Thomas Burns co-founding partner of Burns & Levinson (1960) attended Boston University School of Law and received an LLB in 1943. In 1995 the school awarded him the Award for Distinguished Professional Services. Admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1944 while on active duty in the U.S. Navy as a Lieutenant, he served in the Mediterranean and the Pacific aboard an LC1(L). Tom and his wife, Marjorie, live in Boston. He has four children.

As one of Boston's preeminent trial lawyers, Tom engaged daily in all kinds of litigation. He represented some of the country's largest insurance companies, banks, auto manufacturers, and corporations, as well as individuals in serious complex matters, throughout the various courts of Massachusetts and the rest of New England. He has argued appeals in more than one hundred cases in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the Massachusetts Appeals Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Governor Francis W. Sargent appointed Tom to the Judicial Council of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and twice offered him a seat on the Superior Court. Governor Edward J. King appointed him vice chairman of the Massachusetts Judicial Nominating Commission. Tom also served as special counsel to the Boston City Council and was chairman of the judicial selection committee of the Boston and Massachusetts Bar Associations. He is a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and has served as its Massachusetts state chairman, on its National Board of Regents, and as treasurer. Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly named him one of the state's most influential lawyers of the past twenty-five years, and he appears in The Best Lawyers in America. On October 21, 2004, Tom gave the invocation at the American College of Trial Lawyers Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tom has been a trustee of the American Textile History Museum and a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and of the Citizens Advisory Board of WGBH-TV. He is a member of The Country Club, Brookline; the North Andover Country Club; Coral Beach Club, Bermuda; Duxbury Yacht Club; BS Boston City Club, as well as a former member and governor of the Union Club of Boston and a member of DKE fraternity at Brown University.

A native of Andover, Massachusetts, he served as a trustee of The Pike School and was a member of Phillips Andover Academy's Alumni Council and Development Board, and he was President of the Class of 1938.