Leo Sullivan, lawyer and former arbitrator, has practiced real estate and business law in San Diego for fifty years and served as an an arbitrator with the American Arbitration Association for thirty-five years. A graduate of the University of San Francisco and UC Davis Law School, he began his career with Gray, Cary, Ames & Frye (now DLA Piper, one of the largest law firms in the world), founded Sullivan Wertz McDade & Wallace, a mid-size firm which he managed off and on for twenty-five years, and completed his career as a principal of Sullivan Lawyers.

Leo is or has been a member of the State Bar of California, the San Diego County Bar Association, the Association of Business Trial Lawyers, the California Political Attorneys Association, and the Irish American Bar Association. He has been active in community and political affairs throughout his career and was counsel to three San Diego mayors. Leo served as judge advocate of the San Diego Yacht Club, one of the world’s premier yacht clubs and former home of The America’s Cup, and as founding general counsel of the Top Gun Association, a group of former instructors and students of the Navy's Top Gun school.  Leo also served as San Diego chair of the American Ireland Fund, which supports peace, culture and charity in all of Ireland without regard to religion or politics, as president and Irishman of the Year of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the oldest fraternal society organized in the United States, and as founder and managing partner of Reidy O’Neil’s, a famous but long defunct Irish Bar and American Grill in the Gaslamp Quarter. 

Leo was student body president at St. Augustine High School and later served as a trustee of the school and director of three affiliated non-profits, the St. Augustine Foundation, which supports Augustinian activities throughout the world, Hogar Infantil la Gloria, which supports an orphanage in Tijuana, and Villa Merced, a low-income housing project in San Ysidro. He was honored as alumnus of the year, was admitted as an associate member of the Augustinian Order, and received the Augustinian Achievement Award.

Before law school Leo served as a captain in the Army and was awarded a Bronze Star and Air Medal for service with the First Cavalry Division in Vietnam. He writes historical fiction with military themes, including the acclaimed Columbia Eagle Incident, a novel about the Army’s incursion into Cambodia during the Vietnam War, and Kit Carson in California, an historically accurate account of the famous scout’s adventures during the Mexican American War.

A third generation San Diegan, Leo lives with his family in Point Loma, ten blocks from where his mother was born in 1913 in a house her father built.