Charting a Goal-Oriented Case with Harris St. Laurent Wechsler’s Yonaton Aronoff

High-stakes business litigation, especially on the defense side, can feel formulaic and impersonal – more about what’s on the page than what’s happening between the people in the room.

Litigator Yonaton Aronoff flips that procedure on its head: He approaches every case by starting at the end.

A partner in premier litigation boutique Harris St. Laurent Wechsler (HSW)’s New York office, Aronoff has built a career litigating multifaceted, high-stakes commercial cases, representing companies and executives across a wide variety of industries on both sides of the V. In each of those cases, he aims to understand the people at the heart of the dispute – who they are, what they want and how to help them get there. 

To do that, he works backwards – crafting a bespoke approach that takes the client’s ideal end result as the starting point. Whether that’s monetary damages, changing the public narrative, implementing new policies or simply being able to tell their story, Aronoff works individually with his clients to craft a path forward that puts their priorities first. 

“It's not just where they want to end up in the case, it's where they want to end up in life,” he emphasizes. 

In one recent example, Aronoff represented the former publisher of Sports Illustrated Magazine, The Arena Group Holdings. Aronoff defended Arena in a suit brought by brand management company Authentic Brands Group (ABG), who was seeking $45M in termination fees from Arena – but his client, Aronoff says, felt they were the victims in the case. Aronoff and team filed a countersuit, arguing that Arena was forced out through a “multistep corporate heist.” While the settlement is confidential, “I think there’s a good outcome for everybody,” Aronoff says.

In other high-profile matters, Aronoff, along with his partners, represented more than 40 former Buzzfeed employees who were allegedly restricted from selling their shares of the company when it went public via a SPAC listing in 2021. Instead, the suit claimed, a share class conversion issue meant some employees were able to trade freely while others were shut out. The attorneys say the mistake cost the employees millions of dollars in losses. The team recently reached a successful settlement.

In ongoing litigation, Aronoff is on the team representing Post University in a copyright infringement case against popular subscription-based course materials site Learneo (formerly known as Course Hero). While the case began as an investigation into student cheating, the current case alleges that Learneo was charging subscribers for tens of thousands of unauthorized pages’ worth of Post University’s course material – which particularly impacts the university as a for-profit, primarily remote institution. 

Aronoff’s creative, aggressive and empathetic practice has made him a four-time member of the Lawdragon Leading Litigators in America.

Lawdragon: Before coming to HSW in 2017, you were working in Big Law. What inspired your switch to a trial boutique?

Yonaton Aronoff: I worked for a trial boutique in New York City as a first-year law student. Then, my second year, I went to a Big Law firm in San Francisco. I loved both firms, and I was very close to staying at the Big Law firm and starting my career there. But I got an offer to come back to the boutique, and that really excited me because they were fantastic lawyers, and they practiced creatively. Then, a little over a year into being at the boutique, we merged and became the New York office of Foley & Lardner. So, that firm continued to basically be the nucleus of Foley's New York office my entire career there. So I did get the best of both worlds. It was a boutique environment in the sense that it was the same people practicing the way they had always practiced, but it was also a Big Law experience.

I stayed at Foley for a long time. I made partner there. I loved my colleagues; I'm still very close with them. But I always kind of wanted to get back to the boutique. So, when I met Jon Harris through a mutual friend, his practice and the firm's practice completely aligned with my way of practicing: You start at the solution and work backwards, designing a bespoke process that's going to get the client the outcome they want. What I didn't love about Big Law was that there tended to be a more uniform, cookie-cutter approach to practice.

It's not just where they want to end up in the case, it's where they want to end up in life.

LD: Do you feel like being able to work on both sides of the V is helpful for understanding the other side, as well?

YA: I do. I did some plaintiffs’ work at Foley, but the Big Law firms tend to be more on the defense side. Learning how the big firms defend cases has been advantageous, especially because they tend to be slower, more methodical and more formulaic – so you often know where they're going.

I don't like exclusively being the plaintiff. I get bored. I like to mix it up. But one of the reasons I wanted to go back to being in a boutique was because I like being able to move forward, which is what you do on the plaintiffs’ side. You're stepping forward, causing chaos and creating value for your client, and the other side is the one that has to react.

LD: Going back to your early career for a moment, did you have any mentors early on, and what did you learn from them?

YA: I did. Peter Wang was my mentor, and I'm still in touch with him. I've known Peter my whole life and he taught me almost everything I know about how to practice law. But Peter's partners at Friedman, Wang & Bleiberg, that initial trial boutique, were also my mentors – Robert Scher, Susan Schwartz, Todd Norbitz. They really shaped the way I practice.

LD: What lessons did you take away from them?

YA: Oh my gosh, how much time do you have? First of all, attention to detail and the degree to which precision matters. That wasn’t in my natural skill set, but I learned it begrudgingly and then got good at it. And then again, it's putting the client first, making the client feel like they're the most important person in the universe in the moment that you are engaged with them. Peter does that better than anybody I've ever seen, and I've taken that to my own practice.

LD: Going back to the present day, your practice encompasses so many different kinds of cases on both sides. Are there any types of claims that you find yourself working on the most?

YA: I'll tell you the claims I like the most: the human behavior cases. I prefer those cases, where someone did something bad to somebody else. Even if it was a breach of contract in a business setting, it's far more compelling and fun to me if it's human behavior. Most of the time it is, as opposed to a computer did something bad or an accounting dispute. I like those cases just fine, but they don't get me out of bed in the morning. I would need to sprinkle in a fair amount of human behavior cases to love what I'm doing.

LD: You’ve said that you use this logical reasoning side part of your personality when dealing with highly emotional cases. Are those human behavior cases most often what yields that high emotion?

YA: Absolutely. As an example of a fun human behavior case, we had a client when I was at Foley who had a travel agency business. He and his wife were on a cruise ship, and they were schmoozing with another travel agency business couple. They basically sold their company to that other couple on a napkin – literally wrote it down on a napkin. The couple they sold it to got off at one of the ports and typed it up as a contract and then tried to enforce it. I mean, that's a business-to-business breach of contract claim. But it's so fascinating when you drill down on what actually happened.

LD: How do you handle the high tensions and emotions of those cases?

YA: With the client, we try to take a holistic view of where they want to end up. That could mean a lot of things. It doesn't necessarily mean winning the outcome in court, because the win could come at a cost to the client, financially and to their reputation. They may not say this – they may not even know it – but sometimes one of their main goals is to be able to tell their story. They're not going to be able to tell their story until they're actually deposed. Understanding that means understanding that you can make all the pre-discovery motions you want, but that may not serve the client's ultimate interest, which is to actually get under oath and tell somebody what happened to them. Once they do that, oftentimes it's cathartic for them. How good or bad of a case they have may matter somewhat less now that they've gotten the opportunity to tell their story. So, that's one aspect of it – just understanding from a human perspective where the client needs to get to. That means understanding who they are as a person or who the people are in a business and what the real human objectives are.

In my practice, someone calls me on in their worst moment of their worst day, and that is the highest honor I could think of.

LD: That's so interesting – how the logical, practical side and the deeply human emotional side work together. Then, looking at current cases, tell me about the case on behalf of Post University against Learneo.

YA: I love that case. Again, it's a computer case, but it's really a human behavior case in so many ways. Post is a for-profit national university, but they have a huge online learning model. They also have a campus in Waterbury, Connecticut, but the online learning model is their core business model, and it requires very careful design and deployment. Materials like syllabi, tests, that sort of thing. And Learneo is a $4B Silicon Valley application, it has been contended, that students use primarily to cheat – they upload materials and get other materials back. So, what started as a cheating investigation morphed into a massive copyright case under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

LD: At what point did you get involved?

YA: We got involved when depositions were starting. So document discovery had mostly been done, and they brought us in to help shape the case for trial, which is a posture that we often come into cases for – it’s what we're good at. We immediately started deposing people, and the first person we deposed happened to be the head of compliance for Learneo. And his testimony was extremely helpful for us.

LD: Then, what about the Buzzfeed case?

YA: Working with the former Buzzfeed employees – many of whom were writers and editors and digital content creators – was fantastic. We got to meet so many really interesting, creative people. And it was a bummer because these people did nothing wrong. They worked hard and didn't make high salaries, and the stock was important to them.

But that's another thing I love about my job: because my practice is general, I get to meet different people in any industry. That’s by design; I really have resisted specializing. That was another thing that I felt a little bit out of step with at the big firm – they really want you to specialize because it's easier to market you. But I get bored if I'm doing the same thing over and over again. I like being a trial lawyer in civil litigation because as long as you can learn a subject well enough to cross-examine the other side's expert, you're good to go. So it's a very academic profession. A case comes in and it's in an industry you've never heard of, or in the travel industry or the digital media industry or for Sports Illustrated. It doesn't matter. I can learn it well enough to cross examine the other side's expert, and then I'm an expert in that myself by being able to do that, in a sense. It just keeps me stimulated.

LD: What else do you find most fulfilling about your practice?

YA: In my practice, someone calls me on in their worst moment of their worst day, and that is the highest honor I could think of.

LD: You’ve also spent years working with the Animal Care Centers of NYC (ACC), including being appointed to the board by Mayor Bloomberg in 2012. How did you get involved and why is that an important cause to you?

YA: Back in maybe 2004, 2005, I adopted a dog from ACC, and I went to the Manhattan shelter. I just remember feeling like they needed some help. So, I started thinking, what tools does a lawyer have to offer a public animal shelter? So, I started helping them with animal cruelty cases pro bono. At the time, when an animal came into the shelter system that was the victim of animal cruelty and the owner was charged, the animal was evidence. So, the animal had to be detained for the entire outcome of the case, which could be years.

LD: Oh, my gosh.

YA: So, we helped figure out a process to get that expedited. Then, I helped build a program where we helped ACC with all kinds of commercial cases in addition to cruelty cases. I just stepped down from the board a couple months ago. I just felt like the organization is in such a better place now than it was back when I started. The leadership team is phenomenal. The working relationship with the city, which was not good when I joined, is very, very good today. And they're a first-class shelter system that are really out in front doing everything right, in my opinion. We recently got a first-class, state-of-the-art shelter built in Queens that was a unique public-private partnership structure. Now that that shelter has opened, I felt like I could step down. But it is very near and dear to my heart.