MBA Past President Valerie A. Yarashus
Massachusetts Bar Association Past President Valerie A. Yarashus has been nominated by Gov. Charlie Baker for a Superior Court judgeship. Yarashus, who served as MBA president from 2009-10, is a principal at the Boston law firm of Meehan, Boyle, Black & Bogdanow PC, where she concentrates in plaintiff’s trial practice, including motor vehicle liability, medical malpractice, construction site liability, fire/explosion cases, liquor liability, defective products, premises liability, workplace accidents, nursing home litigation, and a wide variety of other general liability cases.
Yarashus, who is also a past president of the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys (and a member of its board of governors), is a frequent speaker and writer for continuing legal education programs. Yarashus helped establish the MBA Bench-Bar Task Force for Plain English Jury Instructions and also formed the MBA Diversity Task Force, serving as its chair from 2005-07. She is an Oliver Wendell Holmes Life Fellow of the Massachusetts Bar Foundation (the philanthropic partner of the MBA) and has served on its grant advisory committee. Yarashus also co-authored the jury instructions on “Personal Injury” and “Wrongful Death” (in a Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education publication).
Yarashus has been named by Law and Politics magazine as a Massachusetts Super Lawyer, as selected by her peers, every year since its inception, and she has been selected in the “Best of Boston” survey as one of the Top 100 Lawyers in Massachusetts, as well as one of the Top 50 Women Lawyers in Massachusetts. She has been honored in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly’s “Up and Coming Lawyers’ Hall of Fame,” an honor that has been bestowed on only a few other Massachusetts lawyers.
Yarashus graduated from George Washington University and Harvard Law School, where she served as executive editor of the Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review.
If confirmed, she would take the seat vacated by Judge Christopher Muse.