In this series, we share interviews with Filevine users who are some of the most influential lawyers in America. These legal luminaries, recognized on Forbes' prestigious America’s Top 200 Lawyers for 2024 list, are not only building powerful legal careers but also shaping the future of the law.
This article highlights Christopher Mattei, a leading litigator and a New York Times quoted “incredible powerhouse lawyer,” whose unconventional journey to practicing law has led him to fight some of the nation’s most prominent cases, including representing families who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook shooting.
Tell us a little bit about your journey to getting to where you are today.
How did you come to practice law and what drew you to the field?
Did you have specific mentors or experiences that pushed you towards the career you have built?
I never thought I was going to be a lawyer. I never really wanted to be a lawyer. When I was growing up I wanted to be a high school teacher. So, when I graduated from college, that's what I did. I taught high school English on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, a little community called Rough Rock. The name of the school was the Rough Rock Community School, which, when it was started in the 1960s, was the first ever school in Indian Country to be run by a locally elected school board.
So what that meant was that education took on a very different look there. It was bicultural education, with teaching of traditional Navajo religious practices. It was obviously an economic hub for the community. I loved teaching there, but it was in the midst of really indescribable poverty. I became very interested in economic justice and I became a union organizer. After teaching for a year, I went to the Bay Area and started working to organize health care workers in the private hospital industry in Northern California.
One of my jobs for the union was to travel around Northern California and meet with workers who had complaints, including being forced to work off the clock, document those complaints, and submit them to a law firm that was working to put together a class action lawsuit on behalf of these workers. That's when I first started thinking a career in the law could be interesting to me. I went to law school thinking I would return to California to be a labor lawyer, but when I came back to Connecticut, which is where I'm from, the state was in the midst of a whole mess of political corruption scandals.
So, I again switched interests and decided I wanted to be a prosecutor. I spent eight years as a federal prosecutor before coming over to the private sector. Now I am with Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, focusing on catastrophic injury, medical malpractice, and defamation. The firm has really pioneered, I think, a legal effort to combat gun violence, particularly school shootings.
What has been a significant challenge you have faced in your career, and how did you overcome it?
When I was a junior lawyer, I was very fortunate to get hired by the U.S. attorney's office. I think one of the main reasons I was hired is because at the time the federal government was having some budget issues, so they could only afford to pay a certain amount, so I came pretty cheap.
The downside of that, I think, for the Justice Department, was that I didn't have a lot of experience. I was 29 at the time, I was the youngest prosecutor in the office, and all of a sudden I had a lot of authority, a lot of power, a lot of discretion that, were it not for the supervision I had and the mentorship I had from other lawyers at the Justice Department, I think I would have been ill prepared at that point.
Prosecutors have such tremendous power that they wield and the ability to control or make decisions that can have catastrophic consequences for people's lives and their liberty. So that was a real challenge for me— taking my time to understand the weight and gravity that were involved in a lot of decisions that I was making. It was also having the humility to seek out advice and mentorship and in guidance on a daily basis to make sure that I was fulfilling my responsibilities both to the department and the people who were under investigation.
The New York Times described you as an “ incredible powerhouse lawyer.”
In your opinion, what are the defining characteristics that drive your approach to practicing law and make you unique in your philosophy?
I hesitate to think that I'm all that unique. I think that there are certain traits that most trial lawyers share. One is an authentic ability to be relatable and interested in people. You have to remember that you're talking to a jury drawn from all different backgrounds, different viewpoints, different experiences in their life that may have really shaped how they view the world. The more experience you've had interacting with people, the more interested in people you are, the better you're going to be able to understand what a jury may be interested in, what questions they're really going to want answered, what's going to motivate them emotionally to reach a decision that you want.
Being a good team player is extremely important in trial work. I've seen other trial lawyers and other trial teams where it's quite clear that they're not working all that well together, or that there's a hierarchy that's not serving the objective of the client. As the person who's often the one standing up in the courtroom, it's important to be mindful of the fact that that's the end point of the production.
There’s so much teamwork that’s gone into everything before that, from your administrative assistant, to your paralegal, to the tech people who set up the courtroom, to the courtroom staff, those are all people I consider to be part of our team. Having a teammate outlook as a trial lawyer is hugely important to the success of the case, but it’s something that some trial lawyers will often overlook because they think it’s all about them, and it’s really never about them.
Throughout your career you have fought high-profile, monumental cases, and achieved groundbreaking wins.
Looking back, is there a specific case that significantly shaped your legal approach? What about the experience made it so impactful?
The cases that have stuck with me the most are the ones where the person I was representing were particularly vulnerable and needed my help. I’ll start with the most recent case that has generated some attention, and that's the case against Alex Jones’ Infowers on behalf of families who lost loved ones at Sandy Hook and one FBI first responder. One of the things that will always stick with me about the case is the hours that I spent with the family members, getting to know them and their families, preparing them for their testimony, really spending so much time going deep and granular on their personal histories.
Obviously with people who have lost loved ones, especially parents who've lost children, that's a very difficult thing to do. You're going to some places emotionally that a lot of people would rather stay away from, both as the lawyer, frankly, and as the party. But that process is so important because it's not until you really get into the little details that you start to understand how you can tell the story in a way that's going to be most impactful for a jury.
Another case I had when I was a prosecutor, which nobody's ever heard of, was against a gentleman named Joey Tabaco, who had come to the United States from Nigeria, had overstayed and started stealing the identities of other people so that he could present himself as an American citizen. One of the people whose identity he stole was a developmentally disabled gentleman named Steven Buckley, who was living in Massachusetts. Steven Buckle was unaware that his identity had even been taken and that somebody was living as him. That to me made it even worse—that somebody was accumulating credit in his name, marrying somebody in his name, and that it was a real theft of this person's being.
It was really important to me to give this gentleman, who maybe even wasn't aware of all the implications of having had his identity stolen, back who he was, which is one of the only things that we can really claim as our own. That case sticks with me because it reminds me that every single person that we come into contact with has value and is capable of losing something very essential to them.
You are considered to be one of the nation’s premier trial attorneys.
What advice would you give to an aspiring lawyer considering a career in law today?
The most important thing I can say to any young lawyer is to find a senior lawyer to work with who cares about you and who's going to mentor you. If that means working in an office setting that doesn't have the same area of focus that you think you'd be drawn to, do it anyway. If you're working with somebody who's going to look out for your development, both in terms of your skills, experience, and connecting you with other lawyers and people in the profession, that is worth so much more than a year or two as a junior lawyer practicing in an area of law that you think at that early stage in your career, you're most interested in.
Practicing law is difficult and competitive and if you are able to find somebody who you really admire as a person and who has the type of experience and values that you aspire to, that is really where you should prioritize your time.
The second thing I would say is that I have found it to be really important in my dealings with other lawyers to feel like I can trust them. Your reputation for being a person of integrity will only serve you well throughout your career, in addition to it just being, in my view, an important way to be a human being.
In the long run, it's a huge advantage to be somebody who other lawyers and judges trust. Then the last piece of advice I'll give was shared with me by a very senior prosecutor at the Justice Department named Rich Schecter. He said,” in the courtroom, you have to be yourself. You always have to be yourself. Unless you're an asshole, then you have to be somebody else.”
What motivates you to continue practicing law at the highest level?
I'm really motivated by the fact that there are people out there in the world, who I don't know yet, whose stories the public doesn't know, but that are going through something right now, even as we speak, that is unspeakable that they think they're never going to be able to overcome. That's injustice in our midst that nobody cares about. I'm motivated by the possibility that they could end up in my office one day, in need of help, and that I can be somebody who can help them.
I think it's very easy to get caught up in the day to day and doing the work that's right in front of you without remembering that there's a whole world going on outside the office where people are being made victims by the abuse of power, corporate power, governmental power, and feel like they're helpless. What motivates me is the possibility that they may realize they're not helpless, that they could go find a lawyer who's going to take their case. Maybe it'll be me and maybe it'll be somebody else, but that allows you to feel like you can make a difference for somebody.