Premium practices: Long Island law firms see rise in elder law and

The past few years were big for Douglas E. Rowe's labor and employment law group. But the past six months have brought an avalanche of business unlike anything he's ever seen.

Rowe, a partner at Certilman Balin Adler and Hyman of East Meadow, attributes a flood of new cases to a Supreme Court ruling allowing employees to sue if an employer's business practices disproportionately hurt older workers.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alone received 17,837 age-discrimination claims in 2004, a 26 percent increase over the 14,141 complaints filed in 1999.

All this has helped make employment law one of the hottest legal concentrations in the country, according to a study by Wayne, Pa.- based Robert Denney Associates, a management and marketing consultancy.

The study, What's Hot and What's Not in the Legal Profession, also pinpoints intellectual property law and contingency litigation - in which lawyers are only paid if they win - as hip practices.

According to Long Island's law firm managing partners, those trends are reflected here, with a few additions: health law, real estate and elder law.

Those it practice groups are so much in demand that firms sometimes raid talent from rivals or buy up partnerships. But Island firms say that isn't their style. Attorneys make their own choices, they say.

It's not the way we operate, said Co-Managing Partner Michael Faltischek of Ruskin, Moscou, Faltischek of Uniondale. From a company perspective, it doesn't work.

Raiding firms to get hot practice groups or lawyers makes a firm a combination of individuals, Faltischek said. It pits one lawyer against another in ways that are not in the best interests of the clients, he said. When a client comes in, it's the client of the firm.

And other than Charles M. Strain, managing partner of Uniondale- based Farrell Fritz who said he is considering growing his intellectual property practice in-house, no firm leaders revealed how they would like to expand their practice groups.

Like any other business, law practices tend to follow economic trends, Strain said. I think from a strategic point of view, you always try to anticipate where the law is moving, he said. In strong and improving financial climates, corporate and transactional practice groups benefit; in fiscal downturns, litigation practices harvest the rewards.

Independent of the economy are developments that can cause upticks or outright booms in business for lawyers accustomed to a steady flow of business: changes in the law.

Rowe said the new laws and policies in his field aren't limited to age discrimination. For instance, now the U.S. Labor Department requires employers to audit their own operations to check if they are properly paying employees overtime, he said.

With law practices so specific, Steven R. Schlesinger, managing partner of Jaspan, Schlesinger, Hoffman of Garden City, said he's only interested in expanding what he knows.

You have trouble if you expand into areas that you don't have enough base knowledge in, Schlesinger said. I'm more interested in that than all of the sudden becoming a maritime lawyer or something.

Christopher T. McGrath, a Mineola-based member of personal injury firm Sullivan, Papain, Block, McGrath, Cannavo and the president of the Nassau County Bar Association, said partnerships regularly ask to be acquired by his 38-attorney firm and two acquisitions happened already this year. His contingency litigation practice concentrating in personal injury and medical malpractice is evolving quickly, with cases that once took seven years finishing up in 16 months.

The courts are really just streamlining these cases and moving them fast and if you don't move with them you're left behind, he said.

Bernard Hyman, managing partner of Certilman Balin, said the hottest practice groups at the firm are labor and employment, real estate and corporate law, he said. As for the current fashion that has his trusts and estates division inundated with clients, Hyman directly attributes the increase to the controversy surrounding the death of Terri Schiavo. The Florida woman entered a persistent vegetative state without leaving a living will.

While he has seen an increase in requests for living wills, Lawrence Eric Davidow's elder-law practice encompasses far more aspects of law - as in whatever legal services the elderly need - and may be in demand beyond Long Island's large senior population. The managing partner of 10-attorney Davidow, Davidow, Siegel and Stern of Islandia hinted that a large firm might be trying to scoop them up.

I'm not going to mention any names, but we've been approached by several large law firms on Long Island to become their elder law- slash-estate planning division, he said.

Sidestepping whether she had been approached by a larger firm, Jennifer B. Cona, partner and director of the elder-law division of Melville-based Genser, Dubow, Genser and Cona, laughed and smiled as she said, I don't think I can share that.