Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP

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Schnader's team of outstanding lawyers serves the complex litigation and transactional needs of both long established and newly emerging businesses, including those doing business internationally and in cyberspace. We also provide wealth management and an array of personal legal services to individuals.

Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP
1600 Market St #3600
Philadelphia PA 19103-7286
Tel: 215 751-2000
Fax: 215 751-2205

Schnader was founded in 1935. In that year, Schnader & Lewis opened its doors at 1719 Packard Building with three attorneys. Since that time, the Firm has grown to include attorneys in seven offices across the nation with Philadelphia as our largest office and headquarters for the Firm's business operations. Today, Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP is a law firm whose more than 180 attorneys serve local, regional, national and international clients in more than 40 areas of the law.

Schnader's commitment to attracting talented attorneys is reflected throughout its history. In 1988, a group of family law attorneys from the Philadelphia firm Abrahams Loewenstein joined Schnader, establishing for the Firm the largest family law practice in the state. In June 2000, Schnader combined its practice with Mesirov Gelman Jaffe Cramer & Jamieson, adding greater depth to the Philadelphia office's corporate and real estate practices.

Nature of Practice

The Philadelphia office provides services in litigation, business services, labor and employment, real estate, tax, intellectual property, family law, and trusts and estates. The office has an established national reputation for its strength and depth in the litigation area, with a growing reputation for the breadth of our transactional practice.

Description of Practice Areas

Litigation Services

Our Litigation Services Department has achieved notable successes at both the trial and appellate levels. We have tried many jury trials throughout the country, as well as bench trials and arbitrations. In addition, our lawyers have argued before every Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States. We have served as national trial and coordinating counsel in matters involving up to 1,000 related lawsuits and thus have experience in developing consistent defenses, effective fact witnesses and expert witnesses who can communicate with juries in a variety of courtroom settings.

Our trial lawyers are involved in every type of civil proceeding and many types of criminal cases as well. While we have always engaged in general litigation practice, we also have specialized subgroups in antitrust, arbitration and mediation, trade regulation, insurance, aviation, employment and labor, employee benefits, financial services litigation, product liability, e-commerce and high technology, First Amendment and defamation, environmental regulation and litigation, class action, securities and shareholders derivative litigation, toxic tort and white-collar crime.

Clients we have represented in major litigation include television networks and other broadcasters, motion picture producers and distributors, publishers, oil companies, automobile manufacturers, aircraft and aircraft component manufacturers, airlines, steel producers, electronics companies, computer manufacturers, food service companies, construction engineers, banks, department stores, tire manufacturers, telephone companies, drug companies, health care providers, investment bankers, insurers, accountants, lawyers and a host of others.

Business Services

Our corporate experience includes bankruptcy, workout and business reorganization; corporate finance and securities; mergers and acquisitions; corporate governance; public and private offerings of equity and debt securities; joint ventures; tax-exempt bond issues; leveraged leasing; commercial leasing; real estate financing; health care; and project finance. Our clients include large, publicly held corporations, but also privately held small and mid-size businesses, employee-owned companies, large and small financial institutions, insurance companies, limited partnerships and individual entrepreneurs.

We counsel businesses of every size, providing them with timely, cost-effective legal representation and helping them to structure, negotiate and close business transactions. A large number of our corporate clients operate in heavily regulated industries such as health care, transportation and pharmaceuticals, to name a few.

Our attorneys counsel clients in all phases of the business cycle from start-up through initial public offering to ongoing compliance matters. We handle formation and capitalization transactions for startups, including seed money and venture capital transactions, and we help more established companies with private placements and public offerings of debt and equity. We represent clients in the acquisition and sale of businesses and in transnational and international transactions. Additionally, our attorneys serve as general counsel to our clients, rendering legal advice on matters that affect their businesses on a regular basis including noncompetition covenants, employment agreements, shareholder agreements, equipment transactions, sales and general contract matters.

Labor and Employment

Our labor and employment attorneys provide a full range of counseling and litigation services to management in all aspects of labor and employment law matters. We practice before administrative agencies, in state and federal courts and in arbitration proceedings. Our attorneys frequently negotiate and draft collective bargaining agreements for clients and regularly counsel them on matters of contract administration.

Offering a comprehensive program to assist employers on how to respond to union organizational efforts, we maintain a full spectrum NLRB practice, including representation proceedings, unfair labor practice proceedings and jurisdictional disputes. Our attorneys have represented numerous employers during major labor strikes, and have obtained injunctions and counseled employers on the hiring of replacement workers.

We counsel management in every aspect of employment law, including equal employment opportunity matters; defense of wrongful discharge and defamation lawsuits; advice with respect to multi-employer pension plans; negotiation and drafting of executive employment contracts; safety and hazardous materials matters, such as OSHA and employee right-to-know legislation; antitrust and RICO actions; trade secrets; restrictive covenants and claims of "employee piracy;" state employment legislation; and unemployment compensation and workers' compensation issues.

Employee Benefits

Our employee benefits work covers five broad categories of legal services: pension and profit sharing (including 401(k) plans); welfare benefit plans; executive compensation; employee stock ownership plans; and litigation. Our clients include the transportation, health care, consumer products, construction, banking, publishing, electronics, computer technology and insurance industries, and the arts and education fields.

Real Estate

Schnader’s real estate practice serves a wide range of entrepreneurial, institutional and public sector clients. In recent years Schnader’s lawyers in our real estate and real estate lending practice groups have played leading roles in high-profile projects, including the construction, renovation, sale or refinancing of convention centers, sports arenas, waterfront developments, air hub distribution centers, shopping centers and other projects.

Family Law

Our Family Law Department is the largest in Pennsylvania and one of the most respected in the country. Our attorneys handle all phases of family law, including divorce, property division, alimony, taxation, child support, custody, adoption and paternity. Our attorneys are frequently called on to represent clients with cases on the cutting edge of the law, including reverse paternity, domestic torts, prenuptial agreements, jurisdictional conflicts, surrogate parenting and DNA fingerprinting. Many landmark cases have been tried or argued by our attorneys at the trial and appellate levels. Complex matrimonial cases often involve issues of taxes, transfers of real property, business valuations, pensions and estate planning.

Intellectual Property

Our intellectual property practice includes domestic and international patent and trademark solicitation, patent litigation, opinions, licensing, due diligence investigation and analysis, and related matters. We have extensive technical patent capabilities in the mechanical, chemical engineering, electrical engineering and biotechnology fields.

Trusts and Estates

Our trusts and estates lawyers are experienced in all aspects of trust and estate planning. We work with business executives to integrate personal financial and estate planning with corporate benefits packages and are often hired by corporations to provide this service to their executives. We have experience in the complex area of charitable giving, including charitable remainders and lead trust arrangements.

We help create and provide ongoing representation to large and small private foundations. We advise several public charities concerning planned giving including creation and operation of pooled income funds and other charitable vehicles. Our trusts and estates lawyers are actively involved in the administration of estates, a variety of trusts and private foundations. Through a custody arrangement between a Philadelphia bank and our own estates accounting unit, we are able to handle all administrative details promptly and efficiently.

We have developed long-standing relationships with a variety of trust institutions and represent numerous hospitals, schools and other institutions in connection with gifts and bequests. Our attorneys are experienced in protecting the interests of beneficiaries, creditors and others in estate and trust matters, including will contests and other litigation. Our trusts and estates lawyers are involved with personal planning, including asset protection, planning for the possibility of incompetency and the sensitive area of health care decision-making.

Schnader's Nationwide Network of Offices

With offices in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Washington, DC, California and Pennsylvania, Schnader’s attorneys bring together a diverse set of skills to serve our clients. Attorneys in our Philadelphia office work collectively with attorneys in Schnader’s nationwide network of offices to deliver legal services of the highest quality in all our areas of practice. We use our state-of-the-art computer network and communications capability (including video conferencing) to maximize our legal resources, regardless of where among our offices those resources are located. Our common bond is a commitment to excellence and hard work, and a dedication to providing the highest quality legal services to the Firm’s clients on a cost-effective basis.