Died: January 13, 2012
David Rapaport died of cancer at the age of 67 in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he lived most of his life after graduating from Yale. He is survived by his wife, Diane, and his three children, Cary, Jill and Jonathan.
David was born on October 31, 1944, in Washington, Pennsylvania. He prepared for Yale at the Horace Mann School in New York City. At Yale, he was a member of Saybrook College. He served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Literary Magazine and was a student teacher at Dwight Hall, graduating magna cum laude.
David received his LL.B. in 1969 from the U. of Penn. Law School. He was a member of the Massachusetts and New York Bars, and the past president of the Massachusetts Employment Lawyers Association. One of the preeminent employment lawyers in Boston, David was a shareholder at Davis, Malm & D’Agostine, P.C. at the time of his death. Prior to that, he headed Rapaport and Rapaport, and the litigation departments at two Boston firms. David also served as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan’s Homicide Division, and clerked for the Hon. Levin H. Campbell on both the U. S. District Court for the Dist. of Mass. and the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. David taught trial practice at the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Workshop for the past 34 years, and was a frequent lecturer on employment law and trial practice. He was named a Massachusetts Super Lawyer each year from 2004 through 2011, and one of the Best Lawyers in America from 2009 through 2011.
While he had a background as a general litigator and had taught trial practice at Harvard Law School, David came to specialize in employment law and was highly regarded in that field. In the mid-‘90s he won, at trial and on appeal, a famous disability discrimination case against the law firm of Hutchins & Wheeler. The matter was the subject of his grateful client’s book, A Million Reasons: Why I Fought for the Rights of the Disabled by Alan Labonte