Hangley Aronchick is proud to announce that Mark Aronchick has been named to the Philadelphia Business Journal’s 2019 Best of the Bar List. The Philadelphia Business Journal states that this award recognizes the top attorneys in the Philadelphia area, based on the high quality of their work and their commitment to serving their communities. This is the second significant honor Aronchick has received this year; he was recognized as the Legal Intelligencer’s Attorney of the Year in June 2019.
A litigator and founder of the firm, Aronchick has a diverse national trial and appellate practice, including health care fraud and abuse, health care litigation, controversies involving financial institutions, antitrust, environmental, employment, securities, class actions, construction, professional malpractice, governmental, administrative, general business, and white-collar criminal defense cases. In recent years, he led the firm’s teams in numerous high-profile litigations, including the Pennsylvania Gerrymandering Litigation, in which he represented Governor Wolf and members of his administration four separate lawsuits in two federal district courts, the Pennsylvania appellate courts, and the US Supreme Court. Aronchick and his team successfully opposed all the efforts to block or postpone the institution of new electoral maps, and the 2018 primary and general elections proceeded under new maps designed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
In another recent matter, Aronchick represented the City of Philadelphia in the defense of its Sweetened Beverage Tax. After winning at each level, he argued the matter before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and in July 2018, the Court declared that the tax is a lawful exercise of the City’s local powers and rejected the extensive efforts by powerful industries to invalidate the tax, capping two years of litigation. Additionally, in 2014, Aronchick led the firm’s team in Whitewood v. Wolf, which resulted in an opinion declaring Pennsylvania’s defense of marriage statute unconstitutional, leading the way for the recognition and legalization of same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth.
A past Chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, Aronchick was a member of Mayor William J. Green’s administration and was appointed as the youngest City Solicitor in the history of Philadelphia. In 1996, he became the first attorney to simultaneously serve as President of the Philadelphia Bar Foundation and Vice Chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association. Currently, he is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers (where he has chaired the Committee on the Federal Rules of Evidence), a past member of the Judicial Conduct Board of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and a past member of the attorney Advisory Committee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Aronchick has been a member of both the Civil Rules Committee of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and the Judicial Council of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He has also served as a member of the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and the Bench-Bar Relations Task Force of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He has served as Chair of the City of Philadelphia Board of Ethics. He has also served as a federal and state court-appointed arbitrator and mediator and as a Judge Pro Tem of the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County. A former Treasurer and member of the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Board of Governors, he has also co-chaired the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Trial Advocacy Course.
Aronchick is also a dedicated teacher, training the next generation of attorneys. For the last several years he has taught law through the Temple University-Tsinghua Law School (Beijing, China) Master of Laws Program, showing that the best principles of law and lawyering transcend boundaries and languages.
Aronchick earned his law degree, with honors, from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif, and his undergraduate degree, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the Board of the Defender Association of Philadelphia as well as on the boards of several other civic and community organizations. He has received numerous awards and citations for leadership of civic and Jewish community organizations and for pro bono publico projects.
