Philadelphia-based class action firm Berger & Montague has named its first chairwoman in its 48-year existence, as Sherrie Savett takes over the role from Merrill Davidoff.

Savett, who leads the legal team representing Philadelphia in a high-profile lending bias case against Wells Fargo, officially assumed the leadership position Jan. 1, the firm said in an announcement Wednesday.

Davidoff was named chairman just over one year ago. He will continue as a managing shareholder and co-chair of the firm's antitrust, commodities and financial instruments, environment and public health and securities and investor protection practices. Before Davidoff, name partner and firm co-founder H. Laddie Montague Jr. served as chairman from 2002 to 2016.

Savett said Davidoff only intended to serve as chairman for one year when he took the position. She declined to comment on whether she had a particular term length in mind for herself.

“The plan was for one year, and he did an excellent job,” she said. “The fact that the term was one year was no reflection on his leadership.”

Savett started at Berger & Montague in 1975 and is a longtime member of the firm's executive committee, as well as co-chair of its commercial litigation, securities and investor protection, data breach and False Claims Act practice groups. She said she will remain active in those practice areas, and that she co-leads each of those groups with at least one other lawyer, so they will not lack leadership resources as she adds to her plate.

Savett met firm founder David Berger when she was in law school at the University of Pennsylvania, and she joined his firm as a young lawyer five years later. Savett said Berger was a mentor and role model to her.

“I personally take a huge interest in mentoring younger lawyers,” she said. “It can be overwhelming to have a family and an active law practice. … I always try to encourage all the young lawyers, but especially the women, that it all can be done with the right time management.”

Berger & Montague's lawyer ranks are 30 percent women, and its partnership is 34 percent female. Also Wednesday, the firm announced that it has named two women lawyers to its partnership—Ellen Noteware, who focuses on antitrust class actions, and Caitlin Coslett, who works on complex litigation including antitrust, environmental and mass tort matters.

Savett said the number of women in leadership roles at Berger & Montague is only going to increase as time goes on. She experienced a supportive law firm environment as she came up in her career, she said, including her mentorship from Berger.

Still, things have changed since her early days. When her children were born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were no maternal leave policies in place, and she was back to work after eight weeks. Now Berger & Montague offers four months of paid pregnancy leave and alternate schedules for parents of young children.

“I would say our firm is gender blind in the sense of promoting people, compensating people and encouraging achievement,” she said. And “we are quite liberal and not petty about time schedules.”

For the first 20 years of her practice, Savett focused mainly on securities litigation, and through that work she became involved in False Claims Act cases. Throughout her career, Savett has achieved a number of high-dollar settlements and awards. They include settlements of more than $300 million in a case against Rite Aid over accounting problems that caused its stock price to plummet, and a $220 million settlement in a shareholders' suit against Waste Management Inc.

Locally, she recently took on a lending discrimination case against Wells Fargo, representing the city of Philadelphia, which alleges that the bank violated the Fair Housing Act by targeting minority borrowers with high-risk loans. She and colleague Sarah Schalman-Bergen were involved in the U.S. Supreme Court case Wells Fargo v. City of Miami, in which the court determined that municipalities have standing to sue in such cases.