Big-League Attorney

Stereotypes, of course, are never a good idea. They are apt to blow up in your face. Oh, you might think they function splendidly when it comes to, say, corporate shysters for professional sports teams -- they're as slick and slimy as a gob of expelled Skoal, right? But then in walks Lucinda K. Treat, wholesome as a glass of milk, her blue eyes honest and clear, her chocolatecolored hair long and threaded with gray, her freshly scrubbed face anchored with a cute ski-jump nose. She blushes like a schoolgirl when her tinkly laugh overtakes her, which it often does, and then she speaks: "When I die, I want my epitaph to read that I softened the world."

And in that Jerry Maguire moment, Treat -- the chief legal officer for the Red Sox, who says she is the only woman to hold that title in Major League Baseball and, at 33, is the youngest of either gender to hold such a position -- throws the first of her many curveballs.

Today is one of those impossibly warm spring days, a day when you can almost taste a cold beer washing down a Fenway frank, can almost hear Manny Ramirez cracking a ball out, out, out onto Lansdowne Street. Treat abandons her office behind the grandstands, along Executive Row, and leads a visitor on a walk around the park that has undergone yet another face lift that the owners hope will prove to skeptics that Fenway does not need to be replaced, merely improved. Gazing out over the field, she talks about how much she loves this "cathedral to baseball" and the fans who worship there and how honored she is to work with the management team. As Treat stands on an upper-level deck, a soft breeze floats off the expansive cityscape and flirts with her linen peasant skirt. "This is what I love about Fenway and the Red Sox and my job," she says almost reverentially. "Being a part of the fabric of the city."

But how did this self-described brainiac, this product of a Quaker school system who speaks Swahili and was never into organized sports (she played Ultimate Frisbee, for goodness' sakes), become such a key element in one of the most storied franchises in baseball at such a young age, anyway? "I was free one night in June," she says, laughing.

It's a little more complicated. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1992 with a degree in African languages and literature -- and having spent a semester working on a South Dakota Indian reservation -- she thought she'd do something cerebral, like get a PhD and do field research in Africa. But her daughter was born in the fall of that year, and a son would follow several years later. She leaned toward the practical -- law school -- but she knew she wasn't the aggressive type. "I'm just not like that," she says, which is how she instead discovered that she loved deal-making. After graduating from Georgetown's law school in late 1996, Treat took a job in mergers and acquisitions at the firm of Shearman &Sterling in New York. It was there, one night in June 1999, that the 27-year-old third-year associate agreed to help out a Florida businessman on a major acquisition.

Her assistance in helping John Henry close the purchase of the Florida Marlins so impressed Henry that he offered her one of those too-good-to-be-true jobs -- general counsel for the club. It took her 24 hours to accept. "I have so much loyalty, respect, and reverence for John," she says. "He's a rare breed in the sense that he is so genuinely committed to baseball and to what baseball means to people and not baseball as a pure business."

But after three years with the Marlins, in 2002, Treat again found herself working on the sale of one baseball team, the Marlins, and the purchase of another, the Red Sox. "No, I never cried on the job," she says, laughing, about those days. Once Henry completed his purchase, the divorced Treat and her daughter, Madeline, and son, Remy, moved to Brookline. Treat was named chief legal counsel for the holding company -- New England Sports Ventures -- and as such became responsible for all legal matters for the investment group, the Red Sox, and the New England Sports Network, as well as taking over as director for the Red Sox Foundation. "She is a brilliant strategist and an effective problem solver," Henry says of Treat by e-mail. "Whenever she speaks, I listen intently."

Treat has remained active in charities, including Adopt-a-Classroom. (As Boston lawyer Cheryl M. Cronin, who co-chaired a luncheon with Treat for the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women campaign, says: "She has no free time, yet she manages to do great things with her free time.") Her job has also allowed her to avoid those fights that many lawyers crave, the boardroom showdowns and bruising player-contract negotiations that are a badge of honor for her $400-an-hour brethren.

"It's very rare as a corporate lawyer to find a job where you can sit there and really feel good about what you do every day -- and combine complicated, interesting legal work with a real sense of impact on the community," Treat says. "Part of fulfilling that community service to me is being a woman in a very male-dominated world and trying to sort of make change by living your life as an example. I have an incredible sense of duty in my role and my participation as a woman in this business, as one who is in a leadership role. At five years in the industry and at 33 years old, I'm one of the senior women in the game."

Which is not always easy. "I had a scout at one point, after helping him with a pretty complicated legal issue, say, `Wow, you're actually smart.' Oh, well, thanks for noticing," Treat says, chuckling. "One of the things about being a woman in the working world is trying to use your womanliness as an asset, use your differences as an asset, not trying to be like a man in the world."

So much for stereotypes.

Gretchen Voss is a freelance writer. She lives in the Boston area.