About Aimée Groth

Aimée Groth Articles written 62

Former Super Lawyers associate editor Aimée Groth is currently a partner at HolacracyOne, an organizational design firm that helps companies become more agile and human-centered. A one-time technology journalist who covered Silicon Valley culture for Quartz, she also served as a senior editor at Business Insider. In 2017, Simon & Schuster published her book The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia, which Kirkus Reviews called “An intriguing business/sociological chronicle with wider implications for modern corporate practices.”

Articles written by Aimée Groth

Safe Haven

San Diego Volunteer Lawyer Program dedicates itself to helping society’s most vulnerable

As a staff attorney for the San Diego Volunteer Lawyer Program, Amy Fitzpatrick would meet some clients in their cars outside the program’s building in the Gaslamp Quarter. Many felt as if they had exhausted all their options.  One client lost everything after being badly beaten by his partner. He also had advanced AIDS and was struggling to receive his Social Security benefits because he had changed his name.  “He would call me from a pay phone, and I would go down and meet him in his …

Dignity for Detroit's Down and Out

Bodman PLC provides much-needed aid to the city’s homeless and low-income residents

Michigan was hit hard by the Great Recession. The foreclosure crisis pushed many people out of stable housing, and the collapse of the auto industry left many without jobs. Statewide homelessness hit a high, topping 100,000 people in 2009 and 2010.  “Detroit fell on its hardest times when the world wasn’t watching,” says Kimberly Paulson, pro bono counsel at Bodman PLC. The more than 150-attorney firm is committed to alleviating the legal issues that accompany poverty and homelessness …

The Former Outcast

Why personal injury attorney Marvin Salenger identifies with his clients

While in grade school, Marvin Salenger of Brownsville, Brooklyn, was diagnosed with acute rheumatic fever, a debilitating, inflammatory disease that leads to painful swelling of the joints. The isolation he suffered was nearly as bad as the disease itself. “In those days people didn’t know much about rheumatic fever,” says Salenger, of Salenger, Sack, Kimmel & Bavaro in Long Island. “No one visited me because they were all afraid their children were going to get it.” This was no …

T. Boone Pickens, Mickey Mouse and More

Delaware corporate litigator Greg Williams represents business titans

Greg Williams once nearly lost his job at a fast food joint. He was working at Gino’s, a chain that sold burgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken, to pay his way through college at the University of Delaware. “I was mouthing off,” he says, “and the assistant manager says to me, ‘The door swung open for you to come in, and it’ll swing open for you to leave.’ Nobody’s indispensable. Any institution or business can get along without you.” That may have been true then. But today, some …

The Don of Criminal Defense Attorneys

Gerald Shargel defends collars of every color … as well as the mob

“I really find it boring to have to explain what I do. I’m tired of explaining it.” It’s an April afternoon, and criminal defense attorney Gerald Shargel, dressed impeccably, occasionally doodling on a legal pad, is discussing his cadre of clients from his 45th floor office hovering over Lexington Avenue and 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan. Not that he feels the need to defend them. He’s already done that in the courtroom. In fact, he sees people who criticize his work as uninformed …

At the Crossroads

A train collides with a car full of young people, slicing the vehicle in two. There are heart-wrenching phone calls. One is to attorney Sharon L. Van Dyck

It’s devastating enough to lose a loved one in a tragic car accident. To have to relive the pain every day, waiting on whims of the Minnesota legal system, drains the soul. That’s what the parents of Brian Frazier, Bridgette Shannon, Corey Chase and Harry Rhoades Jr.—none of whom were older than 20 when they died after their car was struck by a train—have grappled with for nearly a decade. At the time of publication, the Minnesota Supreme Court had yet to decide whether or not to uphold …

The Takeover King

David McBride has played a part in some of the biggest mergers and acquisitions in U.S. history

In October 2004, Michael Ovitz stood before a Delaware judge and, in a sense, before America. He was defending the $140 million windfall the plaintiffs alleged he received after being fired from The Walt Disney Co. for his embattled 14-month tenure nearly a decade earlier. Shareholders wanted Disney and Ovitz to pay it back. “There were armies of reporters in the courtroom every day,” says David McBride, who was one of four attorneys representing Ovitz. “The most interesting thing to me …

Turning Al Anbar

Why Mark Budzinski left his med-mal practice to lead troops in Iraq

In February 2005, when Mark Budzinski arrived in Iraq with the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, their destination, Al Anbar province—which includes Fallujah and Ramadi—was considered a Sunni insurgent stronghold and one of the most deadly places in Iraq for U.S. forces. Budzinski didn’t have to be there. He’d done his time. In 1993, when he was 17, his mother signed him up for the Marines. He served for a decade—through undergraduate and law school at the University of …

In Love with Kansas City

Real estate and railway attorney Allison Bergman keeps one of America’s great cities moving forward

In 1988, Allison Bergman took a road trip with her fiancé from Richmond, Va., where she was attending college, to Kansas City to meet her future in-laws. “I was thinking, Kansas City, Kansas, which is flat. But [Kansas City], Missouri is not flat, and this is a lovely, verdant city,” recalls Bergman from her Grand Boulevard office, home to one of the city’s oldest firms, Lathrop & Gage. “I fell in love with Kansas City and became convinced that I wanted to move here.” As long as …

Whistler’s Lawyer

Qui tam lawyer David Haron helps clients come forward

In May 1993, Jeanne Byrne arrived at David Haron’s office holding a prepaid legal card, purchased at Montgomery Ward. “She happened to have a card that she paid [something] like $20 per month for, and it got her a will and free telephone calls” with select lawyers, says the Frank, Haron, Weiner & Navarro attorney from his office in Troy. “So she carried the card with my name on it in her wallet, and came to me and said, ‘This is it.’” “It” was a 1992 New York Times …

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