Based in Philadelphia, Dilworth Paxson is a full-service East Coast firm that operates with a multi-disciplinary approach, serving clients in the automotive, biotechnology, construction, education, energy, family office, financial services, infrastructure, insurance, manufacturing, media, and transportation industries.

Practitioners to Politicians

Founded in 1933 and soon joined by Richardson Dilworth—Philadelphia’s future mayor—Dilworth Paxson’s original focus was on real estate tax appeals related to declining property values in the 1930s. Remaining local to Philadelphia for decades, the firm saw other prominent local figures come through its ranks, such as Robert Casey, who would go on to be elected Governor of Pennsylvania in 1986. Today, Dilworth Paxson has six offices across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and New York.

Big Cases Across the Board

With practices in nearly every major legal arena from antitrust and healthcare law to real estate and tax law, the firm has served clients ranging from individual entrepreneurs and investors to big-name companies like Dow Chemical Company. The firm’s portfolio of corporate transactions includes mergers and acquisitions, recapitalizations, business formations and dissolutions, venture capital projects, joint ventures, and financing transactions, to name a few. Some deals the firm has navigated include its client’s acquisition of major Philadelphia daily newspapers, a stock and cash merger that created the largest association of independent truck leasing companies in the U.S. and Canada, and a Fortune 100 company’s sale of its retail fuel delivery division.

Dilworth Paxson’s litigation group has a similarly wide breadth of experience both in and out of the courtroom, representing clients in state and federal trial and appellate courts, mediation and arbitration proceedings, and before regulatory and administrative agencies. The firm’s litigators have handled such matters as the defense of a Fortune 500 company in multiple class actions with damages in the billions, the successful representation of the American Financial Services Association in cases striking down local laws regulating sub-prime lending, and the negotiation of a multi-million dollar settlement for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority relating to environmental contribution claims.

Diversity—A Culture, Not an Initiative

Dilworth Paxson has been a proponent for diversity from the start—and ahead of its time. Operating on a strict meritocracy, the firm was the first in 1950s Philadelphia to offer a position to William Coleman, an African-American attorney with a Harvard law degree who had had trouble finding work at other area firms. And maybe you’ve heard of a case called Brown v. Board of Education? Coleman went on to become a major contributor to plaintiffs' briefs in Brown after Thurgood Marshall, then a New York attorney, recruited him to assist in the case that led to the end of racial segregation in schools. Today, the firm carries on its tradition of diversity by supporting area non-profit organizations that promote diversity and supporting firmwide efforts through its Diversity Committee.