Doing the Right Thing

With more than 60 years of practice under his belt, Aaron Podhurst exudes the fluid ease of a basketball star—along with a keen and affable manner that has made him one of the world’s leading plaintiff’s aviation lawyers. 

And if affability isn’t enough?

“He’s got that great Old Testament voice,” says complex business litigator Harley Tropin, who’s been on both sides of matters with him over some 30 years.

“The judges pay attention to Aaron.”

It was basketball that sent the kid from humble beginnings in the Catskills to college and put him on a path to the law.

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“I was born in a small town in upstate New York. My parents were very poor. Nobody in my family ever went to college,” Podhurst says. His parents repaired mattresses for resorts in the Catskills. Podhurst, the youngest of three sons, scraped together pocket money as a bellhop and waiter.

But he had a gift. “Because of reasons I can never explain—I wasn’t the fastest guy on the high school squad, I couldn’t jump the highest—I could shoot like crazy.”

That got him a scholarship to the University of Michigan. “I was taller then,” he adds with a chuckle. 

Law hadn’t even entered his mind. It was the coldest part of the Cold War, the midst of the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. “Your counselor in high school would say to you, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be an engineer. We’ve got to beat the Russians,’” he says. “So I went toward engineering school, and I must tell you, I did not like engineering.”

The basketball career didn’t last long, either. “I’m playing freshman, and I got really hurt, cartilage in the knee. At that time, there was no arthroscopic surgery. So they had me in a long cast, five or six months, and it didn’t take,” he says. “They had to rip me open again, and did this again. And by that time, I had gained weight, I was slower, I was a sophomore, and that ended my career.”

Luckily, Michigan didn’t pull his scholarship, since he kept his grades up. Podhurst switched to business school, graduating with a BBA. “Now I’ve got to make a decision: What do I want to do? … And I said to myself that which I knew forever: I like to talk. I really do. I knew I would like to be a trial lawyer, so I took the best scholarship.”

That took him to Columbia Law School. 

He didn’t go alone. In his last year at Michigan, he had met a freshman named Dorothy Greenberg, from Miami Beach. They married in 1958 and have been together ever since.  

Podhurst got his J.D. in 1960, did a brief stint in the Army. Then, with Dorothy pregnant and $100 in their pockets, he decided South Florida offered better opportunities for a newly minted attorney. He had passed the Florida Bar just before joining the Army. It had been scheduled for the same day he was taking the New York Bar, so he pleaded with the Florida Bar to let him take it the next day. He didn’t expect acquiescence, but he got it. Otherwise, he would have had to take the Florida Bar after his military service.

“It was terrific, because everything was fresh in my mind when I graduated,” he says. “I could have taken it after I got out of the Army, but it would have been much more difficult. It was very, very nice of them to do that.”

He spent the first year in South Florida clerking for an appellate judge, earning extra cash as a bellhop. 

Then in 1962, he went to work with legendary personal injury lawyer Perry Nichols. One week in, he found himself picking a jury. 

The case involved a diabetic 80-year-old man who lost a leg after tripping over a broken concrete parking bumper. The defense attorney went after the plaintiff, trying to get him to admit he was at fault for not watching where he was going.

The plaintiff, Podhurst says, agreed. “He says, ‘You know, you’re probably right. I probably wasn’t looking where I should.’”

Podhurst can hardly keep from laughing. 

“The jury loved him.”

There it is, as he tells the story: the glint in the eye, the competitive spirit—in the courtroom or on the court. How he sized up the opponents, quick-stepped, and fired the winning shot.

“The verdict was fifty grand,” Podhurst says. “Like $5 million today.”

Nothing but net.

The faith in jurors that began with that verdict remains unshaken.

“Juries do the right thing, unlike judges and lawyers sometimes. My experience, and I’ve been, you know, doing this for 64 years in Florida as a lawyer: Juries tend to do the right thing,” he says. 

Coincidentally, his childhood friend, the late Robert Orseck (see sidebar), also worked for Nichols, in the appellate section. They were from neighboring towns, and in high school played basketball against each other. 

In 1967, they turned their friendship into a firm, Podhurst Orseck. 

Podhurst calls one of their earliest cases, a pro bono matter, “the best case I ever handled.”

It involved a baby adopted in New York, where, at the time, the birth mother had six months to change her mind and take back custody of her baby. That’s what Baby Lenore’s mother did—one day short of the deadline.  

But the agency had lost the adoptive parents’ address. By the time they found it, nearly a year had passed. The new parents refused to give the baby up. The birth mother sued. Every court in New York sided with her. 

By then, Baby Lenore was more than 2 years old. The adoptive parents, Podhurst says, “become felons: They come down to Miami, disregarding the order to turn back the child. Took her and fled.”

Podhurst credits Orseck with coming up with the winning strategy. They got a child psychologist from Yale who testified that taking the baby away from the only parents she knew would be harmful to her. The Florida courts agreed. Baby Lenore stayed with her adoptive parents.

“I used to get a call from the two, now-deceased, adoptive parents every Hanukkah, thanking me for what I did,” he says. “Every year for 34 years.”

Just over a year later came the case that thrust him into the top tier of aviation litigators. 

On Dec. 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 crashed into the Everglades, killing 101 of the 176 people on board. The cause: a burned-out landing gear indicator light. While the crew was busy trying to figure out if the nose gear was down, they didn’t notice the plane was losing altitude. 

It was the first fatal crash involving a wide-bodied jet. At one point, more than 70 attorneys, including celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey, represented crash survivors and victims’ families suing Eastern. The judge named the vastly less experienced Podhurst as head of the steering committee. Amid all the jockeying, the judge decided Podhurst’s people skills mattered most. 

Tropin, founding partner of Kozyak Tropin & Throckmorton, says it’s a trait that’s fundamental to Podhurst’s success. 

“He never takes anything personally and he’s got a real gift for getting people on opposite sides of the fence to come to an agreement and get to a result.”

Eastern settled almost all the claims within 21 months of the crash. 

“It was my ticket to being known as an aviation lawyer.” Podhurst says. That’s an understatement.

Cases kept coming. They involved everything from single-engine private planes to multi-engine airliners. They were complicated, technical and, Podhurst felt, required a specialized knowledge beyond the law. 

He took pilot ground courses, spent time in a flight simulator—everything except liftoff. 

“I took all of the courses and everything so I could cross-examine a pilot, a flight engineer, and all of that,” he says. “But I promised Dorothy I wouldn’t fly.”

Since then, the firm has handled more than 150 aviation cases around the world, winning $43.6 million for three families who had loved ones die in the 1997 SilkAir jet crash in Indonesia, and $250 million for the relatives of passengers who died in the ValuJet crash in the Everglades in 1996. Right now, it’s representing the family of a United Nations worker who died in the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 in 2019. 

One case that stands out in Podhurst’s memory predated the Eastern crash. It involved a U.S. Army helicopter crash that killed three crewmen; Podhurst represented their families. The Army stonewalled. For months, Podhurst’s attempts at discovery and depositions were blocked by claims of military secrecy.

After months of dead ends, Podhurst was momentarily at a loss for what to do next. In the midst of yet another frustrating deposition, he took a bathroom break.

“I was standing at a urinal when I heard a voice behind me say, ‘Don’t turn around.’”

Podhurst froze. The voice continued.

“’The cotter pin on the rotor assembly was manufactured short in one batch by five-eighths of an inch,’” Podhurst recalls the man saying. Then he was gone. 

Podhurst went after the manufacturer’s records. He won. 

The voice, he feels sure, belonged to one of the officers at the deposition. 

“He risked court-martial and everything else to do what he felt was the right thing,” Podhurst surmises.

That’s a value Podhurst holds dear.

“I think a lawyer has an obligation to do the right thing,” he says.

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As a client and friend for more than 50 years, Larry Mendelson, chairman and CEO of diversified aerospace and defense component manufacturer HEICO, knows firsthand how Podhurst walks the walk. In a decade-long fight with Pratt & Whitney, HEICO was sometimes unable to pay him on time.

“At the end, of course, we paid him. But it was never with ‘Give me the money. Give me the money.’ It was always, ‘I believe in what you’re doing,’” Mendelson recalls. “‘What these people are doing to you is wrong. And I’m going to stand up for you. Even if you pay me nothing, I’m going to do it.’”

Though best known as an aviation attorney, Podhurst’s casework includes a broad range of complex multidistrict matters. He was co-lead counsel in the national bank overdraft litigation that resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements involving numerous banks; his firm won a $187.6 million judgment against Cuba for the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down; and, along with lead counsels Joe Whatley Jr. and Edith Kallas (with Whatley Kallas), at the time of publication was awaiting final approval of a whopping settlement agreement worth more than $2.5 billion in a 12-year-long antitrust case against Blue Cross Blue Shield. 

“You see him in court,” says U.S. District Court Senior Judge Federico Moreno, “he’s at the top of his game.”

Despite its prominence, his boutique firm has remained roughly the same modest size for decades. It stayed at the same downtown Miami location for more than 55 years, finally moving to Coral Gables last December because, Podhurst says, his partners wanted to escape downtown traffic. 

“Fifteen minutes from my house,” he says of the new location. “I wasn’t going to complain.” 

His office, with its dark wood desk and bookcase, its padded leather chairs, reflects him: Solid. Spare. Comfortable.

“Having a smaller operation is a very rewarding thing,” he says. “I came to the conclusion that you really can’t know hundreds of people and their families. We stuck around 15. I know everybody’s brother, sister, ex-husband …”

“He’s a mensch,” says Moreno. “He really is. If he had been a judge, he would have the perfect election slogan: Keep that mensch on the bench.”

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Remembering Orseck

Robert Orseck died saving lives. 

He lives on at Podhurst Orseck.

It was June 30, 1978, and the two men and their families were at the beach in Tel Aviv; the lifeguards were on strike

“He drowned trying to save kids in a rip current,” says Aaron Podhurst of his longtime partner and friend. “He saved my youngest daughter … and his youngest son. The older kids got to the jetty.” 

Podhurst remembers watching as two doctors tried for almost a half hour to revive his friend. 

He refuses to remove Orseck’s name from the firm.

That speaks volumes, says U.S. District Senior Judge Federico Moreno. “What’s most impressive is—think about it—the firm has the name of a partner who passed and drowned in an accident, what, 45 years ago?” Moreno says. “In today’s world, where people switch firms left and right, we all forget our history. He remembers.”