A New York judge has ruled that four of the five name partners of now-defunct plaintiffs firm Silverman, Harnes, Harnes, Prussin & Keller were not equity partners and were not entitled to share in a $3.2 million class action fee received by the firm's sole equity partner, Sidney B. Silverman.
In determining that Joan T. Harnes, John F. Harnes, H. Adam Prussin and Gregory E. Keller were not partners, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard B. Lowe said that, in the absence of a written partnership agreement, their badges of partnership were outweighed by other evidence indicating they were mere employees.
"The fact that a person has always been listed in a company's payroll books as an employee tends to establish that he is not a partner," Justice Lowe wrote in Silverman v. Keller, 601913/04.
The Silverman firm dissolved in 2000, with Harnes and Keller leaving one year earlier to start their own firm. But Keller took over two class action representations the Silverman firm had shared with another lawyer who died in 1999.
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