Hangley Aronchick is proud to announce that shareholder and firm founder Mark Aronchick has been named “Attorney of the Year” by the Legal Intelligencer. This prestigious award recognizes an attorney or judge whose work in 2018 had a distinct impact on the law and the legal profession in Pennsylvania.
According to the Legal Intelligencer, Aronchick was recognized for the “pivotal roles he played in two of the biggest cases in Pennsylvania in 2018” – the Pennsylvania Gerrymandering Litigation and the Philadelphia Sweetened Beverage Tax Litigation. He led the Hangley Aronchick team for the Pennsylvania Gerrymandering Litigation, representing Governor Wolf and members of his administration in high profile litigation that played out in four separate lawsuits in two federal district courts, the Pennsylvania appellate courts, and the US Supreme Court. The team successfully opposed all the efforts to block or postpone the institution of new electoral maps, and the May 2018 primary elections and November 2018 general elections proceeded under new maps designed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Also in 2018, Aronchick continued his representation of 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.
The Legal Intelligencer’s editorial staff consulted with esteemed members of the Pennsylvania legal community to narrow down the nominees to three finalists. The winner was announced at the publication’s Professional Excellence Awards on June 27, 2019.
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 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. He has lectured on trial advocacy, litigation techniques, and professional ethics and, 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 graduated with honors in 1974 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif. He received his BA, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
