Unshakeable

If commercial litigation has a rep for being dry and dispassionate, Sheryl Axelrod begs to differ. In fact, she can’t recall a single case where emotions didn’t run high, and it’s often her job to make sure human passions play as small a role as possible. Consider, for instance, a commercial litigation matter she handled many years ago.

The case concerned a father and two sons who sold a house they’d purchased as an investment property a few years prior. Shortly after closing, the buyer claimed countless things were wrong with the property.

“The plaintiff had a punch book three inches thick, and on each page he said he had proof of alleged fraud,” recalls Axelrod, who represented the sellers. “The acrimony between my clients and the plaintiff, who was essentially accusing them of civil fraud, was sky high. There was a lot of anger there.

“My clients agreed at the beginning that we would be guided by my firm’s investigation into the facts; what the law said about their case; and what we agreed our strategy would be based on both. And that’s how we proceeded,” says Axelrod, founder of the Philadelphia-based The Axelrod Firm. Eventually she concluded the plaintiff didn’t have any legitimate evidence of fraud and confronted him in deposition with “proof after proof after proof” that his claims were false. Ultimately, an inspection of the case found no evidence of fraud and the plaintiff’s expert’s report was determined to be deficient, resulting in summary judgment for Axelrod’s client.

When you look at Axelrod’s 30-year career, this type of anecdote appears again and again. In a later commercial litigation case in which three plaintiffs were suing a real estate partnership entity, the stakes were even higher—as were the emotions.

According to Phillip Berger, a seasoned commercial litigator who represented the three plaintiffs, the case involved claims of distributions alleged to be due to his client. Five years into litigation, the case had been presided over by three separate commerce program judges, two of whom retired during that time. That’s when Axelrod was appointed by the court as the receiver to review the potential dissolution of the partnership with the potential liquidation of the real estate.

“She played it right down the middle and made some hard decisions,” recalls Berger. “This was a very litigious case, but Sheryl said, ‘I’m not dealing with your issues. This is a commercial transaction case and I’m not going to hear from you guys. I’m interested in the facts and the law.’ At the time I thought we’d be trying this case for another seven years, but—by focusing only on the issues, facts, law and her designated assignment—she refused to be sidetracked, and forced the parties to make some difficult decisions which led to the settlement.”

Berger says that, while his clients had to concede receiving less than their initial valuations in the grueling negotiations, the defendants likewise wound up paying significantly more than their original offer.

Says Axelrod, “In a receivership, there’s one pool of assets from which to draw. If you fight forever, you deplete it to nothing, and no one gets anything. … As the receiver, the neutral in the receivership, with parties who had been partners and harbored a lot of acrimony toward each other, part of my job was to convince them that they could trust me—that I would not be taking sides. I would tell them, ‘There’s no point in bad-mouthing each other to me. It won’t help your case.’ In cases like these, each side becomes wedded to their position, and they don’t want to budge. My job is to help them see that it’s in their client’s best interest to budge.”

This, says Berger, is a key to Axelrod’s success.

“She was incredibly professional and did not take any guff from anyone,” he says. “She took the emotion out of it.”

Axelrod grew up as the second youngest of eight children in Lower Merion Township. Her father was a family physician with a private practice, who “married his intellectual equal,” she says.

“I was always crazy about my parents. All eight of us knew they were great and that they loved us very much—and, in the case of our mom, who is still alive, that she does,” she says. “They believed in us and showed us by example how to be good people. And they were very bright. When I was younger, I didn’t appreciate just how bright my mother was.”

In addition to founding a successful wholesale pet food business, Axelrod’s mother, Jeanette, was also a fierce advocate for her son Kenny, who was one of two developmentally disabled siblings in the family. During his elementary school years, for example, Jeanette successfully fought the local school board to integrate Kenny into able-bodied busing and gym class, arguing his disability was intellectual and not physical.

“She was way ahead of her time. I remember when she got a letter saying Kenny wasn’t going to be able to participate in his high school graduation or get his diploma. After four years of him working hard in school, she was hurt and understandably angry,” says Axelrod. “She taught us that prejudice is ugly, to never judge people before getting to know them, and that often, prejudice is fear in disguise.”

Axelrod spent several years as a teenager working at her father’s practice on Saturdays, doing hospital rounds with him, weighing patients, taking their blood pressure, and sometimes hooking them up to EKG machines. He too dedicated a great deal of time to helping Kenny, once spending an entire year meticulously helping him learn the Pennsylvania driver’s manual one sentence at a time so he could eventually pass his licensing test.

“My father intensely believed in all of us, in all of his kids,” says Axelrod. “He loved being a doctor. He thought it was the best job in the world and he showed me I could be anything I wanted—even the job of his dreams, a doctor.”

After taking organic chemistry in high school, Axelrod decided medicine was not the path for her. Instead, she enrolled at Brandeis University in 1986 as an economics major because, she says, it was the hardest discipline to study and the subject she knew the least about. By the end of her freshman year, she knew she wanted to be a lawyer.

After graduating from Temple University School of Law in 1993, Axelrod clerked for now-retired Judge Sandra Mazer Moss, who Axelrod calls a “diversity champion,” a passion that would later play a significant role in her own work. From there she went to work for the now-shuttered Dunn Haase Sullivan Mallon Cherner & Broadt, where she primarily handled matters like product liability, slip and falls, and bodily injury defense work. She was eventually offered a job at McCarter & English, a much larger firm that allowed her to run products liability cases as a senior lawyer, even though she was just five years out of law school. Finally, before eventually founding her own firm in 2007, Axelrod worked in the commercial litigation department of Blank Rome.

“I knew nothing about commercial litigation when I joined Blank Rome. I had to learn on the job—and it was an amazing experience,” says Axelrod. “I got assigned to write appellate briefs in larger and larger cases until I found myself writing the appellate brief in a matter in which around $845 million was at stake. The case was being tried as we were writing the appellate brief … and the matter settled shortly after our adversaries saw our brief. It was never actually filed, but we showed them what we were prepared to file. It resolved two weeks later in a confidential settlement.”

While she wasn’t directly involved in those settlement negotiations, Axelrod’s talent for clear-eyed negotiation soon became obvious.

“Sheryl is someone who knows and believes that ‘compromise’ is not a dirty word,” says Aaron Krauss, a 33-year commercial litigation veteran who first met Axelrod across the table more than a decade ago in a real estate dispute. “Sure, you can’t give up your core interests, but often a compromise is better for your client than taking the risk and going the distance. And to be a good mediator, you need to be able to see both sides clearly and to know when the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Sheryl is exceptional at that.”

I have a deep-rooted desire to think through complex, meaty issues that are important but also difficult.

Axelrod made the decision to start her own firm right before the 2008 recession hit. When it did, she wasn’t terribly optimistic about her chances.

“I thought we’d be lucky if we lasted six months. … I totally believed that,” she says. “Now, I’m planning for the next 15 years.

“A lot of women underestimate how well they’ll do.”

Axelrod spends the majority of her time working on commercial cases as a mediator, arbitrator, discovery master and receiver. “I still have this deep-rooted desire to be like my mother and father: to think through really complex, meaty issues that I think are important but also difficult,” she says.

In 2010, civil litigation attorney Gilda Kramer was representing a client who’d been fired after she brought sexual harassment to the attention of management. Knowing that Axelrod represented the employer, Kramer reached out to her directly to lay out the case in detail.

“What was interesting was that she recognized right away this case represented a problem for her client, and because she recognized this, she was able to convince her client that it was in their best interest to bring the matter to an early resolution,” says Kramer. “That’s unusual for lawyers doing this kind of work. Most will fight it out for a long time and all the while they’ll bill. Then, in the end, they’ll have to resolve the case anyway. What this case showed is that Sheryl can see the big picture, and as a very competent counselor she’s willing to give advice that a client may not want to hear in order to do what’s in the client’s best interest.”

Kramer also mentions Axelrod’s longstanding advocacy for female lawyers and women-owned law firms. “That’s something I understand and admire because I’ve had my own practice for a number of years now,” says Kramer.

One of Axelrod’s fondest memories is when her firm became a member of the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms (NAMWOLF). She received the message while sitting at a table at Temple University for an event celebrating alums.

“When I got that email, I literally shrieked,” she says with a laugh. “I couldn’t help it. It just came out. I was so excited.”

Axelrod—who now serves on the NAMWOLF board of directors—is as passionate about her push for diversity as she is about her legal work. She is a founder of The Fearless Women Network and serves on advisory councils for organizations like the Gender Wealth Institute. In 2014, she became the first white person to become a member of The Barristers’ Association of Philadelphia, an organization dedicated to the advancement of Black lawyers.

“I’ve been writing and speaking publicly about the profitability of diversity since 2009. It is not just good for good’s sake. The most diverse law firms make over $100,000 more per partner,” says Axelrod. “I’ve always spoken about the disenfranchisement of women, people of color, the LGBT+, and people with disabilities. I never focused any of my speeches on my people, the Jewish people, until after October 7th. It was the first time I ever gave a diversity presentation and was afraid. I’ve been stunned, saddened, and appalled at the level of antisemitism taking over the country. It is wrong. Prejudice is wrong.

“Have we achieved the mountain Dr. King dreamed about? No, we have a long way to go, but I’d like to think that I’ve made a positive difference, and I’m committed to continuing to try to do so. Jews have a saying: ‘tikkun olam,’ to repair the world. I try to do my part.”