Lawyer y Lawyer is Mano y Mano

March 16, 2010 12:15 PM
Personal Injury Firm Caught Up in Dispute With Former Partner

Posted by Zach Lowe

Oh, boy. The dirty laundry is being aired in three separate lawsuits involving the Philadelphia personal injury firm Anapol Schwartz Weiss Cohan Feldman & Smalley, and the suits paint a picture of a firm divided over how to pay its lawyers and worried about those it pushes out for stealing its business.

The trouble started last year, when Anapol demoted one of its shareholders, Howard Levin, to of counsel status, according to a whopper of a story in the Legal Intelligencer, an Am Law Daily sibling publication. Levin refused the demotion and left the firm to start his own practice, a move that triggered three separate lawsuits that reveal tensions between litigators and rainmakers, the paper says.

The firm claimed Levin, a litigator, no longer deserved shareholder status because of his "failure to generate an independent book of business." Levin countered that it was his litigation skills that kept the firm afloat for years before the firm won a $21 million Vioxx payday in 2007, the Intelligencer says. Levin claims he deserved better and protested the firm's move to emphasize rainmaking over winning cases, the paper reports.

The order of lawsuits goes like this: The firm sued Levin on New Year's Eve for taking pending business with him but not sharing the fees from that business under the terms outlined in the Anapol shareholder agreement pertaining to lawyers who leave the firm, the Intelligencer reports. Levin fired back with his own suit, claiming the firm wrongly cut his compensation and that its fee-sharing rules for ex-lawyers who take business with them constitute "unethical restraints on his ability to practice law and a client's right to choose Levin" as its attorney, the Intelligencer says.

Finally, the firm sued a former associate, Beth Adamski, who followed Levin to his new firm. The firm says she and Levin entered into "a conspiracy" to open up their own firm and take business from Anapol. The firm accuses Adamski of funneling internal information to Levin while she was still at Anapol and e-mailing client-related documents to herself.

There's much, much more, and the entire story is worth a read.