MyPhillyLawyer Attorney Profile: Saul L. Langsam, Founding Partner and Compassionate Advocate for His Clients

As a boy, Saul Langsam was encouraged and inspired by his parents to do something good in the world, to make a mark, to help people.

His parents, who were both born in Poland, were Holocaust survivors who were held in separate German prison camps during World War II. Somehow they survived, eventually ending up in Sweden after the war, where they met and later married. Langsam was born in Falun, Sweden, and lived there until he was six years old, when his family moved to the United States and settled in Philadelphia in 1953.

His parents worked hard to make better lives for the family and they consistently told their children that the road to success was reachable through a good education.

“One of my dad’s favorite sayings was ‘if you put it between your ears, nobody will ever be able to take it away,'” Langsam says. “My parents put me on my journey to go to college and find my place in the world. Education was a top priority in the homes of many Holocaust survivors and it was this way in my family.”

The messages left a huge imprint.

In his junior and senior years at Temple University, Saul took some pre-law classes and they opened up an amazing world for him. His sister had the same experience from their parents and she became a medical technologist.

“I was reaching out for a profession and found the law,” he says. “It caught my fancy.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree in business administration at Temple, he left Philadelphia and headed to Chicago to attend the Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he earned his law degree in 1974.

After law school, he returned to Philadelphia and went to work in the City of Philadelphia’s Solicitors Office, where he tried cases early in his career as an Assistant City Solicitor. In 1976 he left his job and joined another attorney, the late Arnold Silver, in a private practice they called Silvers & Langsam. Together they worked on cases including estate law and personal injury for clients.

That small practice grew to become what is now MyPhillyLawyer.

“I’ve always taken my work extremely seriously,” he says. “If someone is reaching out to me with a legal problem, I want to achieve whatever goal is established for that client. I think it’s a very, very honorable profession. There are a lot of people out there who need legal representation. Often we see our clients at the worst times of their lives and we are there to help them.”

Langsam has extensive experience in litigation involving personal injuries at all levels of the judicial system. He is particularly well-versed in arbitration matters and has chaired arbitration panels in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and in the Court of Common Pleas. He has also served on panels for the American Arbitration Association and sat on Uninsured and Underinsured Motorist arbitration panels.

His legal experience also includes estate planning, bankruptcy, real estate transactions, probate, incorporation small business, and commercial transaction litigation.

Langsam is a member of the Philadelphia Bar Association, the Pennsylvania Bar Association, the Lawyer Referral Information Service and the American Arbitration Association. He is admitted to practice before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

He is also the recipient of the Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Rating of AV, which is only awarded to lawyers operating at the highest level of professional excellence and who uphold the highest ethical standards.

One of his memorable recent cases, he says, involved a disabled man who was threatened with eviction after his late mother’s home was hit with a lien and was scheduled to be sold at auction.

“The son of my client had medical disabilities and he wanted to stay in house but no one would listen to him,” Langsam says. “This was the roof over his head otherwise he’d be out in the street.”

Langsam filed a hardship petition on behalf of his client, which eventually caused the lien to be abandoned. The deed for the home was then able to be recorded in his client’s name in a transfer from the mother’s estate. Today, the client remains in the home and can now legally live there.

“We were able to help someone who really needed help and who didn’t have the financial wherewithal to make it happen on his own,” Langsam says. That’s the part of his legal work that he finds to be very fulfilling.

Langsam and his wife have been married for 36 years. They have three sons and live in Eastern Montgomery County.

He is passionate about exercising, the Jersey Shore, bicycling, boating and downhill skiing. He also is an avid collector of postage stamps from the U.S., the United Nations and Israel.