Arlin Adams is one of the city's best known and distinguished lawyers and now after a career that began in 1947 at Schader Harrison, he has decied to retire and devote more of his time to personal interests. To many lawyers in Philadelphia, Adams, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, was the soul of judicial and lawyerly discernment. Certainly, many political leaders thought of him that way. He was close to former Gov. William Scranton and former President Nixon and an advisor to former Reagan confidante and Philadelphia publisher Walter Annenberg. Officially, his last day at the firm was Dec. 30. But firm insiders say it is a safe bet he will still be regularly seen in the corridors of Schnader Harrison.

Corporate legal departments appear ever so slightly to be easing up on the cost cutting that has ruled their world since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Newtown Square based legal consultant Altman Weil says a survey of chief legal officers shows 56 percent modestly increased legal department budgets this year. That’s up from 51 percent of CLOs the year before. The increases in spending were slightly higher as well. Among CLOs who increased spending, the median expenditure grew by seven percent. The number in 2010 was six percent.

Some 46 percent increased outside legal expenditures, compared with 43 percent in the preceding year.

“These are not big changes,” says Altman Weil principal Daniel J. DiLucchio.  “It is the shift of direction that’s interesting as it may signal some softening of the hard line on spending that corporate law departments embraced in the last few years.”

For the study, Altman Weil surveyed 1,355 corporate law departments in October, receiving 176 responses.

Is the U.S economy on its way to another recession, so soon after the last? Did we ever really get out of the last one?

Add the latest employment and salary survey by Robert Half Legal, the legal recruiting firm, to the list of contradictory economic indicators.

The survey of several hundred “senior lawyers” in firms and in general counsel offices around the country found that the hiring market had picked up. Firms were having increasing difficulty finding experienced associates in busy practice areas like litigation, commercial transactions and health care.

Salary ranges for the most experienced lawyers, those with 10 to 12 years experience, had actually gone up three percent in the last year. This shouldn’t surprise. Firms, especially the very largest, have been assiduous in protecting profitability, lest high producing partners head for the doors and join competitors willing to pay more. But to a very great degree, firms have been able to do this by cutting administrative staff, associate attorneys and even in some instances partners.

Now, the work flow seems to have picked up enough in some practice areas to cause firms to hire the lawyers who actually much of the work – associates with several years of experience.

The Robert Half survey was national in scope, but its results roughly track the situation in the Philadelphia region. There has been a slow firming up of the hiring market in the region. But young law school graduates haven’t yet seen the benefit. And overall, the road back has been, how to put it, a grim slog.

The transformation of Cozen O’Connor from its singular focus on insurance litigation to a broader base of transactional law and other practices continues apace.

Cozen O'Connor law firm announced what it said was a succession plan Wednesday that has Michael Heller, chair of the business law department, taking on additional responsibilities as president and Vince McGuinness becoming managing partner.

Tad Decker, who will give up the title of president but remain chief executive officer, said that the two had been involved in strategic planning at the firm for some time and that the announcement of a succession plan portended no major changes.

Heller and McGuinness "were identified early on as being part of the next [leaders] at the firm," Decker said.

Heller will continue in his business-law role while pursuing his venture capital and emerging-growth practice, the firm said. Heller, who joined the firm in 1995, was its first business lawyer and became chair of the business law department in 2007.

The firm's business practice, which includes real estate, corporate, intellectual property, and private client services, now has 170 lawyers.

As managing partner, McGuinness will take on day-to-day administrative tasks involved in running the firm and its 21 offices. He also will maintain his subrogation and recovery practice, the firm said.

Decker joined Cozen in 2000 as managing partner, and continued in that role until 2004, when Gov. Ed Rendell appointed him chairman of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. He rejoined the firm as president and chief executive officer in 2007. Decker said there was as yet no timeline for when McGuinness and Heller might assume full control of the firm.

The firm grew from a two or three man shop in the late 1960s to a 500 plus firm with 21 offices in the United States and London. It became hugely successful defending insurers against fraudulent claims in the early 1970s and developed a substantial subrogation practice. In recent years, the firm has sought to broaden its base and the succession plan appears to be part of that.

Talk of an impending recession aside, can a recovery in commercial real estate be far behind if a Center City law firm that for the past few years has been touting its distressed real estate practice announces that it has established a new  “real estate recovery group?”

This is what Ballard Spahr has done, and it is premised on the idea that commercial real estate is poised for an upturn.

They might be in a position to know. Ballard and other law firms have been doing substantial business in recent years helping to broker transactions involving commercial buildings in some degree of financial distress. The firm says this specialty accounts for a significant share of its overall real estate practice. Now , the chair of the Ballard’s real estate department, Michael Sklaroff, says Ballard is trying to position itself for a recovery.

“We are now seeing transactions that we have not seen in the last three and half years, and lenders are beginning to lend,” he said.

Partner Dominic De Simone, who will lead the new practice group with David Barksdale, a partner based in Los Angeles, said signs of recovery are very uneven and occurring only in discreet segments – New York is one, Washington, D.C. another. The difference is that money has been in greater supply and more traditional, straightforward transactions – deals that don’t necessarily involve complex workouts – are taking place.

There are plenty of conflicting indicators out there on whether another recession looms. Ballard’s announcement can be added to the list.

Villanova University Law School now is not alone in having to deal with reputational fallout from the disclosure that grades of incoming freshmen were inflated.

The University of Illinois has confirmed that law school admission test scores and grade point averages for its income class had been inflated on its website. The school said Sept. 19 it was investigating the inaccurate admissions data, but offered no explanation of how it happened.

Villanova University disclosed Feb. 7 that admissions data for its incoming law school classes for an unspecified number of years before 2010 had been falsified. Following a six months of silence on the issue, the law school said that the inflated data had been created by a small number of administrators and admissions staff, who are no longer with the school. At the same time, the law school was censured by the American Bar Association, but it was told that it would not lose its accreditation.

There is a great deal of competition among law school for students with stellar LSAT scores and grade point averages.

 They figure into national rankings prepared by U.S. News & World Report, and help to burnish a school’s reputation and ability to recruit the best students. However, there has been enormous mistrust among academics about the reliability of the numbers. Some suspect that the Villanova and Illinois disclosures are the leading edge of more to come.

Sen. Herb Kohl, the Wisconsin Democrat who chairs the Senate Special Committee on Aging, is calling on the Justice Department to focus more attention on abuse of the elderly. Kohl, in a letter to the department’s Office of Victims of Crime, pointed out what simple arithmetic makes clear. The burgeoning number of senior citizens over time will, by definition, mean that more and more elderly people will suffer from financial and physical abuse.

Kohl wants the office to add elder abuse to the list of priority items that states can cite in seeking funding.

Social scientists have been slower to pick up on the problem of elder abuse than on the harmful treatment of children, which now receives considerable focus from the federal government. Yet a growing number of studies show that abuse of the elderly is widespread. As many as one in 20 report that money has been improperly taken from them in the preceding year. That would translate into 2.5 million people nationally. Those same studies show that the perpetrators typically are trusted advisers – lawyers or financial advisers.

Or members of their own families.

Join Michael Byrne, chief counsel of the Pennsylvania Securities Commission, at 11 a.m. Monday, Sept. 19, for a live Internet chat on financial scams and the elderly. Also in the chat will be Robert McNamara, chief of the Ombudsman Division in the Pennsylvania Department of Aging.

Going mobile? Click here.

This web chat is intended to provide general information on the subject of financial exploitation of the elderly. None of the information should be construed as legal advice. People needing legal advice should consult with their lawyers.

Federal District Court judge Christopher C. Conner further stoked passions over President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by ruling Tuesday that a central aspect of the law is unconstitutional.

Conner, a Republican appointee who hears cases in Harrisburg, found that the federal government cannot order U.S. citizens to purchase products against their will. And that is exactly what the law would do. It is arguable whether that is a good idea or not, but it is indisputable that the federal government for the first time in the history of the United States will be telling U.S. citizens that they must buy a product, in this case, health insurance, or pay a financial penalty.

The Obama administration has advanced a number of arguments in support of this policy, most importantly the commerce clause of the Constitution, which gives the government the right to regulate the flow of goods and services between states. The Obama administration says it must compel citizens above a certain income level to purchase insurance in order for the system to work financially.

Yet, Conner opined, the federal government does not have that authority. States, afforded police powers under the constitution, can do that in the way that they can require citizens to purchase auto insurance if they want to own and drive a car.

 But the federal government cannot.

In a little noticed section of Conner’s opinion, he offered the federal government what must surely have been a bit of unwanted advice. Since the feds don’t have the power, at least in Conner’s view, to order citizens to buy things, they might try to raise revenue by passing a tax.

 This of course would be politically unpalatable and likely explains why the health care reform law requires citizens to obtain insurance on their own or pay a penalty. But if the federal government  is unable to obtain majority support for a new tax to pay for the program, Conner says, then perhaps the problem of access to health insurance is “not sufficiently acute."

The current line on all of this is that the Supreme Court will be taking this up sooner rather than later. University of Richmond constitutional law professor Carl Tobias said the court may grant cert within the next few months and hear the case in the spring. The reason for the accelerated time table: The requirement that citizens have insurance becomes effective in 2014. But two different appeals courts have issued rulings that are at odds. Having different law in different regions of the country on an issue this big and this complex would simply be unworkable, and the Supreme Court is mindful of this, Tobias says.