Attorneys
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Howard Lenow (lenow@masslaborlaw.com) has been a union side labor lawyer since 1979. Howard was recently named a New England Super Lawyer in the Employment and Labor category published in the November 2009 Boston Magazine and on SuperLawyers.com. Howard brings a sense of humor, advanced technological knowledge and a bulldog's tenacity to his practice. After clerking in Washington D.C. with the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the labor firm of Yablonski, Both & Edelman, Howard moved to Boston to work for a large union labor law firm. Howard formed his own firm in 1987 and in 2001, he joined with his long-time friend and law partner, Sheilah McCarthy to form Lenow & McCarthy. Howard's practice focuses on public sector unions, including fire, police, corrections, public authorities and other municipal employees.

Howard served as the founding member of the American Bar Association's Labor and Employment Technology Committee and has traveled throughout the United States to speak to lawyers and labor unions on using the latest technologies for labor lawyers and unions. In the Spring, 2002, Howard was the featured speaker at the Annual Council meeting of the ABA Labor and Employment Section in Dublin, Ireland. Howard has also been an instructor at the Labor Guild of Boston, a night school for trade unionists, since 1979. Howard was also elected as a Fellow of the American Bar Association.

Howard is also an founding member of American Jews For A Just Peace and has traveled with five delegations of doctors, lawyers, union activists and journalists to Palestine and Israel as part of the AJJP Health and Human Rights Project. Howard is currently a member of the Coordinating Committee of AJJPf a national organization with chapters in Boston, Philadelphia, Albuquerque, Detroit, Madison and with other members in over twenty cities in the United States.

Howard is the proud father of three wonderful children, Jared, Sasha and Chloe, and a playful French Mastiff and athletic boxer. Howard graduated with a B.A. in Labor History from Hampshire College in 1975 and a J.D. from Antioch College of Law in 1979.

/i//sfmsmall.jpg Sheilah McCarthy is a 1991 graduate of Northeastern University School of Law. She earned her undergraduate degree (A.B. International Relations) at Brown University in 1985. She focuses her practice in the areas of labor and employment law. Shortly after law school, she became an associate with Kaplan and Lenow, which became known as Kaplan, Lenow & McCarthy in 1996 when she became a partner in the firm. In 2001, she and Howard Lenow founded the firm of Lenow & McCarthy.

Most of the unions she represents are public sector groups such as school administrators and school and municipal clerical workers. She represents the Boston Metropolitan Area Local of the American Postal Workers Union. In addition, she advises and represents many individual employees not represented by a union.

Ms. McCarthy’s practice takes her into both state and federal court. She also appears regularly before numerous state and federal agencies, including the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, the Civil Service Commission, the Contributory Retirement Appeals Board, and the National Labor Relations Board. Her union representation regularly requires that she frequently try contractual disputes in front of labor arbitrators.

Ms. McCarthy is a member of the state bars of Maine and Massachusetts, and she is admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and the U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

She is a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association, the Massachusetts Lesbian and Gay Bar Association, the American Bar Association, the Maine Bar Association, and the Lawyers Coordinating Committee of the AFL-CIO. She serves on the Northeastern University School of Law Alumni/ae Association Board of Directors.

Ms. McCarthy has frequently served as a teacher of a class on public employee labor law at The Labor Guild, a night school for trade unionists, and she teaches and lectures regularly on labor and employment law topics.