The only number that is down for Stevens & Lee's 2006 financial performance is its hours billed, as the firm posted double-digit increases in revenue and profit.

The firm saw a 10.3 percent increase in gross revenue, from $102 million in 2005 to $112.5 million in 2006.

The revenue per lawyer grew by 14.8 percent, from $610,000 in 2005 to $700,000 in 2006. The profits per equity partner increased by 16 percent, from $655,000 in 2005 to $760,000 in 2006.

Stevens & Lee has a small non-equity tier, with 13 of the 161 attorneys in 2006 falling into that category. Managing partner Joseph M. Harenza said only about five of those attorneys are income partners, while the others are senior counsel or something similar. Of the attorneys, 99 were equity partners, dropping from 103 in 2005. The average compensation for all partners rose from $635,000 in 2005 to $700,000 in 2006.

Harenza attributes the firm's overall growth to an increase in revenue through a focus on specialized legal work and a simple cost-containment strategy. He said this is the 10th straight year the Reading, Pa.-based firm has seen improved financial results.

The statistic the firm places the most emphasis on, Harenza said, is one The American Lawyer does not calculate for its Am Law survey.

The firm calls it the net income per lawyer, and calculates the number by subtracting expenses from the total revenue with the exception of attorney compensation, Harenza said. The firm reported that number at $557,000, compared to 2005's net income per lawyer of $479,000.

Altman Weil consultant Bill Brennan said his firm looks to RPL and the net income per lawyer as the two most important indicators of a firm's financial health.

Stevens & Lee reported a 69 percent return on the dollar to its partners and an 80 percent return to its lawyers for 2006.

Of the $112.5 million in gross revenue, $75.5 million went to equity partner compensation and another $3 million went to non-equity partners.

There are about 40 nonlawyer professionals in the firm that are paid as employees, Harenza said.

Brennan said the percent return on the dollar for partners could often be a very misleading number because the fewer equity partners there are, the higher the return is for each of them. That isn't the case with Stevens & Lee, which has a much lower leverage than many Am Law 200 firms with about 0.62 non-equity attorneys to every equity partner. For all intents and purposes, non-equity partners and of counsel are counted as associates when calculating leverage.

Harenza said Stevens & Lee's model is different than several other firms when it comes to increasing revenue and profits. His firm, he said, focuses on upping revenue per lawyer and lowering expense per lawyer and then doles out the remaining profits to each attorney tier. Other firms, he said, take what revenue they have left and figure out which attorney fits into which tier.

Harenza said the firm would be able to put its PPP over $1 million if it moved to a 2-to-1 leverage, and up to $1.25 million at a 3-to-1 leverage. Brennan said there is validity to that argument because if the lower paid partners were made associates, the average of the higher paid equity partners would naturally increase.

"Many law firms 'manage' their profits per partner statistic by defining who is an equity partner," he said.

Unsophisticated readers of the Am Law 100, he said, could be easily deceived by that statistic.

A big part of why Stevens & Lee has been able to remain so profitable with low leverage traditionally had to do with its choice of locale. Based in Reading, the firm has offices in places like Pennsylvania's Lancaster, Scranton, Valley Forge and Wilkes-Barre. Harenza said location is no longer the only factor in cost containment.

In the last few years, the firm has opened offices in more expensive markets like Princeton, N.J., Philadelphia and New York City.

Harenza said the expense per attorney in 2003, before the Princeton and New York offices opened, was about $96,000. After the launch of the Princeton office, the cost went up to $101,000, and up even further to $120,000 once the New York office was opened, he said.

In order to combat those rising costs, Harenza said he continues to invest in technology to lower the need for support staff and continues to strive for higher-end work to increase revenue.

Harenza said the firm saves on expenses by centralizing its marketing and technology teams into one office as opposed to having a representative from each group in every office, as many large firms do.

He said large firms with offices all over the world are going to start moving in the direction of centralized support functions.

Stevens & Lee is spending money on technology training in order to reduce costs in the long run, and is working on the demographics of the firm. Harenza said the firm is seeing some of the more senior attorneys migrate out and has a need for first- and second-year associates and fifth- to eighth-year associates.

Harenza said he is trying to make every lawyer specialize in an industry segment and possibly in a sub-specialty with the hopes of commanding higher rates.

"My job is to get higher yield and rates from clients," he said.

Although the firm's geographic locations have been a draw for clients because of lower rates, Harenza wants to increase those rates through higher-end work, and says he has the room to do it. The firm's rates are currently substantially lower than those of Philadelphia and, particularly, New York firms, he said.

More than just looking to increase the rates he charges now, Harenza wants to handle specialty work that automatically commands higher fees and he thinks clients are willing to pay for that specialization.

Stevens & Lee works off a pyramid chart that breaks legal work into three sections: commodity work, experiential work and unique or specialized work. As clients have consolidated, the rates for everyday, commodity work have become more price-sensitive, Harenza said. That phenomenon has even pushed some of the more sophisticated experiential work into the commodity section of the pyramid, he said.

The ultimate goal for Stevens & Lee is to achieve as much of that 5 percent of the legal work that is at the top of the pyramid, he said.

"What I'm trying to do is move this entire business, business by business, up that curve," he said.

In 2005, Stevens & Lee saw a 12.7 percent increase in gross revenue over 2004's financial performance, a 9 percent increase in revenue per lawyer and an 8.3 percent increase in profits per equity partner.

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani's law firm lobbies for Citgo Petroleum Corp., which is controlled by the Venezuelan state oil company and President Hugo Chavez, but the firm said on Wednesday that Giuliani has never worked on the account.

The leftist Chavez is an ardent foe of President George W. Bush's administration and a bane to conservatives whose support Giuliani will need as he seeks the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

Records filed at the Texas Ethics Commission showed the law firm, Houston-based Bracewell & Giuliani, may have received up to $170,000 from Citgo since 2005.

A spokeswoman for Giuliani's campaign, which has been buoyed by recent opinion polls showing him leading his Republican rivals, declined to answer questions, but provided an e-mail statement denouncing Chavez.

"Mayor Giuliani believes Hugo Chavez is not a friend of the United States and his influence continues to grow because of our increasing reliance on foreign sources of oil," the statement read.

It concluded with a call for developing alternative sources of fuel to replace foreign crude oil. Venezuela is the No. 4 oil supplier to the United States.

Jerry Salzman, longtime outside counsel for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, joined Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom on Monday, leaving the law firm he co-founded as it winds down operations.

Freeman, Freeman & Salzman is going out of business after 40 years, he said. The firm had only nine lawyers after some partners retired in recent years.

"People were getting older, and it stopped being sustainable as we were getting smaller," said Salzman. "It was a good run."

Yet, Salzman said he did not want to quit working.

Who could blame him? The Merc recently agreed to acquire CBOT Holdings Inc., parent of the Chicago Board of Trade, in an $8 billion transaction that would create the world's largest futures exchange. The deal awaiting regulatory approval from the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Salzman joins one of the nation's elite law firms, and one he's worked with over several years. Skadden has represented the Merc in several matters, including its reorganization, initial public offering and, now, its merger.

Salzman is one of the few legal experts in derivatives regulation left in Chicago, as the city is no longer the banking center it used to be. He hopes to help build the practice at Skadden.

Meanwhile, a group of Salzman's former colleagues, he said, is moving to Jenner & Block, including Lee Freeman Jr. Freeman could not be reached for comment.

LEGAL AID: The charitable arm of the Chicago Bar Association for the first time has launched a fundraising campaign to help address what it calls a crisis in the state's legal aid system. The funds will be used to help supplement the disparity in incomes of lawyers who work for Chicago-area pro-bono and legal aid organizations compared with their counterparts in private practice.

Legal aid attorneys typically start at $38,500, according to a report from the Chicago Bar Foundation and Illinois Coalition for Equal Justice. A 2006 law school graduate earns $145,000 at one of the city's top-tier law firms.

The report forecast an impending exodus of legal aid lawyers because of the low pay.

Stopping the departures is an immediate priority for the legal community, said Kimball Anderson, president of the Chicago Bar Foundation and a partner at Winston & Strawn. Otherwise, the legal aid system is headed for collapse.

There are about 250 legal aid attorneys in the Chicago area to serve the more than 750,000 Cook County residents living in poverty.

The foundation distributed brochures and donation cards to about 35 law firms and corporations. Partners are being asked to contribute $500, and associates, $100, said Tony Valukas, a partner at Jenner & Block and chairman of the fundraising effort.

A 60-year-old bookkeeper who embezzled more than $1 million from a small, family-owned law firm in downtown Cincinnati will spend the next six years in prison.

Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Charles J. Kubicki Jr. ordered the sentence this morning for Candace Vail, who pleaded guilty last month to a charge of theft. Kubicki also ordered Vail to re-pay the $1,038,499 she stole from from Goodman & Goodman between Jan. 1, 2001, and Feb. 16, 2006.

Vail’s excuse in a letter to the court? She wasn’t paid enough and often did errands for the attorneys she worked for without extra compensation.

Vail used the money to bankroll her son's landscaping business, according to Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Andy Berghausen.

Court records show Vail filed for bankruptcy last October.

Vail took client checks to Goodman & Goodman from the mail, deposited them into little-used firm accounts and then wrote 1,325 checks to herself and her family. She forged attorney names on another 91 checks she wrote to herself, according to court records.

She even duped the Ohio Supreme Court, which began investigating shortly before she was caught. When the firm's trust account, which by law must be kept by law firms, was overdrawn, the bank alerted the Ohio Supreme Court.

Vail intercepted letters notifying the attorneys about the investigation, forged attorney signatures on documents and told Ohio Supreme Court officials they should deal with her. That investigation has been resolved since the theft was discovered, Goodman said.

The firm realized money was missing on March 8 when one of the firm's attorneys went to the bank himself and discovered several bounced checks. Vail was immediately fired, Goodman said.

Martha B. Sosman, one of three Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court judges who voted against the landmark decision legalizing gay marriage in the state, has died, the court said Sunday. She was 56.

Sosman was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005 and had been participating in some cases by watching Webcasts of oral arguments, reading legal briefs at home and talking with other justices and law clerks by telephone.

Republican Gov. Paul Cellucci hailed Sosman as a "conservative" jurist when he appointed her to the high court as an associate justice in 2000.

She said the argument to define gay partnerships as marriages versus civil unions was "a squabble over the names to be used."

Sosman was a former assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts and founded an all-women law firm in 1989, where she worked until she was appointed to the Superior Court in 1993.

Responding to a spate of deaths in clinical trials, the Food and Drug Administration yesterday issued its most severe warning possible for drugs widely used to treat anemia in kidney disease patients and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

The "black box" warnings placed on the prescribing label for Amgen Inc.'s Epogen and Aranesp and Johnson & Johnson's Procrit are expected to result in more cautious dosing by doctors.

Use of the drugs has escalated as physicians have sought to improve the quality of life of anemic patients by using them to stimulate creation of energy-boosting red blood cells. Marketing by manufacturers has reinforced the trend. But the FDA said yesterday that recent clinical trials have shown treatment beyond recommended limits increases the risk of death from heart attack and stroke in kidney patients, and of tumor growth and death in some cancer patients.

The agency advised doctors to give patients the minimum dose required to reduce the need for blood transfusions. It said antianemia drugs should not be used in an attempt to improve the quality of life of cancer patients because those claims are unproven. The FDA allowed claims of lifestyle benefits to remain for kidney patients, but said it is re-examining the validity of patient questionnaires about factors used to support the claims.

Recent concerns about the potential dangers of antianemia drugs and their overuse have been heightened by Medicare reimbursement policies for kidney dialysis treatment, which provide a profit incentive for clinics to administer more Epogen.

Medicare loosened its policy last year to let clinics get paid even if patients exceed the FDA's recommended red blood cell limits. The National Kidney Foundation -- in a set of guidelines paid for by Amgen -- suggested last year that higher targets for red blood cell counts are appropriate, citing statistical studies that showed lower mortality. The foundation is revisiting those guidelines.

The new warnings would effectively reduce the red blood cell target to about 10 grams per deciliter, compared with the upper limit of 12 grams that remains on the label, and the 13 grams permitted under last year's updated Medicare policy. The warnings are advisory, and the targets are still left up to the discretion of physicians, the FDA said.

The FDA said it has alerted Medicare to its latest findings. A spokesman at Medicare, which spends about $2 billion annually on Epogen for dialysis patients, did not respond to a phone message yesterday.

Black box warnings, said Dr. Eric P. Winer, chief of the breast cancer center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, will likely make doctors more cautious about prescribing antianemia drugs.

"These are drugs that have been somewhat overused. I don't think it's been without some effort on the marketing end," he said. "There has been a tendency, I think, for patients, and to some extent health providers, to attribute more fatigue to anemia than deserves to be attributed."

The warnings tarnished the image of a class of drugs that was among the biopharmaceutical industry's first big triumphs and has generated billions of dollars for Amgen and Johnson & Johnson.

Aranesp, which accounted for $4.1 billion in sales last year, is Amgen's second-generation version of the drug. Epogen, its original form, generated $2.5 billion in revenue last year, most of it in federal Medicare reimbursements for its use in dialysis treatment. Amgen makes Procrit, which is identical to Epogen, and licenses Johnson & Johnson to sell it. Procrit sales last year totaled $3.1 billion.

Amgen's stock dropped 2.1 percent to $60.86 yesterday. Johnson & Johnson stock slipped 0.7 percent to $62.14.

In November, an article in New England Journal of Medicine described a clinical trial of Procrit called CHOIR that was cut short because of higher rates of death from heart attack and stroke in kidney patients receiving larger doses. The dosing regimen in the trial pushed red blood cell counts higher than is recommended by the FDA. The results echoed a study of Epogen in kidney dialysis patients that was suspended in 1996, also due to an unexpectedly high death rate during testing.

In October, a trial of Aranesp in Danish patients with head and neck cancers was halted early because of apparent increases in tumor growth. Amgen said it told the FDA about the trial immediately, but it did not alert investors, leading to an informal review disclosed last week by the Securities and Exchange Commission . News of the suspended study was not known until it was reported in February by The Cancer Letter , a trade publication in Washington.

In February, Amgen reported on another study of Aranesp in cancer patients not undergoing chemotherapy treatment, which resulted in a higher percentage of deaths. The causes of death have not been disclosed. The FDA has scheduled a May meeting of its Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee to discuss the new data.