features
fall 2024
Koskoff’s own story is one of a reluctant lawyer who had to fight self-doubt as much as any courtroom adversary.
veryone told him the case couldn’t be won—it couldn’t even be brought. And yet here Josh Koskoff, JD ’94, was, spending late night after late night in his Bridgeport, Connecticut, law office, surrounded by piles of papers and illuminated computer screens, searching for the right story to tell.
by Michael Blanding
photography by Adam DeTour
Soon after the Sandy Hook massacre, Koskoff was taking a taxi to the airport and mentioned to the driver that he was a lawyer. “Could you do something to help my friend?” the driver asked him, naming Carlos Soto, the father of Sandy Hook teacher Vicki Soto, who had died defending her first graders. Koskoff immediately agreed, and began driving to Newtown to work with Soto and the other family members, running interference with the media and helping distribute the outpouring of donations.
“I didn’t have any experience with shooting cases, but I did have a lot of experience talking to families who had suffered terrible losses,” he says. Seeing their pain stirred a righteous anger in Koskoff, who watched as pundits and politicians blamed the school for not having better security, while few seemed to focus on the maker of the AR-15 (the civilian version of the military’s M16 assault rifle)—Bushmaster and its parent company, Remington Arms.
Early on, Koskoff was confronted by one of the factors that has made shooting cases so challenging. In 2005, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA, pronounced “placa”), a law that insulates the gun industry from lawsuits for crimes committed with their weapons.
“From the beginning, I thought it was an impossible undertaking,” attorney Kathleen Nastri says. “The strength of the law seemed so overwhelming. I also knew no matter what I said, Josh felt so strongly about the issue and the families, he was the perfect person to do it, because if anyone was going to figure out a way around those issues, it would be him. And once he discovered the story and the way to tell it, he knew it was a winner.”
Until recently, Koskoff learned, most gun manufacturers were small companies, operating with low profit margins. Many had begun as family-owned businesses, he says, started by “American entrepreneurs who liked to hunt and took pride in their craftsmanship.” As a partner in a family-run firm, this was something Koskoff could relate to. However, in 2006, the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management Group had purchased Bushmaster, followed by Remington in 2007 and a dozen other gun companies, and begun aggressively marketing their weapons to drive up profits. Ads touted the “military-proven performance” of the weapons, with taglines such as: “Forces of opposition, bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered.” Some ads appealed directly to young men, such as one with a picture of an assault weapon and the tagline, “Consider your man card reissued.”
“They tapped into the sense of aggrievement that every adolescent feels, promoting a gun as the solution to the problem,” Koskoff says. At the same time, he discovered, Bushmaster was licensing its weapons to the video game Call of Duty, in which players go on hyperviolent military missions. “There was now a burgeoning environment where kids could be trained on these weapons as a lone shooter, given dopamine for killing.”
In December 2014, Koskoff led the filing of Soto v. Bushmaster in Connecticut, focused specifically on the way the company had deliberately advertised the weapon as a killing machine—in violation of a law called the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act.
Koskoff watched nervously as the case wound its way through the court for two years, afraid of letting down the Sandy Hook families. In October 2016, the Connecticut Superior Court threw out the case, but he kept up hope as he appealed the ruling. “I just thought about my family—my dad and grandfather—and the faith they had that a true story that added up would overcome the odds,” he says.
When Koskoff had his day in court, he described how Remington collected information online about a demographic of young men who were isolated and aggrieved, then “courted” them through a combination of online advertisements and virtual weapons in video games, persuading them to buy their products. They knew these weapons could potentially be used to kill people, he told the judge, and they recklessly disregarded that fact.
In March 2019, the Connecticut Supreme Court issued its ruling, allowing the claim to go forward. Even then, the judges expressed skepticism, saying that proving a “causal link” between the advertising and the shooting “may prove to be a Herculean task.” Koskoff and his colleagues got to work, demanding discovery of Remington that showed through thousands of documents just how intentional it had been in targeting young men who were at risk for violence, and how callous it was to the consequences. In a deposition that Koskoff conducted, the former CEO told him that even if there were a shooting every single day using one of the company’s AR-15-style rifles, Remington would continue to market and sell them. “It would be full steam ahead,” the CEO said.
By now, Cerberus had pulled out from the gun industry, and Remington had gone bankrupt. The insurance companies settled the case in February 2022, giving the Sandy Hook families $73 million and agreeing to make the discovery public. When the time came to announce the settlement, Koskoff deliberately took a back seat and let the families take the lead at the press conference, including Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan was killed in the shooting.
“When we first started speaking to different law firms, we kept hearing it was impossible—an unwinnable case,” Hockley said at that press conference. “Firearm manufacturers were immune, untouchable, and though they expressed their deepest sympathies for our loss, there was nothing they could do.” She choked back tears, even ten years after the shooting: “Josh Koskoff and his firm were different, the only ones that believed in the art of the possible . . . they believed there was a way to crack the gun industry’s impenetrable armor.”
Return to Table of Contents
E
He thumbed through photos from the crime scene, forcing himself to look once more at the carnage left by a shooter who had broken into Sandy Hook Elementary School in nearby Newtown, Connecticut, 11 days before Christmas in 2012, armed with an AR-15 assault rifle. Twenty children lost their lives at school that day; six adults died trying to protect them.
Koskoff didn’t have any experience in prosecuting gun cases—which in retrospect may have worked in his favor, since he didn’t know the case was impossible. So he began to craft a story: This was not only a case of a troubled perpetrator, it was also one of corporate greed, the story of a company that had deliberately targeted vulnerable young men through online advertising and video games in a way that made such a crime possible—even, according to Koskoff, almost inevitable.
When Koskoff filed suit against gunmaker Remington in 2014, the story he told in that case would result in a $73 million settlement for the victims’ family members. When shock radio host Alex Jones claimed those victims were actors perpetrating a hoax, Koskoff sued him too, winning stunning legal judgments of nearly $1.5 billion. It was the largest defamation verdict in US history.
“Storytelling is one of Josh’s great gifts,” says attorney Kathleen Nastri, who has worked with him on medical malpractice suits. “He can come up with an idea and then tell the story based on the idea, not the chronology. It grabs your attention and doesn’t make it confusing, just compelling. Not everyone has that gift.”
Now, Koskoff is crafting an even more complex story, filing a lawsuit this spring on behalf of the victims’ families in the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Not only is he suing the gunmaker Daniel Defense, but he’s also using an untested legal strategy to go up against Meta, which runs social media sites Facebook and Instagram, and Activision, publisher of the video game Call of Duty, which is owned by Microsoft.
Sandy Hook was not Josh Koskoff’s first unlikely victory.
In 2003, a senior partner at his firm had handed Koskoff, then relatively early in his career, a medical malpractice lawsuit. The victim was a local truck driver named Gary, a kind and decent man who had gone to a doctor with chest pains. The doctor gave him an electrocardiogram (EKG) but failed to run more comprehensive tests. A year later, Gary died from a heart attack while recovering from hip surgery. The firm had already settled with the hospital and the doctor who performed the surgery for about $2 million, but the doctor who made the initial diagnosis refused to settle.
Initially, Koskoff urged Gary’s widow to be content with the money she’d already won. “She asked me a question,” Koskoff remembers now. “‘Was the EKG normal?’ If so, she would drop the case.” Examining the evidence, Koskoff couldn’t say the test was abnormal, but there were enough anomalies that it wasn’t exactly normal either, so he told her no.
“It was a pivotal moment,” Koskoff says. “Had she not asked the question that way, we might not be talking today.”
At the time, Koskoff was suffering from a string of defeats, which had become a running joke around the office. When he first started at the personal injury firm, senior partner Richard Bieder had told him it was OK, he’d lost his first 10 cases too. When Koskoff lost two more, he said it was OK, he’d lost his first 12. By now, Koskoff was considering giving up and becoming a school guidance counselor. Adding insult to injury, he had to look at his own last name twice every time he walked in the door: The firm, Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, had been founded by his late grandfather, Ted Koskoff, a legendary trial attorney, and was now run by his father, Michael Koskoff, who, if anything, was even more acclaimed.
With no choice but to go to trial, Koskoff set to work. He’d always assumed that the first doctor was too far removed to be held responsible. As he dove into the details, however, he realized that had that doctor done his job, Gary would still be alive. He swallowed his anxiety and prepared to make his case.
“Something happened that first day,” Koskoff says. “I didn’t completely fall on my face.”
Over the next week, as he argued passionately in defense of his client, he could feel the jury shift in his favor. When they came back with a verdict, they awarded the widow $10 million. When Gary’s case was later overturned on a legal technicality, he tried it again, winning a new verdict of $22.5 million, then the largest-ever medical malpractice award in Connecticut.
The case taught Koskoff a lesson he never forgot. “As a lawyer, you are the author of a story,” he says. “You decide who are going to be the lead players, and what you’re going to talk about—and not talk about.”
Koskoff didn’t have experience prosecuting gun cases—which may have worked in his favor, since he didn’t know the case was impossible.
Koskoff’s own story is one of a reluctant lawyer who had to fight self-doubt as much as any courtroom adversary. Last May, Koskoff, who is a member of both the Suffolk Law School Dean's Cabinet and the Summa Society, was awarded an honorary degree at the Suffolk University Law School Commencement. He told the graduates he never imagined he’d become a lawyer who handles gun cases—“or anything really that significant,” he said. “I tried to fail pretty hard, because I was afraid. My father and grandfather were such successful lawyers and did so much for so many people.” He didn’t see how he could live up to their example.
Koskoff’s grandfather was a famed defender of underdogs. The son of a Ukrainian immigrant, he earned a law degree from Boston University, and struggled to make a living with a series of failed businesses. Eventually, Ted went around the Bridgeport courthouse hustling cases, trading cigars to lawyers in exchange for their worst clients, and through trial and error learned how to mount winning defenses for prostitutes and other marginalized citizens—giving the cash he received from clients to Koskoff’s grandmother to run through the washing machine. “She was a money launderer, literally,” Koskoff cracks.
His father carried on the family tradition of defending underdogs, representing members of the Black Panther Party and winning high-profile malpractice cases against hospitals. “My dad was riveting in the courtroom,” says Koskoff. “I learned that the people society designates criminals or losers or grifters are human beings who may be more worthy and ethical than some corporate board members.”
Even so, he remained leery of the forbidding rows of law books in the family office. His father tried to tell him that the legal books were just full of hundreds of stories—righteous tales with a protagonist, antagonist, tension, and resolution—but Koskoff wasn’t buying it. After earning his undergraduate degree at Syracuse, he moved to New York City and worked as a bike messenger, health club clerk, and waiter at a trendy East Village restaurant, but without any real direction.
Finally, his father came to visit and persuaded him to at least give law school a try. He applied to Suffolk Law, convinced he wouldn’t get in; when he was admitted, he thought there must have been a mistake. Yet when he enrolled and finally began reading cases, he realized his father had been right. “They really are like short stories,” he says, “and you are learning about the interrelationship of law and people and conflicts.”
Alinor Sterling, a Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder attorney who would later work with him on the Sandy Hook case, could see the dedication Josh inherited from his father. “Mike Koskoff was tremendously compassionate—he didn’t have an off switch for his heart,” she says. “Josh grew up in that environment and took that in through his pores. When people come in with cases, it’s in his DNA to help them in the most profound ways he can come up with.”
Over time, Koskoff learned how to make an argument to persuade a jury, and hold his own with a judge. “First you are insolent, then you are obsequious, then you learn how to stand up for yourself and fight in a respectful way,” he says.
Then came that fateful day when he stood up to argue Gary’s case despite wanting to walk away, and it convinced him that maybe he had what it took to be a lawyer after all. “I was trying to take an off-ramp,” he told the Suffolk Law students at Commencement. “But you can never get to your true north if you keep taking off ramps.”
The ink was barely dry on the Soto settlement when news of another school shooting rocked America, with a by-now familiar pattern of details. On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old man took a newly purchased AR-15 and opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 fourth graders and two teachers.
The families of the victims contacted Koskoff, who over the years had continued to develop his understanding of how these tragedies occur. He’d started with the gun, and then looked at the advertising. But even the best ads need help targeting an isolated teenager in a place like rural Texas. In the past, a company such as Daniel Defense, which made the gun the Uvalde shooter used, would have had to place an ad in a newspaper or magazine. Now, however, they could market directly on social media, without parents even knowing.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, does not accept advertising that promotes the sale or use of weapons, ammunition, or explosives. At the same time, it allowed Daniel Defense to post freely on its platforms, using language even more aggressive than Bushmaster had. In one Instagram post, for example, a young man is taking an AR-15 out of the trunk of a car with the tagline, “Refuse to be a victim.” Meanwhile, on Twitter, Daniel Defense boasted their guns are “rooftop ready, even at midnight,” next to photos of an assault weapon mounted on a building’s roof and pointed, sniper-style, at cars below.
Before the shooting, according to cellphone records Koskoff obtained, the perpetrator used Instagram obsessively, where he was bombarded by Daniel Defense’s gun ads. In addition, he was an avid player of Call of Duty, made by Activision Blizzard, which was in turn acquired by Microsoft in 2023. The game featured an AR-15 style weapon licensed by Daniel Defense, and Koskoff argues that repeated playing desensitized the shooter to the idea of using it to commit violence.
“We call it a video game, because that’s the way Call of Duty is marketed,” he says, “but we’re at a stage now where the line between a video game and a training simulator is obliterated.” In a statement following the shootings in Uvalde, Activision expressed its sorrow but added that “millions of people around the world enjoy video games without turning to horrific acts.”
This past May, Koskoff filed a case on behalf of the Uvalde families against Daniel Defense, Meta, and Microsoft, arguing that repeated exposure to Instagram marketing and Call of Duty sessions made the shooter obsessed with acquiring a gun as a solution to his adolescent despair and rage. The case won’t be an easy one. Like the gun industry, social media platforms have also been shielded from lawsuits—in their case by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects them from liability for material shared over their networks. Koskoff believes there is enough ambiguity in the law to challenge it.
He is counting on the case surviving long enough to get him into a courtroom, where he can tell his story to the jury, laying out just how vulnerable young men have been systematically groomed by companies that turned a blind eye to the impact of their marketing practices. Far from the insecure lawyer he was 20 years ago, Koskoff enters this fight with an unshakable sense that he is doing the right thing.
“It’s funny, the little things that end up defining you and your career,” he told his Law School audience in May. He gestured to wristbands he was wearing, which were given to him by the Uvalde families he is representing. If Suffolk hadn’t taken a chance on him back in 1991, he said, he might never have become a lawyer, might never have had the chance to pursue justice for those families.
“We’re wired to be risk-averse, we’re wired to take shortcuts, we’re wired to give up,” he said. “But you need to stare risk in the face, stare fear in the face. Those things will bury you in this profession. But if you can overcome that, you will bury them. And you will be the lawyers and the people you want to be.”
Left: This past May, Koskoff filed lawsuits on behalf of the Uvalde families against Daniel Defense, Meta, and Microsoft, parent company of the video game Call of Duty. The companies, he says, have targeted “socially vulnerable” young men in particular, conditioning them to see guns as the solution to their problems. Photographs from left: AP Photo/Eric Gay, Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images, Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Image
“We’re wired to be risk-averse, to take shortcuts and give up,” Koskoff told graduates last spring when Suffolk Law awarded him an honorary degree. “But you can never get to your true north if you keep taking off ramps.”