Cozen O’Connor has agreed to a settlement with a group of investors who alleged the law firm was involved in a real estate investment scheme that cost the investors millions.

But the law firm is not entirely out of the case, in which commercial real estate company Cushman & Wakefield remains a defendant. Cozen O’Connor will be included on the verdict sheet at trial, and will have to produce its settlement agreement for the court, U.S. District Senior Judge Jan E. DuBois of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled.

The investor plaintiffs and Cozen O’Connor filed a motion seeking dismissal of the claims against Cozen O’Connor with prejudice, and the law firm requested that the court rule as a matter of law that it is not a joint tortfeasor with Cushman & Wakefield.

William Harvey of Klehr Harrison Harvey Branzburg, who represents Cozen O’Connor, said Cushman & Wakefield would have been entitled to discovery on the amount of Cozen O’Connor’s settlement anyway, so the decision does not have a great impact on the firm. He said Cozen O’Connor reached a complete settlement with the plaintiffs.

Fellow Philadelphia-based Am Law 100 firm Blank Rome was also a defendant in the case, but it reached a settlement last year.

The decision stems from a case in which plaintiffs Kilbride Investments Ltd., Busystore Ltd. and Bergfeld Co. Ltd. accused Cozen O’Connor, Blank Rome and Cushman & Wakefield of fraudulently misrepresenting a development project in Philadelphia, leading the plaintiffs to invest more than $27 million.

The investors claimed Charles Naselsky, a disbarred lawyer who once worked at both Cozen O’Connor and Blank Rome, conspired with Philadelphia real estate developers to get the investors to put millions of dollars into a project that would be barred by zoning restrictions.

The investors alleged that the law firms were part of a scheme orchestrated by Eliyahu Weinstein, who was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for operating a massive Ponzi scheme that stole money from members of the Orthodox Jewish community under the guise of investing in Philadelphia real estate projects.

They alleged that Cushman & Wakefield fraudulently appraised a property in Philadelphia called River City that stretches from John F. Kennedy Boulevard to the Schuylkill River. Cushman & Wakefield denied the allegations and claimed Weinstein was the source of the investors’ misfortune.

The case was originally filed in New York federal court, but was moved to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 2013 at Cozen O’Connor and Blank Rome’s request. Naselsky is not a defendant in the suit. He was sentenced to 70 months in prison for an unrelated tax evasion scheme.

In February 2018, the court found that Cozen O’Connor may still be found liable for Naselsky’s actions while he was employed at the firm, but that the firm can’t be held liable for the lawyer’s conduct after he moved to Blank Rome.

Blank Rome settled with the investors in March 2018, and agreed that any judgment in the lawsuit would be reduced by the percentage share of liability attributed to Blank Rome.

But there was a difference between the two law firms’ settlements, this week’s opinion said.

“In contrast to the release agreement entered into by plaintiffs and Blank Rome, plaintiffs and Cozen have not conceded joint tortfeasor status or agreed to an automatic reduction,” DuBois wrote. “As a result, C&W has the right to require Cozen to remain in the case through trial for the purpose of determining liability and the amount of any pro rata reduction in any verdict for plaintiffs.”