Mark Aronchick of Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller. (Photo: Nanette Kardaszeski)

In most cases, attorneys count their successes in motions granted or denied, dollars won or lost and—when all goes right—the look of a satisfied client. But, in 2018, Mark Aronchick counted his successes by the length of the lines outside polling places across Pennsylvania, by the deluge of candidate yard signs, and by the number of children taking advantage of the city's free pre-K programs.

In 2018, Aronchick, a longtime fixture in the Pennsylvania and national legal scene, played a leading role in two of the most significant and talked-about cases in Pennsylvania—if not the country. One of those cases dealt with the implementation of the first tax on sweetened beverages levied by a major U.S. city, and the other pushed to dismantle the state's congressional map for being an unconstitutionally partisan gerrymander.

Aronchick, along with teams of lawyers from Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.—including the Public Interest Law Center, Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer and Hogan Lovells—was successful in both fights, helping to convince state and federal courts that the congressional map needed to be replaced, and getting the state Supreme Court to uphold Philadelphia's so-called "soda tax," which was aimed at providing funding for pre-K services.

"Just to travel around those days, driving to Harrisburg, or going to York, or someplace like that, and seeing all these signs. Like, this one for Congress and that one for Congress, or to read in the newspaper, saying like 14 people were out in front of their congressional office protesting that this congressman has been nonresponsive, because he hadn't had to have been responsive, because he had a locked-in seat," Aronchick, who is a finalist for the 2019 Attorney of the Year, said. "I'm thinking, 'Hey, I had something to do with that!'"

Both cases involved numerous parties and courts, and handling either one of them in a given year would be a difficult feat. But Aronchick and his team of lawyers at Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller were involved in both cases at the same time, with Aronchick making oral arguments before different courts sometimes only a week apart.

The gerrymandering litigation began in Pennsylvania state court in 2017, and Aronchick officially became involved in November of that year, filing on behalf of Gov. Tom Wolf. Around that time, additional suits were filed in federal courts stemming from the same congressional map challenge.

According to Aronchick, when he first got involved in the litigation, it did not look like the case was going to be resolved in time for the 2018 primary, but by December the litigation was proceeding on an expedited basis before both the state and federal courts. In fact, the federal judge overseeing the lead federal case scheduled trial for Dec. 4, 2017, and the Commonwealth Court judge handling the state action scheduled its trial-like hearing to take evidence Dec. 11 —exactly one week later.

"I've been a litigator for 45 years and I've never seen so much litigation and action in that kind of timeframe," Aronchick said.

At that point, Aronchick said, his team pushed to have Wolf's role front and center in the case. Being the executive and the main figurehead of the state, Aronchick said Wolf had the most important role in the case, and getting his position correct was paramount.

One of the key concerns was whether it would even be possible to toss out the existing congressional map and draw a new one only a few months before the primary. Aronchick, who at 33 was the youngest city solicitor in Philadelphia history, had a long career representing government entities in Pennsylvania, so he knew better than most what it would take to scrap the old map and create a new one before the 2018 primary. Although many state officials were fighting him tooth and nail on it, he said he knew it could get done in time.

Aronchick, along with David Gersch of Arnold & Porter, argued the gerrymandering case before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Jan. 11, with Aronchick focusing, among other things, on whether a new map could be drawn and implemented in time.

Little more than a week later, the justices tossed out the map, and gave the parties less than a month to either put together a new one, or, the high court threatened, it would redraw the map on its own.

After the ruling, Aronchick said, all parties were "completely in the pivot," mustering experts, evaluating competing proposals and responding to challenges. Republican leaders in Pennsylvania also began a lengthy series of appeals in the state and federal courts, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but those efforts were eventually denied.

But before all that was finalized, on Jan. 30, 2018—just days after the Supreme Court came down with its gerrymandering ruling—the justices agreed to take up the appeal regarding another contentious piece of policy in Pennsylvania: Philadelphia's recently imposed soda tax.

Aronchick had successfully argued the case several months before in front of the Commonwealth Court, but, Aronchick said, part of the preparation that has made him so successful during argument sessions is not building on the work done at the prior argument session, but instead, building the case again from the ground up. That intense preparation, he said, was necessary because, going up against attorneys from Kline & Specter and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, they were facing "two of the best firms in the city, if not the country," Aronchick said.

"They were upping their game, so we're going to up ours," Aronchick said.

So, at the same time he and the team on the gerrymandering case were fighting off appeals and working to implement the new map, he and the team in the soda tax case – which included Philadelphia City Solicitors Sozi Tulante and later Marcel Pratt—were going back over the case law and holding numerous moot court sessions.

Aronchick argued the soda tax case before the justices May 10, 2018—five days before the Pennsylvania primary.

In the end, the soda tax arguments were successful. The 2018 primary and subsequent election were "seamless," Aronchick said.

Along with the numerous lawyers from the outside firms involved, Aronchick credited the hard work of his team at Hangley Aronchick, which included Michele Hangley, Dylan Steinberg, Ashton Lattimore and Claudia De Palma on the gerrymandering cases, and John Stapleton and Andrew Erdlen, along with De Palma and Lattimore, on the soda tax case. He also credited his early mentors, Howard Gittis and Alan Davis from his days at Wolf Block, who, he said, taught him how to be a lawyer.

The rulings didn't mark the end of his professional year—in 2018 he also went on to mediate a high-profile case over civil asset forfeiture and spend seven weeks teaching law in China—but, he said, he did continue to see the effects of those two cases, in the "outpouring of democracy" and in the educational aspirations of thousands of Philadelphia children, throughout 2018 and beyond.

"It's nice to feel like all the time I spent makes a difference," he said.