Daniel Arshack

Daniel "Dan" Arshack (born March 30, 1956) is an American criminal defense attorney, co-founder of The Bronx Defenders, managing partner of the law firm Arshack, Hajek and Lehrman, PLLC, and a founding member of the International Criminal Bar, which was created to promote "the development of an independent legal profession and practice before the International Criminal Court."

Arshack, who has been a defender for his entire career and "has never put anyone behind bars as either a prosecutor or government counsel," is known for his expertise on international criminal justice issues, lawyer trainings, and anti-death penalty advocacy.

Arshack has conducted training for lawyers in Paris, Beirut, The Hague, Victoria, Montreal, Liberia, and New York.

His specialties are trial advocacy techniques, ethics, and international criminal tribunals.

He has also been an adjunct professor of trial advocacy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.

Arshack was born in Detroit on March 30, 1956, and lived there until 1959.

His parents divorced and his mother raised him and his sister Susan in Ann Arbor until she moved the family to the Washington, D.C. area in 1966.

Arshack attended Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he played on the varsity soccer team and was president of Stage Crew.

He supervised designing and building the sets for Oliver and Lil‘ Abner.

Arshack studied at Brandeis University, where he first majored in technical theater and studied theatre set design in Sweden at the University of Stockholm, though ultimately majored in Sociology.

His first job out of college was as a field researcher for the Environmental Protection Agency on a national rural water quality assessment study.

He was assigned a portion of northeastern Pennsylvania and was responsible for interviewing rural households about their water and took samples of water for testing.

He then worked from 1978 to 1980 as research analyst for Abt Associates, a social science think tank in Cambridge, MA. He worked on studies designed to understand methods of improving the workflow though welfare offices, compared the outcomes of child day care programs in relation to their funding models and addressed juvenile justice issues.

Arshack then attended Antioch School of Law in Washington D.C., from which he graduated in 1983.

After receiving his J.D. degree from Antioch, Arshack worked at private firms in Washington D.C. and Philadelphia from 1983 to 1987.

His scope of practice included administrative hearings in securities fraud litigation, criminal trials including conspiracy, drug sales, interstate prostitution, homicide, passport fraud, and bank teller fraud; he also handled complex product liability work business loss, contracts, civil rights, and federal tort claims.

As a result of one of his first cases, involving the rape of a young boy while in pre-trial detention in Washington, D.C., which successfully challenged the conditions of confinement for juveniles in Washington, D.C., Arshack had the opportunity to assist in the drafting of the Child Protection Act of 1984, which protected vulnerable children from being housed in cells with older, more violent arrestees.

From 1987 to 1991, Arshack worked as a trial attorney at the Legal Aid Society in New York City, where he represented thousands of clients and participated in training new lawyers.

During this time, he successfully challenged the length of time individuals could be confined pending indictment.

While still a young Legal Aid lawyer, Arshack was featured in the 1990 Ted Koppel documentary news report that followed a drug trial from beginning to end.

At the conclusion of the case after his client was convicted, Arshack answered in response to Koppel asking if he thought his client got a fair trial: "Well, I believe there should have been a level playing field. In this case there were two prosecutors in the room. One sat at the table next to me and the other was wearing a black robe" (referring to then New York State Supreme Court Justice Leslie Crocker Snyder).

From 1991 to 1996, Arshack again worked in a private practice, which emphasized criminal defense in state and federal courts.

In 1994, he completed post-graduate work in Medical Bio-Ethics and the Humanities at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and Einstein School of Medicine.

In 1996, Arshack, under contract to the City of New York, built a new public defender’s office in The Bronx known as The Bronx Defenders, now a nationally recognized office.

His team of lawyers and support staff handled around 13,000 cases per year.

While with the Bronx Defenders, Arshack implemented a program to train attorneys from Latin America to set up public defender programs in their countries.

In 1999, Arshack, along with David Hoffman, formed Arshack & Hoffman, P.C., in Manhattan.

The firm specialized in criminal defense and the defense of medical malpractice cases.

When Hoffman left the firm to become General Counsel at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in 2003, Arshack formed Arshack, Hajek, and Lehrman, PLLC, which provides criminal defense to businesses and individuals, medical malpractice defense to physicians and hospitals, and counsel to businesses in complex commercial litigation; the firm works throughout the United States and internationally.

Arshack’s partners are Lynn Hajek, who specializes in representing hospitals and physicians in medical malpractice cases, and Michael Lehrman, who heads the trial defense division of the firm’s medical malpractice group.

In 2006, Arshack successfully represented actress and singer Chanti Nieves’s privacy interests, when she was surreptitiously videotaped by HBO’s reality show Family Bonds as she stood on a street corner in Manhattan.

Members of the cast made "crude remarks" about the effect Nieves’s appearance had on their genitals, and she sought damages.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Debra A. James ruled in Ms. Nieves's favor that Family Bonds would have had to show a "real relationship" between the show’s subject matter and the bystander’s image to avoid liability in an invasion of privacy case.

In 2008 and 2015, Arshack represented David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, who was a key government witness in the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

A group of historians sought to uncover Greenglass’s secret grand jury testimony, which led to the conviction and subsequent execution of the Rosenbergs; letters Arshack wrote on his client’s behalf convinced a federal judge in the July 2008 decision not to unseal Greenglass’s testimony.

In 2008, Arshack represented "French Spiderman" Alain Robert, who was charged with reckless endangerment, among other charges.

Robert claimed to have climbed The New York Times Building to raise awareness about global warming.

After hearing Robert’s testimony, a grand jury decided to reduce his felony charges to minor non-criminal violations; Robert was sentenced to three days of community service, which he completed at the nonprofit organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

In 2011, Arshack provided the United States defense of the highest-ranking former official of Libya’s Qaddafi regime to defect from Libya at the inception of the Arab Spring.

Arshack, representing the estate of David Greenglass and his family, continued to resist the release of that grand jury testimony in 2015 after Mr. Greenglass’s death.