Paul is a member in the firm's Boston office, practicing in the Litigation Section. A broadly experienced civil litigator who now specializes in lawsuits involving real estate, Paul heads Mintz Levin's interdisciplinary Real Estate and Land Use Litigation Working Group. Paul's litigation efforts for housing developers, whom he regularly represents from local zoning boards to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, have earned him recognition as a housing industry leader. His recent real estate litigation has also involved shopping malls (wetlands, zoning permits, leases and other contract litigation), a dispute over the right of a quarry to continue to exist, negotiations to avoid litigation with environmental agencies about decades-old contamination, commercial lease litigation for both landlords and tenants, and land purchase contract litigation. In other legal areas, Paul recently successfully defended a medical malpractice case, prosecuted a racial violence civil rights and tort case on a pro bono basis, and convinced a complainant that it would be futile to sue Paul's client for expert witness malpractice. Paul has obtained multi-million-dollar victories for his clients both at trial and through settlement. Recent trial successes include: · the first case to apply the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act to a commercial lease, which Paul successfully defended before the Connecticut Supreme Court · a battle over easement rights to permit commercial development of otherwise-landlocked land · a lawsuit against a Fortune 100 company over illegal releases of pollutants at our client's factory · several trial victories which allowed clients to construct mixed-income housing developments. Paul is also an experienced and successful appellate lawyer, winning appeals for clients as diverse as: · the first continuing care retirement community to be built under the Massachusetts affordable housing statute · a physician sued for participating in gender discrimination committed by the State Police · a housing agency challenged over its decision that a project was eligible for a state subsidy · a private university that contracted to manage a public school system. For the past 10 years, Paul has taught trial techniques for Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education in Boston, and has organized and moderated seminars throughout the United States on national developments in land use law for the American Bar Association (ABA). Other recent speaking engagements include chairing a national ABA panel on affordable housing and speaking to the ABA's Business Law Section on pro bono opportunities for transactional lawyers. For nearly 20 years, Paul taught legal writing at Boston University School of Law, and he also has taught whitewater paddling and wilderness leadership skills for the Appalachian Mountain Club. Paul serves on the governing body of the American Bar Association's Section of State and Local Government Law. At the ABA's annual meeting in August 2009, the ABA's Section of State and Local Government Law elected Paul as its Director of Continuing Legal Education for the coming year. In 2003, he was selected by the Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Community Development to recommend procedural and administrative reforms to the state's comprehensive permit law. His recent publications range from a chapter in At the Cutting Edge 2008: Land Use Law from The Urban Lawyer, to a 2008 op-ed piece in The Boston Globe about housing issues. Every year since 2004, Paul has been recognized as a Massachusetts Super Lawyer, in a listing published as a special supplement to Boston Magazine. Before joining the firm in 1982, Paul served as a law clerk for a federal district judge in Atlanta. He is an honors graduate of both Princeton University and New York University Law School, where he was named to the Order of the Coif and served as an editor of the Annual Survey of American Law. For his work over the years on behalf of victims of housing discrimination, Paul won the Mintz Levin Pro Bono Award in 1993, the same award that one of his associates won years later for his work with Paul in successfully litigating an environmental justice case. Industries Real Estate Energy & Clean Technology |