The best way to avoid being sued by a design/build firm is to never look at any plans that they have produced. We follow that procedure in our office. Unfortunately, we did look at preliminary (unregistered) Timberpeg plans associated with the lawsuit, and even though we did not copy them, we paid dearly for the mistake. Any T-Peg plans should be politely returned to the customer without having been opened.
The Architectural Copyright law is interesting. The bar for originality in architectural design is very low. For instance, if someone designs a box of a certain dimension and copyrights it, then they own the exclusive rights to that box and can sue anyone who looks at their box then designs one like it. However, if the person they try to sue has never seen the plans for the box, and designs the same box on their own, they are not liable because they never had access to the plans.
Also, once a plan has been copyrighted, the owner of the copyright owns all the original material in the plan, so changing one or two things is not enough to avoid a copyright lawsuit. The subsequent plan must not be substantially similar to the original design.
The jury instructions in our case do a very good job describing what infringes and what does not.
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