A young Harvard Law School graduate in 1974 who had earlier studied for an undergraduate degree at MIT, you wanted to be a tax lawyer. Before your first day of work, however, President Ford signed into law an act that would change your career arc for years to come. The law was the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and the law firm you joined recruited you to help them and their clients understand its intricacies and comply with its requirements.
In nearly four decades of practicing law since then, you have become a pre-eminent attorney in that very specialized field, and it has become one of your greatest passions.
That’s meant mastering extensive regulations issued by the Department of Labor and IRS. As part of your success in that field, you have obtained several significant and groundbreaking advisory opinions from the Labor Department, beginning with the landmark Batterymarch Letter in the mid-1980s. That letter was one of the first two advisory opinions authorizing ERISA fiduciaries to receive incentive compensation.
“Jack is the best at what he does,” says F. Beirne Lovely, general counsel for the Archdiocese of Boston and your former colleague at Goodwin Procter. “His insight and ability to take complicated facts and distill them to what’s important has put him on everybody’s short list. Jack’s clients come to him for the toughest of decisions because of his credibility and character.”
Listed in The Best Lawyers in America, you are a member of the Employee Benefits Committee of the Tax Section of the American Bar Association, a past co-chair of the Employee Benefits Committee of the Boston Bar Association, a member of the Government Affairs Committee of the Pension Real Estate Association and a former director of the New England Employee Benefits Council and of Catholic Memorial School. You have also been selected for inclusion in Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business. Your work as a board member at Catholic Memorial School in the 1990s demonstrated your ability to meet many challenges head on.
You are quick to credit your family for supporting your success over the years. Nancy, your devoted wife of 41 years, and you have raised two children—Nina Morrissey and Eric, who like you has pursued a career in law. You have two grandchildren whom you love: Julia, 7, and
Jack, 4.
In recognition of his lifetime pursuit of excellence, and in recognition of his singular and passionate devotion to the field of law and service to businesses throughout the nation, we recognize Jack Cleary ’64 with the Vince in Bono Malum Award for Professional Achievement.
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