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Additions

Reger Rizzo & Darnall announced that Stephen M. Asbel joined the firm as a partner in its Philadelphia office.

Asbel focuses his practice in the areas of wills and trusts, estate planning and estate administration, business and real estate contracts, and transactions, LGBT+ law, planning second-parent and intra-family adoptions, and gestational carrier and assisted reproduction technology agreements.

Asbel helps individuals and families with matters including estate taxation, choosing fiduciaries to manage funds until children or other beneficiaries come of age, planning ahead for making medical decisions, addressing special needs of family members, and all other personal decisions that go into planning an estate for a family.

He earned his Juris Doctor from Villanova University's Charles Widger School of Law in 1989.

Speakers

Barry L. Cohen, a partner in the law firm of Royer Cooper Cohen Braunfeld, and Nancy Frandsen, a partner in the Philadelphia office of Baker & Hostetler are set to co-chair the 2019 Pennsylvania Bar Institute Intellectual Property Law Institute on April 16 and 17.

U.S. District Judges Mitchell S. Goldberg and Mark A. Kearney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania are also slated to present the keynote lunch speech on their experience in IP litigation matters.

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Stradley Ronon Stevens & Young partner Deborah Hong served as a panelist at The Women in Law Summit Series: Women, Diversity and Change. Hong's panel, “Dealing with Unconscious Bias and Discrimination,” explored the types of unconscious bias and how best to address these issues in the workplace.

Hong focuses her practice on corporate transactions, including mergers and acquisitions, venture capital transactions, joint ventures, and corporate restructurings and reorganizations.

Her clients include a number of privately owned, middle-market companies as well as publicly held companies in the technology, media, retail, investment management and manufacturing sectors.

Hong also provides general corporate and strategic business counseling for a variety of clients.

Events

The law firm of Antheil Maslow & MacMinn is scheduled to host a “meet the candidate” event for Bucks County Court of Common Pleas judicial candidate Denise Bowman at its Doylestown office from 7 to 9 p.m. April 23.

Bowman is a partner at the firm in its commercial litigation department. She represents and advocates for numerous businesses, individuals, nonprofits and governmental entities throughout Bucks County in a wide variety of civil and commercial disputes.

An attorney for 20 years, she represents clients at both the trial and appellate levels.

She is a formally trained mediator and has experience as an arbitrator.

Elected and Appointed

Blank Rome associate Thomas J. Szymanski was appointed co-chair of the Philadelphia Bar Association's labor and employment law committee for a one-year term.

Active in the Philadelphia Bar Association, Szymanski also served on the young lawyers division's executive committee from 2015 to 2017.

The labor and employment law committee is concerned with all phases of federal, state and local labor laws as well as agency practice and procedure.

The committee organizes and sponsors discussions and seminars on topics of interest to its members and represents the Philadelphia Bar Association where public comment or participation in labor or employment matters is appropriate.

Membership is open to all labor and employment law practitioners, whether they represent plaintiffs, defendants, management, unions, government agencies or individuals.

At Blank Rome, Szymanski's labor and employment practice ranges from proactive counseling to litigation in federal and state courts and administrative agencies.

His experience includes nationwide and single plaintiff wage-and-hour claims; discrimination, retaliation and hostile work environment claims; complex restrictive covenant and breach of contract litigation; and employment due diligence counseling for mergers and acquisitions.