John Robinson serves as Co-Managing Partner of the Hartford office, opened the Boston office for the firm. He also manages the firm’s offices in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. While he is admitted to practice in both Massachusetts and Connecticut, he regularly litigates throughout New England and nationwide. John has substantial experience in handling complex litigation, complex commercial litigation and class action litigation matters. John possesses deep experience in the defense of wide-scale mass tort litigation, including representing individual doctors in the Nationwide MDL opioid litigation.
John is the Co-Chair of the firm’s Product & Tort Liability practice group. He strives and commits himself to being immediately responsive to clients, crafting solutions around clients’ needs, and presenting those clients with no surprises. He is happy to provide references, upon request, regarding this commitment over decades of practice.
John has extensive experience in handling toxic tort personal injury and property damage litigation, catastrophic personal injury matters, complex products liability matters, commercial litigation, and drug and medical device litigation. He has successfully defended numerous class actions and handled unfair trade practices and consumer fraud litigation. He counsels clients on product safety issues and risk management, and tried cases substantially or to verdict in various jurisdictions. He has successfully defeated class certification, successfully defended product liability class actions, and has resolved (pre-class certification) proposed product liability class action litigation. He has extensive experience in defending fire and explosion loss litigation.
As primary trial counsel and consulting counsel for the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions, he assists a corporate parent to hundreds of manufacturing subsidiaries with its products liability matters. He also acts as primary consulting counsel, nationally, for a client in the asbestos litigation, and as its trial counsel in New England. In this capacity, he coordinates discovery in all cases nationwide and addresses global litigation strategy with the client and with local counsel. He coordinates experts, the handling of complex legal issues, and the defense of its corporate representatives.
John also served as national counsel for two other defendants in toxic tort litigation with responsibility for managing large regions at the time. In that capacity, he handled cases in California, Hawaii, Washington, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Arizona, Delaware, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine, regularly appearing in court in many of those jurisdictions. As a result, he has significant litigation management experience on a national level in mass toxic tort litigation.
In 2002, the Connecticut asbestos defense bar selected John as Defense Liaison Coordinating Counsel for the Connecticut asbestos litigation, and he continues to serve in that role to this day. He is responsible for coordinating with the court and all Plaintiffs' counsel regarding docket management, trial settings, discovery, medical workup, motion practice, and trial preparation.
Admissions
- Connecticut
- Massachusetts
- U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut
- U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts
Memberships
- State Bar of Connecticut, Member of the Litigation Section Executive Committee (past)
- State Bar of Massachusetts
- International Association of Defense Counsel
- Connecticut Defense Lawyers Association, Board of Directors (past)
- DRI-The Voice of the Defense Bar
- Hartford County Bar Association
- Connecticut Bar Foundation, James W. Cooper Fellows
*Not admitted to practice in Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont