Firms

Two suburban meeting-planning firms have joined forces: Lead Dog Inc. of Swarthmore and Meetings & More of Blue Bell will form Lead Dog Inc., Conferences, Special Events, Meetings & More. Carmel Rose Caporale, who was a partner and director of meeting services at Meetings & More, will join Lead Dog founders Marc Rose and Mary Susan Ryan Milbourne. Caporale is a certified meeting professional and is on the board of directors of the Philadelphia area chapter of Meeting Professionals International.

Before Mary Monica Mitchell entered his life, Philadelphia lawyer Bob Katzenstein thought nothing of excusing himself from a session with a client to take a phone call. It was efficient because it kept him from having to play telephone tag for the next few days. But Mitchell, president of the Philadelphia firm Uncommon Courtesies, reminded him and others in his firm that abandoning someone in mid-interview isn't nice - and that nice counts in the tougher business climate of the 1990s.

The planned merger of Philadelphia's Wolf Block with a Miami-based law firm to create a giant that would span the East Coast is taking place amid a debate about whether law firms need to be huge simply to survive. Many firms in Philadelphia and across the nation have adopted an aggressive growth model. But the strategy can pose risks, and there is some evidence that midsize firms can thrive by focusing their practices and targeting regional clients left behind by larger firms seeking a much wider national and even global footprint.

At a meeting last March, the three-member body that controls the Philadelphia Gas Works pension fund voted to hire several new firms to manage pension fund investments. Although the vote to hire the firms was conducted in a public meeting, the specific firms being retained were not discussed, and the names of the firms were not revealed until after the vote was taken and the meeting adjourned. Consumer activists have now filed suit to reverse the action, charging that the decisions had been made in secret in violation of the state open-meetings law. In a complaint filed last week, the groups presented an affidavit by a former financial consultant to the three-member body stating he believed that the firms were decided on before the meeting.

U.S. District Court Judge John F. Gerry yesterday approved a plan in which 10 companies responsible for dumping toxic wastes in the Lipari landfill in Pitman, Gloucester County, would help pay $3 million toward the cost of cleaning up the site, which is ranked high on the federal government's Superfund list. Rohm & Haas Co., which dumped about 46,000 of the 54,000 55-gallon drums of waste at Lipari and must pay for most of the cleanup, protested the settlement and asked the judge not to give his approval.

Times are tough for real estate - and especially so for single-office real estate firms. During the last dip in the housing market, the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, many small- and medium-size real estate concerns - including some that had weathered previous storms - merged with larger firms or went under. In 1988, at the start of that downturn, Richard Astrella acquired his Pennsylvania real estate license. In 2004, as the market peaked, he became a broker and started Star Real Estate Group, which has its office at the Bourse in Center City.

In a meeting marked by heckling and the ejection of three consumer activists, the commission governing the Philadelphia Gas Works pension fund yesterday voted to increase the number of firms paid to manage the fund's assets. The list of firms being considered was secret until the vote, and commission chairman Anthony DiSandro refused even afterward to release the names. Another board member, city Finance Director Stephen Mullin, released the list after requests from reporters.

After 16 years of legal skirmishing, a mountain of paper work and rulings in the highest courts in the land, the monumental antitrust and dumping case filed by two U.S. electronics companies against their Japanese competitors appears - finally - to have ended. In a unanimous ruling last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia dismissed the landmark case against 21 Japanese television and radio makers accused of a predatory pricing conspiracy to eliminate competition in the American market.

Two firms were paid more than $4 million by Medicare, mostly for selling and renting wheelchairs, hospital beds, heating pads and commodes to elderly people who neither asked for nor needed the items, federal authorities contend. The related companies, Home Health Care Products Inc. and Federal Home Care, and nine people who own or work for them have been sued for fraud in federal court here. The owners were identified as Mark Mickman and Don Schatzman, both New Jersey residents.

A City Council bill that would grant Philadelphia brokerage houses the virtually exclusive right to buy and sell securities for the city's pension fund may be gathering momentum despite considerable opposition from city officials. The measure, which has languished before Council's Labor and Civil Service Committee for nearly a year, may be listed for a public hearing within the next 30 days, Robert Rego, chief of staff for committee Chairman Leland M. Beloff, said last week. Democrat Beloff and Council President Joseph E. Coleman are co-sponsors of the measure introduced by Republican Councilman Brian J. O'Neill.