Practitioner in Residence; Director, FUSION Certificate Program.
  • Founding Chairman, Ohio Invents. Founding President and Trustee, the North East Ohio Musical Heritage Association. Co-Founding Director, Classrooms to Corporations. Trustee and Treasurer, the Hessler Neighborhood Association. Director, IdEnergie.
  • Prior roles bearing on Northeast Ohio technology and energy institutions, including Advanced Energy Fellow at NorTech, Chief Commercialization Counsel at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, managing director and fund counsel at Panzica Investments, and founding chairman of Chardon Tomorrow. The institutional engagements described under The Work are part of this disclosure and should be read as such.
  • Engagements are contracted through ThetaSquared, LLC, which is not a law firm and does not provide legal services.
Two decisions still open on this page First, whether this page belongs on this domain at all. A neutral has to appear unaligned, and The Work catalogues the Northeast Ohio institutions you built and the regional bodies you convened. In a regional technology or energy dispute the parties may be organisations on that page. I have built the page here with the standing disclosure above, which is the low-regret version, but a separate domain remains the cleaner answer and you have not chosen. Second, whether Kohrman Jackson & Krantz has cleared neutral and expert appointments taken outside the firm, and on what conflicts-checking terms. That is a gating question for this page, not a stylistic one, and it also governs the capacity figure on How I Work.