Donald Gary Tye

DONALD G. TYE is a founding partner and co-chair of the Domestic Relations Practice Group at Prince Lobel Tye LLP in Boston (a multi-practice firm which handles matters of local, regional, national, and international reach). He has forty years of experience as a trial attorney, a guardian ad litem, a master, a mediator, a conciliator, an attorney for children (including the Massachusetts ARC program), and an arbitrator.

He has prepared and argued numerous cases to the Massachusetts Appeals Court and the Supreme Judicial Court. Mr. Tye is a fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML). He was national co-chair of national AAML’s legislation committee; during 2009 and 2010 he served on its Special Concerns for Children Committee, which was responsible for updating and revising the AAML’s Standards for Attorneys for Children in Custody or Visitation proceedings.; In 2014 he was appointed to AAML’s Impact of Special Needs Children Committee; and in 2013, 2015, and 2017 he was appointed to be a member of its Continuing Legal Education Committee. He was president of the AAML Massachusetts chapter from 2005 through 2007 and received the Massachusetts chapter’s “President’s Award” in 1998 and 2004. Since 1999, he has been a member of the family law curriculum advisory committee of Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education and was co-chair from 2006 through 2008. He is a member of the Family Law Section of the American, Massachusetts, and Boston Bar Associations and was appointed to the MBA Family Law Section council, on which he has served since 2010.

He is an editor emeritus on the board of editors of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. His work has also been published in the Massachusetts Family Law Journal, the Boston Bar Journal, the ABA’s Family Advocate, Massachusetts Bar Lawyers’ Journal, Best of Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education Journal, and ABA Family Law Quarterly. A frequent lecturer and panelist, he has lectured and conducted workshops and seminars in the areas of trial practice, divorce, and child-related issues at Harvard Law School; Boston College Law School; Northeastern University Law School; Suffolk University School of Law; MCLE and its Family Law Institute; Brown University Medical Center; Boston University Graduate School of Social Work; the American Psychological Association; the Boston public schools (Partners in Education, Inc.); the Maine, Massachusetts, and Boston Bar Associations; the ABA Family Law Section annual meetings in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2011, and in 2015 for the ABA Family Law Section Fall CLE in Portland, Oregon; the AAML annual meeting in Chicago in 2013, and in 2015; the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Lawyers; the Massachusetts Association of Guardians Ad Litem (MAGAL), and in 2017 at the AAML AFCC Conference “Advanced Issues in Child Custody: Evaluation, Litigation and Settlement” in San Diego, CA, and at the Annual Meeting in Chicago of the AAML CLE he will be co-presenting on “the Intersection of Alienation and Custodial Issues”.

Active in the community, Mr. Tye has been a Board Member and a vice president of Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University, the nation’s oldest continuously operating free public lecture series. From 2009 through 2014 he was a member of the Massachusetts Judicial Nominating Commission (appointed by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick); and has been active on the civil rights committee of the Anti-Defamation League. In 2012 he was appointed to serve as a member of the statewide taskforce Voice of the Child by the then-chief judge of the Massachusetts Probate & Family Court Department. In January 2015, he was appointed to a three-year term as a hearing officer by the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers; and is a member of the Board of MAGAL, Inc. 

In May 2018 he received MCLE’s Annual Scholar- Mentor Award for his life time contributions to Family Law in Ma. (Four of these awards are presented annually by the premier CLE program in Massachusetts among all fields of practice among Ma. lawyers).

Since 2004, he has been recognized as a “Massachusetts Super Lawyer.” He has also been named as one of the “Top 100 Lawyers in Massachusetts” as featured in Boston Magazine and as a “Top Attorney in New England” by New England Super Lawyers. He was coeditor of the “Domestic Relations” chapter in Summary of Basic Law, a selection of the Massachusetts Practice Series (published by West Publishing Company), was editor of the “Divorce” chapter in the Massachusetts Bar Association publication, Traps for the Unwary, and in Fall 2017 his article “Preferences and Voices of Children in Massachusetts and Beyond” was published in the ABA Family Law Quarterly. The article he co-authored, Navigation of the Culture of the Immigrant Experience in the Family Courts, will appear in the in Fall 2017 Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Mr. Tye is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, and its Brown School of Social Work (M.S.W.),and Tufts University.