2019 Lawyers of the Year: Kevin J. Powers, Mansfield.

Byline: Pat Murphy

Rarely in the course of a career does a lawyer have the opportunity to eliminate a barrier to relief for an entire category of plaintiffs.

Mansfield solo Kevin J. Powers did just that in Meyer v. Veolia Energy North America. Powers convinced the Supreme Judicial Court that the 30-day notice requirement in the state's road defect statute did not apply to bar the negligence suit of a cyclist who alleged he crashed when his bike struck a misaligned utility cover on a Boston street.

After the accident, plaintiff Richard Meyer provided prompt notice to the city of Boston of his injuries, only to find out later that the maintenance of the utility cover was not the city's responsibility but that of defendant Veolia Energy.

Powers successfully argued that only governmental and quasi-governmental entities are entitled to 30 days' notice of a road defect claim under G.L.c. 84, 18. Accordingly, the SJC unanimously ruled in May 2019 that Meyer's failure to provide statutory notice to Veolia was not fatal to his negligence suit, reversing a summary judgment in favor of the utility company.

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"I thought this is the beauty of our common-law system of jurisprudence, that we can have conversations about the same laws that span not just generations but centuries."

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Powers credits part of his success on appeal to the work of trial attorneys Andrew M. Fischer and Andrew J. Brodie in doing everything possible to provide statutory notice on behalf of their client. According to Powers, the Boston attorneys' diligence at the lower court allowed him to present a compelling factual case demonstrating to the SJC the impracticality of requiring plaintiffs to give 30 days' notice of a road defect claim to private entities that frequently are difficult to identify.

"What we wound up with on appeal was a factual record that was extremely compelling, because here's a plaintiff whose trial counsel did everything right," Powers says.

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Q. Why was the SJC's decision an important win for the plaintiffs' bar?

A. It's important because the burden [of providing timely notice to a non-governmental defendant] on plaintiffs and plaintiffs' counsel would have been actually or practically impossible had this case gone the other way under the prior Appeals Court decisions that this case overruled.

It's hard to imagine an injured plaintiff being able to not just identify [the governmental entity that] is responsible for the road but, more than...