FOR UNIONS AND EMPLOYEES
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 & Lenow, which became 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 also represents the Boston Metro Area Local of the American Postal Workers Union, the Providence Local of the American Postal Workers Union, and the Rhode Island State APWU. In additional, 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 Division of Labor Relations, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, the Civil Service Commission, the Contributory Retirement Appeals Board, and the National labor Relations Board, the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCP) and the Employees’Compensation Appeal Board (ECAB). 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.