A firm that finishes the file — eighteen years of forensic work on the Lake Erie industrial corridor.

§1An origin in 2008

Margaret Trzaska finished her PhD in power-systems engineering at Carnegie Mellon in May 2008. Her dissertation, on the propagation of capacitor-switching transients through industrial distribution systems, was supervised by Marija Ilic and read by Granger Morgan; it was the kind of dissertation that gets you a faculty interview in a normal year. The year was not normal. Bear Stearns had collapsed in March; Lehman would go in September; the four faculty searches she had on her shortlist closed in succession between May and August.

She came home to Erie. Her father had been a Pennsylvania Electric Company lineman based out of the West Lake Road garage in Millcreek Township for thirty-one years, and the family lived four blocks from the bay on Pittsburgh Avenue that the firm now occupies. The work she could find was forensic — Erie Insurance Exchange had an opening for a contracted electrical investigator, paid by the matter, no benefits — and the work she could not find was anywhere else. She incorporated as a Pennsylvania professional corporation on the 15th of September, 2008. The first Case File was opened that same week: a Class-B kitchen fire at a duplex on East 28th Street, traced to a non-listed outdoor extension cord left in the rain.

The firm took on its second engineer, Theron Adekunle, PE, in 2015. Adekunle had spent eleven years at Bechtel’s industrial-power group in Frederick, Maryland, on the petroleum-refining side of the practice, and had grown tired of the travel. He came to Erie for the lakefront and stayed for the work, which was — and remains — a steadier diet of mid-voltage industrial than he could get east of the Allegheny. Adekunle was the firm’s first hire who had not done his undergraduate at Penn State Behrend; the next two hires would correct that.

§2How the firm was built

For the first six years the firm was Dr. Trzaska, a Hioki PQ3100 power-quality recorder rented for a flat monthly fee from AEMC’s Akron office, a 2009 Ford Transit Connect, and an answering service in Cleveland. Margie wrote her reports at a kitchen table at her parents’ until the youngest of her three brothers graduated and she could afford the lease on the original Pittsburgh Avenue bay (Bay 7, at 2118, since taken over by a brake shop). The firm filed an average of twenty-two Case Files a year during that period. None of them is featured in current marketing; many of them taught lessons that are still in operation in the firm’s present methodology.

The 2015 Adekunle hire let the firm move into the larger Bay 4 at 2104, which had previously been the rear shop of a foundry-pattern shop and still has the overhead crane rails — useful when a 1,200-pound failed motor needs to be lifted onto a test bench. Hanna Lindqvist-Vasilakou, PE, CFEI, joined in 2019, brought her NAFI CFEI credential, and effectively gave the firm a stand-alone fire-origin practice that the partnership now bills under R-01. Doménico Marcantonio joined as an EIT in 2023, a Behrend power-track graduate; he is sitting for the Pennsylvania PE in October 2026.

The current shop layout is one principals’ office, one shared associate office, a wet bench, a dry bench, an environmentally-controlled instrument cabinet (calibrated to ISO 17025 traceability through Tektronix calibration services), a forty-foot conduit lab built into the rear wall, and a fireproof archive vault that holds Case File evidence under chain-of-custody seal for the firm’s ten-year retention policy. The shop is heated by a 1972 gas-fired Modine and cooled by two Mitsubishi mini-splits installed in 2019; the office space is partitioned with reclaimed sash glass from a Lord Corporation building on West 12th that was demolished in 2014.

§3A method, not a brand

The firm does not have a tagline. The Filed Record was started in 2019 partly to give a published-citation handle to findings that would otherwise live only inside sealed PE reports, and partly because three of the firm’s four principals teach evening sections at Penn State Behrend’s School of Engineering and were already producing draft material for class. The publication has not been positioned as marketing; the firm is small, its capacity is full, and it has never advertised. It exists because the engineering profession in this country was built to publish, not to argue.

The methodology under each of the firm’s eight Protocol headings is therefore stable, documented, and citable from its issued report number — R-01 through R-08, indexed at the Reports page. Each one names the standards it follows, the instruments it uses, the deliverable it produces, and the typical fee range a retaining counsel or insurer can expect to budget. A second engineer who walks the same scene with the same standards in hand should reach the same finding. That is the working definition of forensic — “belonging to courts of judicature” — and it is the threshold the firm tests every report against.

“The bar wants conclusions; the engineering profession can offer findings. The job of a forensic firm is to honor the second without pretending to deliver the first.” Margaret W. Trzaska, PhD, PE · Filed Record Vol. III No. 1, March 2021

§4Eighteen-year ledger

1. 2008

   Incorporation; first Case File opened

   The firm files articles of incorporation as a Pennsylvania professional corporation on 15 September 2008. CF-2008-001 is opened the following week — a Class-B kitchen fire at a duplex on East 28th Street, traced to a non-listed extension cord. The firm operates out of a kitchen table.

2. 2011

   Bay 7 lease at 2118 Pittsburgh Avenue

   First proper shop space — a single bay shared with a paint contractor, 1,400 sq ft. Hioki PQ3100 leased from AEMC. First contract with Erie Insurance Exchange as a panel-approved electrical investigator.

3. 2013

   First testimony · Erie County Common Pleas

   Direct testimony in Karetski v. Borough of Lawrence Park, a contested street-lighting electrocution matter. The plaintiff prevailed; Dr. Trzaska’s qualifying voir dire stands as the firm’s first sustained expert qualification.

4. 2015

   Adekunle joins; move to Bay 4 at 2104

   Theron Adekunle, PE, transfers from Bechtel’s Frederick, MD office. Bay 4 at 2104 Pittsburgh Avenue is leased — overhead crane rails intact from prior foundry-pattern tenant. Capacity for motor-failure RCA work begins here.

5. 2017

   First IEEE 1584 arc-flash study

   The firm closes its first arc-flash incident reconstruction with a calibrated IEEE 1584 study. CF-2017-082 — an injury at a 480 V switchgear room at a Meadville casting plant — establishes the working pattern for R-02 reports.

6. 2019

   Lindqvist-Vasilakou joins; CFEI capacity

   Hanna Lindqvist-Vasilakou, PE, joins; brings her NAFI CFEI certification. The firm formalizes R-01 fire-origin-and-cause as a stand-alone practice. The Filed Record publishes its first issue (Vol. I No. 1, October 2019).

7. 2020

   Pandemic — remote dockets

   Six bench trials with the firm as expert witness convert to videoconference; the practice adapts. The Hioki PQ3198 (IEC 61000-4-30 Class A) is purchased outright as the lockdown drives a backlog of unattended power-quality data logging across plants whose engineers cannot physically visit.

8. 2022

   Doble M4100 commissioning

   The firm acquires a Doble M4100 insulation-and-power-factor test set, enabling in-shop transformer dissipation-factor testing and Megger-based diagnostics on motors brought into Bay 4. Capacity for R-03 motor-failure RCA expands accordingly.

9. 2023

   Marcantonio EIT hire

   Doménico Marcantonio joins as an associate; Penn State Behrend BSEE 2022. Sitting for the PA PE October 2026. The firm establishes a formal mentoring track for EITs through the PA State Board for PEs reciprocity program.

10. 2025

    Quarterly cited in Common Pleas

    An issue of The Filed Record (Vol. VI No. 4, December 2024) is cited in Markham v. Northwestern Paper at Erie County Common Pleas. The judge admits the citation over objection. Filed publication is, henceforth, a matter of record.

11. 2026

    This issue · Vol. VIII No. 2

    The firm enters its eighteenth year. Four featured Case Files this quarter — three on 480 V secondary investigations and one shore-power pedestal. The summer issue is expected to lean substation.

§5Where the work goes next

The firm has no growth plan. Eighteen years of practice with no advertising have produced a backlog that the four principals can clear at the published rate without expanding capacity, and Dr. Trzaska is plain about the fact that the firm’s value to its retaining counsel and insurers depends on its principals knowing each other’s reports closely enough to catch each other’s blind spots. A fifth PE would be welcome; a fifth PE who would be on a flight every other week to Texas would not. The firm is interested in expanding R-04 power-quality survey capacity locally in the Lake Erie corridor (Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Erie itself) and in the continued growth of R-07 lightning and surge investigations as the region’s aging open-wire distribution gets replaced.

The firm is open to retainers from local industrial clients on annual standing arrangements (a quarterly site walk-through, an annual IEEE 519 study, a refreshed arc-flash incident-energy survey under IEEE 1584-2018); see the Engage page. It is closed to retainers from parties on both sides of contested matters; it is also closed to retainers from out-of-state counsel where the firm would have to qualify in a court it does not regularly testify in. The relevant jurisdictions are listed on the Principals roster.

Counsel new to the firm should expect, at the first call, three questions — what happened, who is there now, and what has been moved — followed by a conflict check that runs against ten years of retained records. The conflict check is binding and final. If a conflict is identified, the firm will not accept the matter, even if the principals on the prior matter have retired or moved on. The firm’s retention policy is at the Privacy page.

§6Sources