Leo Boyle knew everything would change after 9/11.
He vowed to make some of that change positive
BY NICK DIULIO
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRYCE VICKMARK
The Man
BEHIND THE LARGEST
Pro Bono Effort
IN HISTORY
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Leo Boyle
was driving to work. Less than halfway to
his Boston-based firm, however, the trial
lawyer got a phone call.
The law offices, he was told, had closed.
The entire building, in fact, was being shut
down. Planes had crashed into the World
Trade Center in New York City. And maybe
the Pentagon. Details were fuzzy. Boyle
was told that he should go back home, turn
on the news, and wait to see what would
happen next.
Boyle didn’t go home. Instead he made
a U-turn and headed in the direction of his
mother’s assisted living facility to explain
to her what was going on. It was then—
midway through his drive somewhere in
suburban Massachusetts on that crisp late-summer morning—that it occurred to him.
“I thought, ‘Everything has changed now.’”
Boyle recalls the moment while sitting
inside a crowded Manhattan coffee
shop on Sixth Avenue across the street
from the hotel where he’s attending
the annual convention of The American
Association for Justice (AAJ). Lost for a
moment in a memory now a decade old,
the unassuming, soft-spoken partner at
Meehan, Boyle, Black & Bogdanow sips his
coffee and repeats himself.
“Everything,” he says, “had changed.”
At the time, Boyle was the newly minted
president of the AAJ (then called the
Association of Trial Lawyers of America
[ATLA]), and he realized that put him in a
position to do some good.
“If everything had changed,” Boyle says,
leaning closer, “I also realized the legal
system had to change, too. I thought, ‘We
can’t just sit on the sidelines and wait to
see how it changes. We have to become
involved in what that change is going
to look like.’ And what happened was a
beautiful thing to watch.”
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN BOYLE
couldn’t see the beauty in law. Shortly
after graduating from Harvard College in
1968 with a degree in English, he enrolled
at Boston College Law School. It was
practicality, not passion, that brought him
there, and he admits law school “was OK,
but not that much fun.”
At the age of 25, Boyle got his first job
doing legal research at the now-defunct
Parker, Coulter, Daley & White, but soon,
Something clicked. Boyle was “lit on fire
by the law,” he says. Once he started seeing
real people—and real suffering—coming
through the door, he realized that he had
the ability to actually make a difference in
the lives of countless individuals.
“I was immediately addicted,” he says.
“Once I got out there and started practicing,
that was it. I was gone. One hundred
percent. This was what I knew I wanted to
do, and I still feel that way 40 years later.”
Even in the architecture of United
States courthouses Boyle sees a unique
majesty. “From the first time I entered
a courtroom, I loved them,” he says. “I
learned early on that it’s a place where the
disparity of power disappears the minute
you walk in the door. You want to be in that
environment because it doesn’t happen in
many places. It’s a little like a church. Even
the architecture is special. It’s designed
for a purpose, to make you serious and
thoughtful. To give you … presence.”
