Geoffrey R. Bok is an American lawyer based in Boston, Massachusetts, who practiced labor, employment, and litigation law. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1987 after earning his law degree at Harvard, and he later chaired the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners.
Education
Bok earned a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 1984 and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1987. Harvard College, founded in 1636, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, and its undergraduate program provided the foundation for his later legal training.
Harvard Law School, established in 1817, became one of the most influential American law schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its tradition of teaching through the study of cases was shaped in part by faculty such as John Chipman Gray, who taught part-time there and helped introduce the case method that later became standard in American law schools.
Career
Bok began his legal career in Boston after receiving his law degree in 1987, the year he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. From 1987 to 1991 he worked as a tax and litigation associate at Ropes & Gray, a Boston firm founded in 1865 by two Harvard Law School graduates, John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray. The firm went through several name changes over the following decades as its partnership evolved.
From 1991 to 1995 he was a litigation associate at Lane & Altman, a firm established in 1923 that later practiced under the name Lane Altman & Owens.
In 1995 Bok joined Stoneman, Chandler & Miller LLP in Boston, where he is now a partner. The firm was formed in 1945 as a traditional labor law practice and has since developed into a labor, employment, and education law firm representing employers and public school districts. Bok represents management in employment, insurance coverage, litigation, and employee relations matters, and he advises employers on procedures intended to avoid litigation. He also represents municipal and regional school committees and charter schools in disputes involving student and teacher discipline. He is a member of the Massachusetts bar and has also been admitted to the bars of Vermont and the District of Columbia, as well as several federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2005 the Justices of the Supreme Judicial Court, the highest court of Massachusetts, appointed Bok as one of five members of the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners. In February 2010 they named him chairman of the board, and he served in that role until December 2016.
