Clayton Attorney Sokol Passionate About Road Racing

When Dan Sokol isn't working on family law cases in downtown , he can often be found pushing the limits of his seal gray Porsche on a road-racing track.

Sokol and his wife, Rose-Lynn, have lived in the city for more than a decade. The longtime attorney recently received recognition as the best family law attorney in St. Louis for 2012 by The Best Lawyers in America.

People often tell Sokol they could never do his job, and he acknowledges that he often sees people at their worst. The founding shareholder in law firm provides guidance to people going through divorce and other issues.

"I guess it is stressful, it is tense, that's part of what makes it so challenging," Sokol said. "But you also have the gratification of having assisted people in a professional manner through a very difficult trip they have to take."

The path to family law
But he thinks his skill set is a good fit for the job. Sokol majored in marketing at New York University as an undergraduate. He had planned to get an MBA. After graduating, he worked for a consulting firm in Manhattan before deciding to go to law school at Saint Louis University.

Since graduating, Sokol has served as an assistant prosecutor for St. Louis County, a municipal judge for St. Louis City and an alternate judge for Clayton. He has been in private practice for decades and said the focus on family law that he began 25 years ago simply represents the evolution of his career.

It is a subject area that has changed over time.

"Family law has always demanded some knowledge in a wide variety of subject matters, and that's increased over the years," Sokol said. Forensic accountants are used more frequently today than in the past, for example. Attorneys must know something about personal finance, taxation, social work, psychology and pensions, among other topics.

Perceptions about gender also are different, even though "some vestiges of sexism" remain, Sokol said. Women now pay spousal support to their ex-husbands, for example, and more women have been appointed as judges. He said those changes have made his job more personally refreshing.

The economic downturn has presented challenges in helping clients find resolution. While in the past, couples who are splitting might have sold a big house and bought two smaller ones, couples today find themselves unable to sell the big one and unable to afford the smaller ones. People have more debt and fewer assets.

He suspects more people are staying in unhappy marriages because of those circumstances.

On the track
Racing lets Sokol step away from work and focus solely on driving. He doesn't have much of a choice when trying to negotiate hairpin turns and hills.

"It's the ultimate escape from the office," said Sokol, who is a member of the St. Louis chapter of the Porsche Club of America.

Sokol has always been a car nut, and he's preferred sports cars to muscle cars since the late 1960s. He began racing in earnest in 1990 when he bought a Porsche 911. It had peculiar handling quirks at its limits, so he decided to attend a weekend driving school.

"I pretty well got hooked," he said. Now, he's participated in more than 90 such driver education (DE) events and has logged thousands upon thousands of miles on race courses.

His most recent event happened Sunday at Gateway Motorsports Park, a newly revived 1.6-mile course.

The events are noncompetitive: There are no trophies, and no times are kept. Instead, they serve to equip drivers with the skills they need to handle vehicles as they were meant to be driven and react in the event of an emergency.

He does most of the maintenance on his own vehicle. He's got floor jacks and an air compressor, among other gear. He installs race pads on his brakes before an event and has a separate set of tires.

He'd prefer to not scrub the tread off his regular wheels in a single weekend.

He also volunteers as a high-performance driving instructor for the Porsche club and St. Louis-area Audi and BMW clubs. He's taught between 25 and 30 times at places such as Putnam Park in Indiana and Heartland Park Topeka in Kansas.

"It makes people better street drivers," Sokol said.

Reflecting on St. Louis
Sokol and his family initially moved to the Central West End because it most reminded them of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where they had previously lived.

They then moved to Clayton and have lived in the city for about 17 years.

Sokol loves the city. He lives four blocks from his office in the Pierre Laclede Center on Forsyth Boulevard. The firm has grown from eight lawyers in 2001 to 20 today.

"We've been hiring throughout the recession," Sokol said. The office will soon grow to include the entire 12th floor of the building.

He sees Clayton as a nice mix of urban and suburban with both skyscrapers and green space. His family's nearness to the central business district allows them to go to dinner, take a leisurely walk home and do so safely.

His wife, Rose-Lynn, is a real estate agent with Prudential Alliance. The couple have two sons. Their older son, Andrew, will turn 30 in December and works in New York for a large law firm based in Boston and Washington, D.C. Their 28-year-old son, David, also is a New York lawyer. He works for a large firm headquartered in the state.

He's not particularly surprised that the two are working in the same career field as him in the state he once called home. Both like urban areas, Sokol said, and they have found good places to start their careers.

Plus, it gives their parents the opportunity to visit regularly.