Maggie Bopp

Maggie Bopp comes from a family of law enforcement and military service. Both grandfathers fought in World War II, her grandfather was a police inspector and Suffolk County district attorney’s investigator, her father is the village justice in Lindenhurst and a former assistant district attorney, and her brothers include a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, a state trooper and an Army JAG captain. She considered the FBI, but by the time she was ready she was starting a family and already loved being a prosecutor, so she stayed.

Maggie credits a competitive streak forged as the only girl among four brothers. Until sixth grade she played boys lacrosse with her braid tucked into her helmet so no one knew she was a girl. In court she says she walks in with the attitude of “Try me.” Ten years bartending in the Hamptons taught her that people just want to be heard. “You have to tear those walls down and get right to the evidence,” she says.

Seven months pregnant, Maggie was called to a crash near her home: a driver who had smoked a large amount of marijuana and was speeding on a residential road hit an Uber head-on. The Uber driver and three passengers died and a fourth was seriously injured; the passengers were young college graduates. While detectives monitored the defendant at the hospital and warrants were drafted, he died, so no one could be charged. “I felt like justice was stolen from those victims and their families,” she says.

Maggie’s closing thought is to trust your gut. She prosecuted a drunk driver who ran a red light at well over 100 mph and killed a father of four who had stopped for milk. The defendant showed up to court in a wheelchair, nonverbal and drooling. Suspicious, she had a pole camera placed outside his house; it caught him walking around his yard and loading his wheelchair into a car before a court date. He was convicted. “You gotta trust yourself so that you trust your case,” she says.

In the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Vehicular Crime Bureau, Maggie Bopp won convictions in a fatal DWI crash that killed a Newsday delivery woman (2015), a Southern State Parkway crash that killed a father and his two young children (2017) and a DWI crash that killed a father of four (2021). The Southern State case took months of investigation, more than 100 proposed witnesses and a six-week trial. Weeks after joining her civil firm in 2023, she helped win a $1.4 million verdict in Suffolk County.

Maggie Bopp earned a B.A. in psychology from Rutgers University in 2004, where she played Division I lacrosse, and her J.D. from Touro Law Center in 2010. She then spent nearly 13 years as an assistant district attorney in Suffolk County, New York, joining the Vehicular Crime Bureau in 2015 after helping try an aggravated vehicular homicide case. She received a MADD Recognition of Excellence in 2016 and the Suffolk County DA’s Trial Excellence Award in 2020. Since 2015 she has coordinated and taught the “Choices and Consequences” program.

Maggie Bopp is an associate attorney at Rappaport, Glass, Levine & Zullo, LLP, in Islandia, New York, on Long Island. She joined the firm in April 2023 after her former Vehicular Crime Bureau chief, who had made the move about a year earlier, recruited her. Her practice covers vehicular crime and DWI-related injuries, catastrophic personal injury, wrongful death and general personal injury cases. The firm’s website is rglzlaw.com. She lives on Long Island with her husband and two daughters and is a member of the National Women Trial Lawyers Association.