Aaron Freiwald

Aaron J. Freiwald, Layser & Freiwald’s founding partner, has extensive trial experience and has obtained numerous six- and seven-figure verdicts and settlements for his clients.

Mr. Freiwald’s practice focuses on cases involving serious individual injuries, including harm arising from environmental contamination or toxic exposure (such as chemical or radiation exposure); motor vehicle accidents; and health care mistakes (such as medical malpractice, birth injury and prescription drug errors). Mr. Freiwald has also handled cases involving consumer fraud, civil rights violations, defamation, bad faith insurance dealings, defective surgical and industrial products and employment disputes.

Some of Mr. Freiwald’s litigation and trial successes include:

• In September 2011, a $2 million verdict in conservative Montgomery County, PA in a case involving a 37-year-old man who was misdiagnosed in the ER of Pottstown Memorial Medical Center. The ER physician was found negligent for failing to diagnose pericarditis, a heart condition that can be life threatening if not treated in a timely manner.
• A multi-million dollar settlement on behalf of a groups of individuals who are part of a residential brain tumor cluster in Northern Illinois. The case involved allegations of cancer-causing chemical exposure from historic plant operations and dumping. In a related matter, Mr. Freiwald also negotiated a multi-million dollar settlement on behalf of a class of residents in the community who required monitoring for brain tumors. As a result of the monitoring program that followed, two former residents were diagnosed with early-stage brain tumors.
• A $4.5 million jury verdict in a case where the surgeon operated on the wrong kidney leading to the patient’s death.
• A multi-million settlement on behalf of a woman whose Ob-Gyn failed to diagnose and treat her hyperthyroidism. The woman died during an emergency delivery and her baby was profoundly brain injured.
• A $6.33 million jury verdict on behalf of the parents of a 13-month old baby whose pediatrician failed to make timely diagnosis of bacterial meningitis.
• A $6.4 million jury verdict on behalf of parents of a 19-year old boy who died of liver failure after his neurologist failed to perform routine and required blood tests after prescribing Depakote, an anti-seizure medication.
• A $4 million jury verdict on behalf of a 36-year old mother of three who died of a massive pulmonary embolism following routine knee surgery.
• A multi-million dollar settlement on behalf of a woman who suffered a severe, allergic reaction to an iodine-based contrast dye used during an imaging study. The patient had disclosed her allergy in the “patient information” form, but the physician had failed to review the record. The patient died because the office was not equipped to handle the emergency.
• A multi-million dollar settlement on behalf of a teenage boy whose physicians failed to diagnose a volvulus – a twisted bowel – leading to his requiring multi-organ transplants.

Mr. Freiwald’s main office is in Philadelphia, PA, but he has handled complex, civil cases and trials in New Jersey, Massachusets, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Florida and Ohio. He is a member of the Philadelphia Trial Lawyers Association, the American Board of Trial Advocates, the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association and the Philadelphia Bar Association.

Mr. Freiwald has an AV rating from Martindale Hubbell, the organization’s highest rating. His peers have repeatedly recognized Mr. Freiwald as a “Pennsylvania Super Lawyer.” In 2006, Mr. Freiwald was invited to become a Fellow of the American Academy of Trial Counsel. In 2007, Lawdragon Publications named Mr. Freiwald to its list of the 500 leading Plaintiff’s lawyers in America.

Originally from San Francisco, Mr. Freiwald graduated from Columbia College in New York, where he was Editor in Chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator. He is an graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School where he was named to the Order of the Coif, the law school’s honors society.

Prior to law school, Mr. Freiwald worked as an investigative print and television journalist for eight years covering law and politics in Washington, D.C., Latin America, and Europe. He worked as a foreign correspondent based in Mexico, traveling from there to Nicaragua and Guatemala, and, later, based in Paris. Mr. Freiwald covered the Justice Department for the weekly D.C. newspaper, Legal Times and then worked as a staff writer for The American Lawyer magazine in New York. In 1990, Mr. Freiwald was named Editorial Director for the American Lawyer/Time Warner start-up, Court TV.

In 1994, Mr. Freiwald published the critically acclaimed book, The Last Nazi (W.W. Norton), which is a history of the Nazi war crimes trials in German and the story in particular of the life and trial of SS Commander Josef Schwammberger, one of the last important Nazi figures to be brought to trial. In researching the book, Mr. Freiwald spent time at the Schwammberger trial in Stuttgart, visited archives in Germany and Poland and traveled to Argentina, where Schwammberger had hid from authorities for 40 years.

Mr. Freiwald has lectured in continuing education courses on many aspects of trial practice.

Mr. Freiwald is married and has three daughters.