Julie Pruitt Barry

Julie successfully defended a commercial and residential property owner against an abutter’s appeals of a groundwater conditional use permit granted by the Boston Zoning Board of Appeals both at trial in Suffolk Superior Court and on appeal (Perry v. Boston ZBA, 100 Mass.App.Ct. 138 (2021), as well as a Certificate of Appropriateness granted by the Back Bay Architectural Commission at trial in Suffolk Superior Court, which was not appealed, for a highly visible mixed use residential, retail and office building on Newbury Street in Boston.

Julie successfully represented a developer of affordable housing against an anti-SLAPP claim in the Massachusetts Appeals Court, which lead to an opinion deemed by MA Lawyers Weekly to be one of the Most Important Opinions of 2013 (Coalition to Preserve the Belmont Uplands et al. v. Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, et al., 84 Mass. App. Ct. 1118; unpublished).

Julie obtained a favorable decision for a client engineering firm from the Massachusetts Appeals Court, which found that a professional engineering firm employed by a town to review the development of subdivisions in the town does not owe a duty of care to a developer or its contractor absent a showing that the developer reasonably relied on the peer reviewer’s advice and the peer reviewer was aware of the reliance. (Meridian at Windchime, Inc. v. Earth Tech, Inc., 81 Mass. App. Ct. 128, 2012).