Jerome Drabiak

A skilled engineer and an experienced patent attorney, Jerome Drabiak has dedicated the past 30 years of his professional life to the field of intellectual property. After completing his chemical engineering education at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, at the end of 1971, Mr. Drabiak relocated to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked as a process-design engineer, initially in the area of chemical manufacturing and later in the area of food processing.

Working as an engineer by day, Mr. Drabiak took graduate-level engineering courses at night, initially at a nearby Purdue University's "satellite" campus, and thereafter at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he earned a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering from IIT in August 1976. Jerome Drabiak next completed his Juris Doctor from the John Marshall School of Law in Chicago, while working full time as an engineer.

With two professional degrees in hand in vastly different fields, Mr. Drabiak took the Illinois state bar exam and the Illinois Professional Engineering Examination within months of each other. Successfully passing both exams, Jerome Drabiak found himself at a critical crossroads in his professional development. Mr. Drabiak ultimately chose to dedicate himself to protecting intellectual property. Since a chief patent counsel at his engineering job had told him quite matter-of-factly that patent law skills could only be learned in private practice, Jerome Drabiak worked for the next five years as an Associate at well-known Chicago-area patent law firms before accepting a position with a consumer-products company in Wisconsin.

Since March 2001, Jerome Drabiak has worked for the Xerox Corporation in upstate New York and is now a Senior Patent Counsel there, where he assists Xerox's patent-licensing business group, as well as its litigation-defense legal team. His duties involve researching and analyzing legal issues and providing support to the company's patent-licensing and litigation-defense teams. As a presenter at patent-licensing negotiations with third parties, Jerome Drabiak is tasked with finding clear and convincing evidence of infringement of Xerox patent claims by such third parties. Mr. Drabiak also presents defenses, including non-infringement and invalidity defenses, for neutralizing assertions of patent violations leveled against Xerox itself.