Law Offices of Gerard F. Lane
Established 1959
BIOGRAPHY
GERARD F. LANE SR.
Attorney Lane has never been a stranger to perseverance in the face of adversity, and to the success it yields. At a mere sixteen years of age he graduated from Malden Catholic High School. At age twenty he graduated from Boston College where he earned a degree in mathematics and was captain of the rifle team. In ROTC training Mr. Lane achieved the coveted title of “Expert”, the top designation in rifleman hierarchy of marksman-sharpshooter-expert, the progressive sequence of skills in both the United States Army and Marines. Upon graduation in 1951 Mr. Lane underwent further army training, and in 1952 at twenty-two years of age he shipped out to war to command troops as a second lieutenant in the Seventh Infantry Division of the United States Army.
While in Korea, Mr. Lane achieved recognition as the first man to reach the summit of Triangle Hill in one of the bloodiest battles of the Conflict fittingly coded “Operation Showdown”. He was severely wounded during that battle and evacuated to the United States. Mr. Lane was awarded the Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars For Valor for his heroic actions in two different military engagements including Operation Showdown, and in a previous battle that he was not supposed to take part in, but in which he freely chose to run into a “withering curtain of enemy fire” (quoted from government records) solely to evacuate his wounded comrades.
After the war, Mr. Lane took advantage of GI Bill and attended Boston College Law School by night while working by day as a parole officer for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This occurred after numerous surgeries, a two-year convalescence in several military hospitals, and constant physical therapy, in order to recover from his battle wounds.
Even prior to graduating from law school in 1959, Mr. Lane earned his legal wings by taking a case to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. The case was won after oral argument by his then law professor, Monroe L. Inker. Metcalf v. Commonwealth, 338 Mass 648, (1959). As a law student Mr. Lane was not yet permitted to address the state’s highest court, but when asked to step in, Attorney Inker jumped at the chance. Even late in his own prestigious career Attorney Inker referred to this moment as a defining one, and he always gave full credit to Attorney Lane for its success.
Attorney Lane has spent the last forty-eight years representing thousands of clients in an array of matters far too expansive to list. He addressed the Supreme Judicial Court in the case of Ezekiel v. Jones Motor Co., 374 Mass 382 (1978) in which new law was broken regarding the so-called testimonial privilege of a sworn witnesses. Attorney Lane argued that witnesses who made knowingly false statements before a management-union grievance board had slandered his client. The defense argued that their witnesses were protected by an absolute privilege when testifying and were therefore immune from suit. The State’s Highest Court disagreed and sided with Mr. Lane’s argument that the witnesses had only “qualified” privileges that were vulnerable to the actual malice test. The verdict of the lower court in favor of Mr. Lane’s client was restored. The landmark case of Ezekiel v. Jones is one of the most oft-cited cases on the subject of qualified privilege.
Gerard F. Lane Sr.’s law practice has ranged from criminal, to juvenile, to workers’ compensation, to civil cases of negligence, fraud, sexual harassment, discrimination, slander, libel, and civil rights violations. Mr. Lane has even prosecuted criminal cases in the District Court. He is also experienced in Real Estate, Administrative Law, and Probate, Family and Estate Matters. In short, it would be difficult to find an area of law in which Mr. Lane has not successfully plied his trade.
A former state police officer once commented on Attorney Lane’s dedication as follows:
“We received a call that an attorney in the federal courthouse was refusing to continue his trial unless we could get sixteen feet of guardrail into the courtroom as an exhibit in his case. This attorney “Lane” would not agree to cut the guardrail into sections, nor would he agree to use a scale model. He needed the whole damn rail, and he was prepared to sit there until he got what he wanted. On the judge’s orders, we took the elevator apart to get the entire rail to the floor the courtroom was on. After that, I decided to watch the trial to see if it was worth what this attorney had put us all through. It was. It turned out that all sixteen feet had passed through his (deceased) client’s abdomen in an accident, and nothing short of the visual of the entire guardrail would suffice to carry the image of the suffering he had endured. The son-of-a-gun won the case. Now, I am not much for personal injury cases, but this poor bastard really suffered in his final moments, and after watching the trial I really felt his parents deserved every penny. Despite cursing the attorney for what he put us through on day one of trial, I congratulated Attorney Lane and commended him on the final day.”
Perhaps the best anecdotal evidence of the quality of advocacy that Mr. Lane brought to the Massachusetts Courts, and to his perseverance and dedication to the various causes of his clients came from one of his colleagues who once described him as follows:
“In his heyday Mr. Lane was a bulldog. He was the sort of attorney we all loved to watch because he would bang his head against a brick wall again, and again, and again, without being deterred or embarrassed, convinced that if he just kept doing so, the wall would move. We would sit in awe and disbelief at his stubbornness. And then to everyone’s astonishment, but his – the wall would move.”
Gerard Lane Sr. served as a Massachusetts parole officer for over ten years, as a member of the Zoning Board of Appeals for the Town of Holbrook, and as the Holbrook Town Moderator. He twice ran for higher office; once for State Senator and once for District Attorney. He won the Democratic nomination for State Senator and nearly won the general election in a largely Republican District. With a young family at the time he opted out of politics to practice full time at his law office in Quincy.
Mr. Lane has lived in Hingham for the last thirty-four years with his wife of nearly fifty years, Ruth Lane. Mr. and Mrs. Lane raised three children, the youngest of which, Gerard F. Lane II, continues the legacy of the Law Offices of Gerard F. Lane. Attorney Lane has practiced law in Quincy, Marshfield and Boston since 1959.