Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer litigation partner Sheila Boston has been nominated to be the next president of the New York City Bar Association.

The group said Monday that Boston, who defends companies in mass torts, products liability cases and other complex litigation, had been nominated by one of its committees to fill the shoes of Roger Juan Maldonado, a partner at Smith, Gambrell & Russell who was announced to lead the organization in 2017.

Boston—the first woman of color to be nominated to serve as the organization's president—had previously been a vice president and secretary of the city bar. She has also been a chair of its committees on diversity, equity and inclusion and on the recruitment and retention of lawyers.

Nominated to serve one-year terms as city bar vice presidents were David Arroyo, a longtime media lawyer who now works as vice president and associate general counsel at BuzzFeed; Joseph Drayton, a Cooley partner who works on intellectual property and litigation and served as president of the National Bar Association; and Susan Kohlmann, a Jenner & Block partner who leads the firm's New York office and chairs the board of Legal Services NYC.

The group said Drexel Harris of Reliance Insurance was picked as secretary and Thomas Slome, a bankruptcy partner at Cullen and Dykman, was nominated to continue in his role as the organization's treasurer.

Other prominent attorneys were nominated for posts on the bar's executive committee. The four nominees were Judge Kiyo Matsumoto of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York; New York Supreme Court Justice Tanya Kennedy, who sits in Manhattan; Jaipat Jain, a partner at Lazare Potter Giacovas & Moyle; and Sarah Berger, an attorney for the state court system who has chaired the city bar's criminal justice operations committee.

A new president is typically picked every two years. All the leadership nominees will formally stand for election at the city bar's annual meeting May 19. It is rare that a nominee is not elected.

Boston has been involved with the city bar since she was a junior associate at Kaye Scholer, which merged with Arnold & Porter in 2017. She said she has long been involved with its programming, making speeches and moderating panels.

"I love the city bar," Boston said in an interview, explaining her decision to accept the nomination. "There are some wonderful people over there, extremely brilliant—some of the best practitioners, not just in the state, but in the country."

A graduate of Columbia Law School, Boston said she worked at Arnold & Porter and Kaye Scholer for her entire career and made partner around 2004. Some of her major cases include the trial defense of Bayer and Takeda in personal injury matters involving the drugs Xarelto, Yasmin and Actos, according to her firm's website. She also works pro bono on the case of Darryl Scott Stinski, a convicted murderer in Georgia.

She said she supported the city bar's mission of support for the legal community and the world more broadly, adding in a statement that it has been "an important resource and voice for the people of our great city" and has championed the rule of law and the causes of marginalized members of society.

Despite tough times for bar organizations across the country, the 24,000-member New York City Bar Association has seen a recent boom in membership. Staff at the organization have touted continuing legal education classes, which are free to many lawyers, and say they have shored up revenue and membership in part by taking their pitch to any law firm willing to listen.

This story has been updated with the nominees to the NYCBA's executive committee.