Reed Smith

Reed Smith, the law firm founded in Pittsburgh with a large presence in Center City, said Tuesday that it has opened an office in Shanghai to complement offices in Beijing and Hong Kong. Jay Yan, a Columbia University Law School-educated lawyer who has practiced in Shanghai for 15 years, has joined the 1,600-lawyer firm as the managing partner of the new Shanghai office. Yan represents clients on cross-border investment, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory and compliance matters and other issues, Reed Smith said.

Here's a workplace riddle: Who hears everything, yet hears nothing? The staff at Reed Smith, a Center City law firm, know the answer: Carol Lennon, chief receptionist. Her policy of complete discretion coupled with a professional attitude have kept her in her job for 50 years. "You never talk about any client, any attorney, or any staff member to anyone else," said Lennon, who was honored this Wednesday with a champagne party at the office. "Fifty years? That is so unusual these days," said Victoria Green, founder of Green Leadership Consulting L.L.C., a management consulting firm in Center City.

A federal court jury yesterday found that lawyer Richard Glanton sexually harassed and defamed Kathleen Frederick, an associate lawyer he supervised, but awarded her only $125,000 in damages. The jury of five men and five women deliberated about 13 hours over three days before returning with a verdict that appeared to be a compromise. Frederick was seeking more than $2 million in damages. The damages were awarded to Frederick not for the sexual harassment but for the defamation - for statements that Glanton, a former aide to Gov. Dick Thornburgh and president of the Barnes Foundation, made to reporters in January 1992 after he learned of Frederick's suit.

The disdain shows in Richard Glanton's faint smile. He is, as always, impeccably and expensively dressed. It has been quite a year for the 46-year- old Glanton. As president of the Barnes Foundation, he liberated that eccentric museum's long-inaccessible collection of impressionist masterpieces. He garnered lots of press. The Barnes show headed for Paris and Tokyo. Glanton was approaching national stature as an attractive, successful African American lawyer and Republican fund-raiser, former top aide to Gov. Dick Thornburgh.

Philadelphia Republican boss William A. Meehan is joining the Philadelphia office of the Pittsburgh-based law firm of Reed, Smith, Shaw & McClay, effective July 16, firm officials said yesterday. Meehan is one of the most powerful Republicans in the state, with more control over party politics than that of many elected officials. His only formal political title is general counsel to the Philadelphia Republican City Committee, but he rules city GOP politics. "Billy runs one of the last remaining effective big-city Republican organizations in the country," said Richard Glanton, a partner at Reed Smith.

Since Reed Smith Shaw & McClay opened a branch office here in 1978, the staid Pittsburgh law firm has attracted clients with deep pockets, powerful new partners and, now, the most unwelcome notoriety in its 116-year history. The cause of the notoriety is the sensational sex harassment case unfolding against the firm and one of its partners, Richard H. Glanton, in federal court. The city's legal community has been sitting on the edge of its chair, listening to allegations by attorney Kathleen A. Frederick that she lost her job at Reed Smith because she ended an affair with Glanton.

The glamour and prestige of a powerful law firm aside, the impact of Reed, Smith, Shaw & McClay's not including Kathleen Frederick in its future came down to dollars she would not see after being denied partnership in the big- league firm, an economist testified yesterday. Paul J. Andrisani, a Temple University management professor and expert in labor economics, testified for Frederick in her sex-discrimination suit against Reed Smith and one of its lawyers, Richard Glanton. Andrisani estimated that her firing would cost her $2.5 million in lost wages from her dismissal until her probable retirement in 2013.

Three friends of Kathleen Frederick, all of them lawyers, told a federal court jury yesterday that an emotionally distraught Frederick confided in 1989 that she was having an affair with lawyer Richard Glanton, and that she feared it would end her career. Frederick, 41, is suing the Center City law firm of Reed, Smith, Shaw & McClay and Glanton, a prominent Republican lawyer and president of the Barnes Foundation, under federal discrimination laws. She is alleging that Glanton coerced her into a sexual relationship with promises of partnership and then set out to destroy her career when she ended the affair.

After four weeks of accusations and innuendo and a plot that could rival a TV miniseries, a federal court jury yesterday began weighing the evidence in Kathleen Frederick's sex discrimination case against Richard Glanton and the law firm of Reed, Smith, Shaw & McClay. The jury of five men and five women deliberated about 50 minutes after a morning of emotion-filled and fractious closing arguments from the lawyers and lengthy instructions by U.S. District Judge Robert F. Kelly. The deliberations resume this morning.

Seeking to void a judgment to pay $81,000 in court costs of a group that challenged his 2004 presidential nominating petitions, Ralph Nader contended yesterday that the group's law firm should have disclosed its ties to three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices who ruled in its favor. Nader, the longtime consumer advocate who was an independent presidential candidate in 2004, lost his court fight in the state Supreme Court to get a spot on Pennsylvania's ballot - and he lost again when the high court ruled in 2006 that he must pay about $81,000 for court transcripts and handwriting experts hired by the ad hoc group that contested his petitions.

The law firm of Reed Smith L.L.P. will move its Center City offices for the first time since 1989. Brandywine Realty Trust said Reed Smith signed a lease for 115,000 square feet of space in Three Logan Square, 1717 Arch St. The firm, which has more than 150 lawyers in Philadelphia, currently occupies 156,534 square feet in One Liberty Place, 1650 Market St. Reed Smith chief of operations Pat Hiltibidal said the firm intended to move its 300...

Moorestown lawyer Daniel Mateo grew up a "nerdy, skinny kid" in South Camden, which he describes as excellent training for his profession. "Nothing that happens in a courtroom [is] quite like being chased down a street," the father of two says. "Talk about a life lesson. It makes you tough in a different sort of way. " Two weeks ago, Mateo was sworn in as president of the 300-member Hispanic Bar Association of New Jersey. He had the ceremony in Camden, because he wants to emphasize that anything is possible - even for kids who are growing up in one of America's poorest cities, as he did. "We invited 10 high school students," he says.

Reed Smith, the law firm founded in Pittsburgh with a large presence in Center City, said Tuesday that it has opened an office in Shanghai to complement offices in Beijing and Hong Kong. Jay Yan, a Columbia University Law School-educated lawyer who has practiced in Shanghai for 15 years, has joined the 1,600-lawyer firm as the managing partner of the new Shanghai office. Yan represents clients on cross-border investment, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory and compliance matters and other issues, Reed Smith said.

Here's a workplace riddle: Who hears everything, yet hears nothing? The staff at Reed Smith, a Center City law firm, know the answer: Carol Lennon, chief receptionist. Her policy of complete discretion coupled with a professional attitude have kept her in her job for 50 years. "You never talk about any client, any attorney, or any staff member to anyone else," said Lennon, who was honored this Wednesday with a champagne party at the office. "Fifty years? That is so unusual these days," said Victoria Green, founder of Green Leadership Consulting L.L.C., a management consulting firm in Center City.

As a military intelligence officer in the Mekong River Delta region of Vietnam in the late 1960s, where U.S. forces battled both the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong, Chris Walters had no trouble identifying enemy soldiers. They were the ones who were shooting at you. It was Walters' job to find out where the enemy stored munitions, what they had in the way of defenses, and what their battlefield plans were. The people Walters interrogated had been picked up following shoot-outs or had been pulled out of bunkers stuffed with weapons.

Tort reform should be included Any attempt at fairly predicting the impact of tort reform on medical resource utilization would be nothing more than an irresponsible stab in the dark. While the vast majority of physicians favor fair compensation to those patients that have sustained injury from a medically negligent action, what seems misplaced, and surprisingly not mentioned, is the 40-50 percent portion of the monetary judgment awarded to the patient and then immediately diverted to the representing attorney as "fair compensation.

John F. Smith III is a senior litigator at Reed Smith L.L.P., of Philadelphia, who served for 11 years on the firm's executive committee and now, in addition to representing clients, is deeply involved in programs aimed at sharpening the business-development skills of young lawyers. Law firms for years had given such training short shrift, relying on a relative handful of relationship partners to generate work. Younger associates typically had little idea where the work came from, or what firms had to do to get it. Smith, who serves on the boards of a number of locally prominent institutions, says he is trying to change that by showing younger lawyers more of the business side of the law firm.

Last summer, Sowathany Jessica Ourk had a high-end-job offer in hand from Morgan, Lewis & Bockius L.L.P., the large Center City law firm, and planned this fall to apply her legal skills on behalf of corporate America. She still has the offer, but now finds herself quite unexpectedly on the front lines of the brutal restructuring wave lashing law firms from coast to coast. Ourk received an e-mail March 2 from Morgan Lewis hiring partner Eric Kraeutler saying the start date for new lawyers at Morgan Lewis would be delayed a year as the firm coped with the ongoing recession in the legal market.

The steady drumbeat of layoffs in the legal world continued yesterday with the announcement by Reed Smith L.L.P. that it would let go 100 lawyers and staff in offices in the United States and London. The firm, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh and has a large Center City office, said it would let go 17 lawyers in various U.S. offices and nine in its London office. A total of 74 administrative staff also would be laid off, the firm said, in the United States and the United Kingdom.