Regardie's - Washington's Ten Most-Feared Lawyers
By: Patrick J. Kiger

The motto on Aaron Levine's web site - "When the cure is worse than the disease" - is vaguely reminiscent of a line from an old Sylvester Stallone action flick. But it works, no doubt because Levine inspires the same sort of cold-sweat-down-the-back terror in doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and medical-device manufacturers that Stallone once evoked in cinematic bad guys. The Brooklyn native brashly set up his own law firm shortly after he graduated from George Washington University's law school in 1960, and since then he's represented thousands of clients in medical-malpractice and product liability cases. In the 1970s, Levine was a trailblazer in filing lawsuits over an arthritis drug that allegedly caused blindness and over pacemakers with defective leads, and his dogged persistence at digging up proof of manufacturers' negligence led the Association of Trail Lawyers of America to select him to head the practice groups that coordinated lawsuits in those areas nationwide. Since then, he's played a similar leadership role in a fact of other headline-grabbing health scandals. In the 1980s, he helped lead the way in litigation over DES, the anti-miscarriage drug that caused cancer and other health problems in the daughters of women who took it, and over the Dalkon Shield, a birth-control device that caused sterility and sometimes death; in the 1990s, he represented hundreds of clients in suits over health problems linked to breast implants and the diet drug Fen / Phen.

Levine has won big, again and again - $70 million in settlements for his DES and Dalkon Shield clients alone. He wins not with elegant lawyering - "In the courtroom, I'm kind of a plain-talking Brooklyn boy who maybe gets a little excited at times," he says - but by relentlessly investigating his targets and amassing mountains of medical research and data. "I've got the world's biggest library of DES research - some 1,400 studies - here in my offices," he says. "I've got five medical professionals here on staff, and I'm associated with a dozen doctors in various specialties that I can call up any time to pick their brains. You've got to be able to get the information and get it quick. I'll be in the middle of a deposition of the other side's experts, and when they cite a study, I can call my people and have that study in my hands in seconds, with all the problems noted so I can confront the other side. That's how you win cases."

Even so, he's continuing to push the envelope. Last year, for example, he won what he says is the largest-ever settlement over botched laser eye surgery - an emerging controversy where malpractice suits face difficult going, thanks in part to the detailed waivers that patients are required to sign. At an age where he could easily retire to Florida and bask in his successes, what keeps him going? "Aggression, hate of the drug companies, and avarice," he says. "I just like to take on the big boys, and show them as the commercial creatures they are, not as they ethical lifesavers they make themselves out to be."