  The LHC search strategies for leptoquarks that couple dominantly to a top
quark are different than for the ones that couple mostly to the light quarks.
We consider charge $1/3$ ($\phi_1$) and $5/3$ ($\phi_5$) scalar leptoquarks
that can decay to a top quark and a charged lepton ($t\ell$) giving rise to a
resonance system of a boosted top and a high-$p_{\rm T}$ lepton. We introduce
simple phenomenological models suitable for bottom-up studies and explicitly
map them to all possible scalar leptoquark models within the
Buchm\"{u}ller-R\"{u}ckl-Wyler classifications that can have the desired
decays. We study pair and single productions of these leptoquarks. Contrary to
the common perception, we find that the single production of top-philic
leptoquarks $\phi = \{\phi_1,\phi_5\}$ in association with a lepton and jets
could be significant for order one $\phi t\ell$ coupling in certain scenarios.
We propose a strategy of selecting events with at least one hadronic-top and
two high-$p_{\rm T}$ same flavour opposite sign leptons. This captures events
from both pair and single productions. Our strategy can significantly enhance
the LHC discovery potential especially in the high-mass region where single
productions become more prominent. Our estimation shows that a scalar
leptoquark as heavy as $\sim1.7$ TeV can be discovered at the $14$ TeV LHC with
3 ab$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity in the $t\ell\ell+X$ channel for $100\%$
branching ratio in the $\phi\to t\ell $ decay mode. However, in some scenarios,
the discovery reach can increase beyond $2$ TeV even though the branching ratio
comes down to about $50\%$.
