Horwitz, Horwitz & Associates, Ltd.: Four Generations, One Courtroom Argument

Attorney advertising. This profile was not paid for, commissioned, or reviewed by the firm before publication. Awesome Attorneys is not a lawyer referral service and does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any firm. Results described below are attributed to their published source; past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Nothing here is legal advice.

At a Glance

Firm	Horwitz, Horwitz & Associates, Ltd.
Founded	Family practice traced to Jacob W. Horwitz, who practiced from 1921 to 1963; the present firm name dates to 1988, the corporation to 1983 (see Section I)
Principal office	25 E. Washington Street, Suite 900, Chicago, IL 60602 — 20 of 22 attorneys are ARDC-registered here
Other locations	Joliet (two attorneys); Gurnee and Aurora, both by appointment only
Focus	Catastrophic and construction injury; motor vehicle; medical malpractice; product liability; FELA; wrongful death; workers’ compensation
Side of the docket	Plaintiff only
Size	22 attorneys — 12 partners, 10 associates
Signature result	$64,000,000 judgment, Bayer v. Panduit Corp. — $80M verdict reduced 20% for comparative fault; Horwitz lawyers named as counsel in the Illinois Supreme Court opinion, 2016 IL 119553
Fee model	Contingency (per the firm)
Disciplinary record	No public discipline on file with the Illinois ARDC for any of the 22 attorneys

I. The Firm That Was Also Another Firm

The firm’s own mission page says it plainly: “Jacob W. Horwitz was the first in the family to become an attorney. He founded the law firm that became Horwitz, Anesi and Ozmon. He practiced from 1921 until his death in 1963.”

That sentence is worth stopping on, because Anesi, Ozmon, Rodin, Novak & Kohen is still a separate, active Chicago plaintiff’s firm today, ten blocks north at 161 N. Clark. Two firms in the same city, in the same business, descended from the same man. A century later they occasionally appear on opposite sides of the same caption — Anesi Ozmon filed as amicus in Bayer v. Panduit, the case that is this firm’s single largest result.

Four generations: Jacob, then Andrew J. Horwitz — the ARDC confirms an Andrew J. Horwitz admitted November 28, 1961, retired since 2004 — then Mitchell (partner 1978) and Clifford (partner 1988), and now Joshua and Elizabeth Horwitz, both currently associates at the firm.

Three corrections to how the firm tells this. It advertises “since 1924,” but its own text says Jacob practiced from 1921. The 1924 date is a lineage claim, not entity continuity — by the firm’s own account the name “Horwitz, Horwitz & Associates” dates to 1988, and the BBB records the Ltd. corporation as incorporated April 1, 1983. And Jacob W. Horwitz does not appear in the ARDC roll at all, which is explainable — he died a decade before the ARDC was created in 1973 — but means the founding generation is firm-asserted rather than independently verified. The claim that Andrew Horwitz “pioneered the concept of hedonic damages” we could not tie to any reported case, and do not repeat as fact.

II. The Mechanism: A Construction-Injury Practice Built on Both Halves of the Same Case

An Illinois ironworker who falls on a job site has two claims, and they behave nothing alike. Workers’ compensation is capped, tried without a jury, and paid against the employer regardless of fault. The third-party negligence suit — against the general contractor, the property owner, the equipment manufacturer — is uncapped and tried to a jury, and it is where the real money is.

This firm runs both, with a senior partner heading each. Mitchell Horwitz leads the workers’ compensation department; Clifford Horwitz and the litigation partners try the third-party cases. The firm’s own self-description is “a Personal Injury and Workers’ Compensation Trial Law Firm,” and unlike most firms that make this claim, it carries the credentials on both sides: Mitchell Horwitz and Mark Weissburg were the two selected for the Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group’s invitation-only Top Injured Workers’ Attorneys program in July 2020, while the litigation side produced Bayer.

The structural advantage is that the same injury does not have to be re-worked by a second firm, and the comp file does not get built in a way that damages the tort case. The structural risk, which we will return to, is that we could not establish how the practice actually splits — the firm publishes no breakdown, and we will not invent a percentage.

III. Practice Areas

• Catastrophic injury
• Construction and workplace injury
• Motor vehicle and trucking collisions
• Medical malpractice
• Nursing home neglect
• Product liability
• FELA (railroad worker) claims
• Dram shop
• Class action and qui tam
• Wrongful death
• Workers’ compensation

Every listed area is plaintiff-side. We found no defense or insurance-defense work anywhere on the site or in any directory listing. There is no Social Security disability practice.

IV. Track Record

Past results do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any future case. Each figure below is identified by its source, and figures we could not confirm outside the firm’s own website are marked as such.

The headline result survives checking, and the primary record is unusually explicit about it. The Illinois Supreme Court’s opinion in Bayer v. Panduit Corp., 2016 IL 119553, lists counsel for the appellant as “Clifford W. Horwitz, Thomas A. Kelliher, and Jay R. Luchsinger, all of Horwitz, Horwitz & Associates, Ltd., of Chicago.” All three are current partners. Panduit and Area Erectors were represented by Querrey & Harrow.

$80,000,000 verdict → $64,000,000 judgment	Bayer v. Panduit Corp. Ronald Bayer, an ironworker for Area Erectors, fell on a Panduit warehouse project and is quadriplegic. Tried to a Cook County jury in fall 2012; the award was reduced 20% for comparative fault. The firm discloses the $80M/20% mechanics itself on its own results page — to its credit. The judgment was never disturbed on appeal; the subsequent litigation concerned the workers’ compensation lien and Section 5(b) attorney fees, and the Supreme Court’s 2016 ruling reversed an appellate decision against Bayer, a net win for the client.
$44,700,000	Securities class action. Firm-sourced, no case name given.
$40,000,000	Truck-accident burn case. Firm-sourced, no case name given.
$35,000,000	Defective hard-drive product liability. Firm-sourced.
$32,150,000 / $32,000,000 / $25,000,000	Construction death; CRPS truck driver; ironworker. All firm-sourced.

One nuance the firm leaves out, and it matters. The appellate opinion states that “Panduit and Bayer later settled the lawsuit after the jury trial.” So the $64 million is a genuine verdict and judgment, but the actual recovery was a confidential post-trial settlement of undisclosed amount. Advertising it as a verdict is accurate. Describing it as “$64 million recovered” would not be, and we have written it as a verdict throughout.

Of the twelve itemized results on the firm’s results page, we independently verified one against a court record. The other eleven carry no case names and are firm-sourced only. They total roughly $348 million.

The aggregate claims do not agree with each other. The homepage says “billions in verdicts and settlements,” plural. The results page and the Chicago Bar Association profile both say “over $1 billion.” Nothing we found supports “billions,” and we cap the claim at the firm’s own more careful figure. Also unsupported: an “over 99% success rate” and “over 25% record-breaking verdicts,” both on the homepage.

The superlative is stated four different ways on the firm’s own properties. The results-page body is careful: “one of the largest Cook County jury verdicts and the largest jury verdict for a quadriplegic client in Illinois history.” That formulation is defensible. But the page’s own title reads “highest jury verdict Illinois history”; Clifford Horwitz’s bio says “the highest personal injury jury verdict of all time in Illinois for an individual”; and his Avvo profile says “largest spinal cord injury verdict in IL history.” Those are three different claims, and competing Chicago firms contest the unqualified version — Cavanagh Sorich announced a $104 million Illinois verdict in October 2025. We could locate no authoritative all-time Illinois ranking, so we are not calling the claim false. We are declining to repeat it, and using only the qualified formulation. Clifford Horwitz’s bio also states he “has won virtually every case he has tried since he began practicing law,” which the CBA version renders as “won every case he’s tried for the last 20 years.” Both are unverifiable, and they are not the same claim.

V. Client Voice

The client-facing record is strong and the employee-facing record is not, and those are different things that get conflated in most firm profiles.

Clients: 5.0 across 225 Google reviews — 224 five-star and two one-star, with nothing in between. That figure comes from an aggregator’s published distribution rather than from Google directly, and we flag it as such. Yelp shows 11 reviews across what appear to be two duplicate listings; the star rating was not retrievable. Clifford Horwitz carries a 10.0 Avvo rating with four client reviews averaging 4.3 and “no misconduct found.” The BBB gives an A+ and has accredited the firm since April 14, 2017. No pattern of client complaints about fees, communication or case handling surfaced anywhere.

Employees: Glassdoor shows 3.4 out of 5 across 21 reviews, with only 52% saying they would recommend the firm, against 82% CEO approval. The recurring themes are pay below benchmark, favoritism, and a gap between stated values and actual treatment. One review, quoted because it is representative rather than because it is the harshest: “they say ‘we’re family’ but treat you like crap and then get confused when we all leave.”

We include the employee data because turnover is the mechanism by which a client’s case changes hands, and because a profile that reported only the 5.0 would be telling half of what we found.

VI. Beyond the Courtroom

We looked and came up short, and say so rather than filling the section. The only lead was a URL for an “Andrew J. Horwitz Scholarship,” which now redirects to the homepage with no scholarship content behind it — a removed or dead program. A “Horwitz Charitable Fund” exists in West Chicago; we found no evidence connecting it to this firm, and Horwitz is a common enough surname in Illinois law that we will not assume the link.

There is no verifiable firm-level community involvement. Whatever the lawyers here do individually, the firm does not publish it and no outside source records it.

VII. Credentials and Recognition

Peer-reviewed or invitation-based:

• Workers’ Injury Law & Advocacy Group — Top Injured Workers’ Attorneys. Mitchell W. Horwitz and Mark Weissburg, announced July 10, 2020. Invitation-only, extended by the organization’s board.
• Super Lawyers — ten attorneys selected per the firm profile, with Clifford (personal injury) and Mitchell (workers’ compensation) individually listed. Independent research plus peer nomination, though the publisher also sells marketing to those it selects.
• Martindale-Hubbell AV / Distinguished peer review rating.
• Leading Lawyers, 2013–2017, peer-survey based.

Paid or self-selecting programs, which should not be read as honors: the Million Dollar Advocates Forum and Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum, both membership-fee plus self-reported case threshold; National Trial Lawyers “Top 100,” a solicitation-and-dues model; Avvo’s algorithmic 10/10, driven by self-supplied profile data; and BBB accreditation, which is purchased.

A note on the Wikipedia article about this firm: it reads promotionally and is materially out of date, describing two offices and sixteen attorneys against the current four locations and twenty-two. We did not use it and neither should anyone else.

VIII. What We Checked and Did Not Find

All 22 attorneys were run through the Illinois ARDC individually. Every one is “Active and authorized to practice law,” registered at a firm address, with “Public Record of Discipline: None.” No suspensions, censures, reprimands, disbarments or pending proceedings. No malpractice suits, sanctions or ethics findings were located against the firm or any attorney at it. No reversed verdict is being advertised. Andrew J. Horwitz, retired since 2004, is correctly presented as history rather than as practicing staff.

Two method notes, because they nearly produced false findings. The ARDC’s results page returns a static “your search returned no results” placeholder for every query, including attorneys who have been disbarred — the real data loads from a separate endpoint. We validated our method against a control surname that returns a known disbarment record before relying on any null. And the roll paginates at ten rows: our first “Horwitz” query returned only surnames A through D and appeared to show Mitchell, Joshua and Elizabeth Horwitz missing from the roll entirely. That was a pagination artifact, not a finding. All three are in good standing. We also note that ARDC’s separate disciplinary-case search channel failed its own control test, so we discarded it and rested on the one validated method rather than claiming two.

One drafting hazard worth flagging for readers: The Horwitz Law Group, run by Mark J. Horwitz, is a different Chicago plaintiff-side personal injury firm at 20 N. Clark Street, half a mile away and in the same 60602 ZIP code. There is also the Blake Horwitz Law Firm (civil rights and criminal defense, 216 S. Jefferson), a Horwitz & Horwitz, LLC in Centerville, Ohio, and a Horwitz & Zim Law Group in New York. Use the full name and the 25 E. Washington address.

IX. The Illinois Legal Backdrop, in Plain English

General information, not legal advice. Statutes below were verified against the Illinois General Assembly, the Illinois Courts, or the current Illinois Compiled Statutes as noted; deadlines turn on facts a lawyer has to look at.

Illinois does not recognize legal specialists. Illinois Rule of Professional Conduct 7.4(b) states that “The Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize certifications of specialties in the practice of law, nor does it recognize certifications of expertise in any phase of the practice of law by any agency, governmental or private, or by any group, organization or association.” Rule 7.4(c) bars a lawyer from using “certified,” “specialist” or “expert” to describe their qualifications, except to identify an actual certificate or award — and then only with a disclaimer stating that the Supreme Court of Illinois does not recognize specialty certifications and that the credential is not a requirement to practice law in Illinois. Registered patent attorneys are the single carve-out. No lawyer at this firm is described as a specialist anywhere in this profile, and any Illinois firm that describes itself that way is telling you something about its compliance habits.

Two years, usually. 735 ILCS 5/13-202 gives two years from accrual to file a personal injury action.

Fifty-one percent ends the case. Under 735 ILCS 5/2-1116, a plaintiff more than 50% at fault recovers nothing. At 50% or below, damages are reduced by the plaintiff’s share — which is precisely the mechanism that took $16 million off the Bayer verdict. No contributory fault may be attributed to a plaintiff suing over childhood sexual abuse.

Children get the clock back. 735 ILCS 5/13-211 gives a person injured before turning 18 two years from their eighteenth birthday.

Medical malpractice runs on its own clock. Under 735 ILCS 5/13-212, a claim against a physician, dentist, registered nurse or hospital must be brought within two years of when the claimant knew or should have known of the injury, and in no event more than four years after the act or omission. For a person under 18, the period runs eight years from the act but the suit must be filed before the person’s twenty-second birthday.

Public bodies are far shorter. Under 745 ILCS 10/8-101(a), a claim against a local public entity or its employee must be filed within one year. Subsection (b) gives two years, with a four-year repose, only for claims arising out of patient care.

The CTA is one year, and there is no longer a notice requirement. 70 ILCS 3605/41 gives one year from accrual to sue the Chicago Transit Authority. The six-month written notice requirement that older articles still describe was repealed effective June 1, 2009 by P.A. 96-12. It is not current law.

Wrongful death. Under 740 ILCS 180/1 and 180/2, the action is brought by the decedent’s personal representative for the exclusive benefit of the surviving spouse and next of kin, generally within two years of death — five years where the death resulted from violent intentional conduct, or one year after final disposition of a related criminal case for certain charged offenses.

X. The Awesome Attorneys Assessment

What Horwitz, Horwitz & Associates has is a construction-injury practice that owns both halves of the same accident — the capped, no-fault comp claim and the uncapped third-party jury case — with a senior partner running each and genuine credentials on both sides. The clearest proof is that its signature result survives adversarial checking: the Illinois Supreme Court’s own opinion names three of its current partners as counsel in the case that produced the $64 million Bayer judgment. That is rarer than it should be. Twenty-two lawyers, a clean ARDC record across every one of them, a 5.0 client rating across 225 reviews, and no reversed verdict hiding on the results page.

The honest limitation is that the firm’s marketing runs well ahead of its own record, and in a specific direction. The homepage claims “billions” where the firm’s careful pages say “over $1 billion.” A “99% success rate” appears with nothing behind it. The signature verdict is described four different ways across four of the firm’s own properties, escalating from a defensible qualified claim to an unqualified “highest of all time.” Eleven of its twelve published results carry no case name. None of that is misconduct — the ARDC record is spotless and we found no reversed figure being passed off as intact, which is more than several of its competitors can say — but it means a reader comparing firms by advertised numbers is not comparing like with like, and should ask which specific case a headline figure refers to before signing anything. The second limitation is quieter: a 3.4 Glassdoor rating with 52% recommending is a turnover signal, and turnover is how a client’s case ends up with a lawyer they did not choose.

This firm is right for the injured construction or railroad worker with a serious third-party case alongside a comp claim — the situation it is actually built for, and where keeping both files under one roof is a real advantage. It is a weaker fit for someone who wants a boutique’s undivided attention, or who needs the firm’s advertised numbers to mean exactly what they appear to mean without asking.

Methodology & Sourcing

Research conducted September 14, 2026. Attorney admission dates, registered business addresses and disciplinary status were taken from Illinois ARDC registration records for all 22 attorneys, not from the firm, using a query method validated against a control surname returning a known disbarment before any null result was relied upon; a second ARDC search channel that failed its own control test was discarded rather than reported. The principal office was confirmed on the firm’s own live contact page and corroborated by 20 of 22 attorneys’ ARDC-registered addresses. The Bayer v. Panduit verdict, the 20% comparative-fault reduction, the identity of counsel and the post-trial settlement were verified against the Illinois Supreme Court’s published opinion, 2016 IL 119553, as issued by the Illinois Courts, and the Section 5(b) appellate history against the First District’s 2015 opinion. Founding dates were checked against the firm’s own mission page and the BBB’s incorporation record, and the conflict between them is reported rather than resolved. Review distributions were taken from an aggregator’s published figures and from Glassdoor directly. Statutes were verified against the Illinois General Assembly (735 ILCS 5/13-202, 5/2-1116, 5/13-211), the Illinois Courts’ official rule text (Ill. R. Prof’l Conduct 7.4), and the current Illinois Compiled Statutes as published by secondary repositories carrying the governing Public Act notes (735 ILCS 5/13-212, 745 ILCS 10/8-101, 70 ILCS 3605/41, 740 ILCS 180/1–2), the Illinois General Assembly’s own site being unavailable on the research date. Claims we could not verify are marked as unverified rather than softened or omitted.

Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice

Awesome Attorneys does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any firm profiled on this site. Inclusion is not paid placement, and no firm pays to appear, to be positioned, or to have material removed. “Awesome Attorneys” is a brand name only; it is not a rating, ranking, certification or assessment of any lawyer’s ability. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. Facts are current only as of the research date above, and firm addresses, rosters, credentials and case outcomes change. Verify anything you intend to rely on directly with the firm and with the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.