ABA LEADERSHIP
President
Photo Credit: ABAJ/Chris Fitzgerald
MICHAEL S. GRECOPRESIDENT, AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION
Michael S. Greco, a partner in the Boston office of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP , is president-elect of the 400,000-member American Bar Association. He will become president in August 2005 at the association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago.
Greco has been a trial lawyer, mediator and arbitrator for 32 years, with experience in complex business and other disputes throughout New England and across the country. He joined Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP in 2003, after 30 years as a partner with the former Boston firm of Hill & Barlow.
Greco is a graduate of Princeton University and Boston College Law School, where he served as editor in chief of the Boston College Law Review and class president. After law school he clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit and was a fellow at the Institute of Comparative Law at the University of Florence, Italy. Prior to law school he taught English at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H.
Greco, an active ABA member since 1974, has been a member of the ABA House of Delegates since 1985, and Massachusetts State Delegate since 1993. He has chaired the ABA Section of Individual Rights & Responsibilities, the ABA Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary, the executive committee of the Conference of State Delegates, and other ABA committees. After September 11, 2001, he was appointed to the ABA Task Force on Terrorism and the Law, which helped develop ABA policy on the government’s use of military tribunals and its treatment of detained persons and prisoners. He also served on the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security and the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession.
In Massachusetts, Greco was president of the Massachusetts Bar Association, the New England Bar Association, and the board of trustees of Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education. As MBA president, he and then-Gov. Michael Dukakis appointed a blue-ribbon Commission on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children. The report and recommendations prepared by that commission led to enactment of new laws protecting the legal rights of children in the state. He also chaired the first-in-the-nation Massachusetts Legal Needs for the Poor Assessment and Plan for Action, and was co-founder and co-chair of Bar Leaders for Preservation of Legal Services for the Poor, a national bar leader grassroots organization that helped preserve the Legal Services Corporation in the 1980s.
Greco also served on the board of overseers of the Newton-Wellesley Hospital, and the board of bar overseers of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. He served for eight years on Gov. William Weld’s state Judicial Nominating Council, and on Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry’s Commission on Federal Judicial Appointments.
Greco was born in Italy and raised near his mother’s birthplace in Hinsdale, Ill. He and his family have resided in Wellesley Hills, Mass., for the past 31 years.
