The spotlight was brightly focused on Boston trial lawyer Leo V. Boyle on July 28 when he received the American Association for Justice's coveted Leonard M. Ring Champion of Justice award at the group's banquet in Washington, D.C.
While Boyle was officially feted for demonstrating "a particularly strong commitment to the civil justice system and the protection of consumers," everyone in the room knew that the real reason for the prestigious award was Boyle's actions as president of the AAJ, then known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, in the wake of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks.
In the days following 9/11, Boyle called on trial attorneys across the country to refrain from filing lawsuits in connection with the disaster, successfully lobbied Congress to establish a compensation fund for the victims, and founded a national pro bono organization that offered free legal services for the victims' families.
Boyle, a founding partner of Meehan, Boyle, Black & Bogdanow, attempts to characterize those efforts as very much a team effort.
"We started meeting by phone on Sept. 12, and it was out of those meetings that the moratorium came," he says.
But it was Boyle who personally sent out an e-mail on Sept. 13 to the 60,000 members of the organization asking them not to sue. He says that of the 700 e-mails he received in response, only a small fraction was critical of the request, which was honored by lawyers for six months.
It was also Boyle who flew to D.C. to lobby for a victims' compensation fund.
"Shortly after the 11th, we heard that lobbyists were up on the Hill on behalf of the airlines," he says. "They weren't just looking for tort reform; they were also looking for loans, outright grants, loan guarantees - a financial bailout."
Boyle says that it was a "you've-got-to-be-kidding" move by the airline industry, especially in light of the tort lawyers' pledge.
"We're the ones who are always criticized, and we, out of respect for what's happened, enact a moratorium on any lawsuits, and the airlines are in there trying to take advantage of the situation," he says. "It was a very disturbing scenario."
So Boyle met with lawmakers, asking them to sponsor legislation to compensate the victims.
"Our mantra was, ‘How can you bail out the airlines without helping the families?' It became a difficult debating point to go against. We just didn't think anybody, even the most corporate-friendly member of Congress, would ever stand up in the well of the Senate and say, ‘I want to bail out American Airlines, but I don't want to take care of the families of the firemen who were killed.'"
August 17, 2009
