A career of fighting for social justice, equality
Michael Koskoff took on long shot cases, underdogs
As a young lawyer, Mike Koskoff defended a Black Panther facing murder charges in a New Haven trial that drew national attention. Not long afterward, a group of black Bridgeport policemen hired him to challenge discrimination in the police department. “If you could represent the Black Panthers, you can represent someone really unpopular, and that’s us,” they told him.
His long shot successes in these cases were just the beginning of a career in which Koskoff took on the underdog and challenged the powerful. He had an actor’s poise and eloquence, loved the drama of a jury trial — and became very successful. “He was the best trial lawyer of his generation,” said David Rosen, a New Haven criminal defense lawyer, who worked with Koskoff on several cases. “The best listener in a courtroom. … He would get that look in his eye because he had just heard or seen something maybe no one else had seen.”
He was motivated by “the idea you could fight for somebody who isn’t used to having a fighter in their corner, who didn’t have a voice,” said Mike’s son Josh Koskoff, a senior partner and one of the third generation of Koskoffs at the firm started by Michael’s father. “When a case came in, it became a Gestalt: not can you make any money, but is it a just cause? Does the client need my help? So even if it didn’t yield any financial benefit, if you did enough good things, good things would come, and if you didn’t, at least you would do some good things.”
Michael Peter Koskoff, 77, died April 24 of complications of pancreatic cancer. He was the senior partner at Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, and the state’s only member of the Inner Circle of Advocates, consisting of the top 100 trial lawyers in the country.
He was born March 16, 1942, in New Haven to Ted and Dorothy Fuchs Koskoff and grew up in Stratford. His father founded the Bridgeport based firm that over time has employed nephews, children and grandchildren, in 1936. Ted Koskoff taught himself how to be a trial lawyer by picking up cases his colleagues disdained, became a prominent trial attorney and eventually, president of the American Trial Lawyers Association and its Connecticut affiliate.
Michael entered Brandeis University and became part of the restless civil rights ferment of the 1960s but was expelled for staging a mock crucifixion outside the dean’s office. (“It’s probable his grades were terrible,” Josh added.) He finished college at the University of Bridgeport with a degree in English, graduated from the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1966, then joined his father’s firm.
As a teenager, he had taken courses and summer programs in acting at the Stratford Shakespeare Theater and nurtured dreams of being an actor, but “he wasn’t very good,” Josh said. Nevertheless, the theater experience proved to be extremely important in his legal career. Not only could he quote innumerable passages from Shakespeare, he developed a sense of drama, poise and flair that helped him become a riveting courtroom performer.
He represented the Guardians in Bridgeport, which had 14 black police officers on the entire force of 460 people, and by showing that the hiring and promotional tests were discriminatory, succeeded in increasing the number of minority officers. This case led to a similar one in New Haven and a case against the Bridgeport fire department that also ended in success.
He began taking on cases of medical malpractice, which 40 years ago, were few in number and very difficult to win, in large part because doctors were reluctant to testify against their peers. In 1979, Koskoff won the state’s first $1 million verdict; later he won or settled multimillion-dollar cases, including one where a young Yale intern developed HIV after she cut her hand during a procedure. (“Her own fault” was the hospital’s defense.) He won a $27 million verdict after a Yale surgical resident punctured an aorta during heart surgery that left the patient blind and brain damaged. (Koskoff and Yale “had a relationship of mutual respect,” Rosen said.) William Doyle, a lawyer who frequently opposed Koskoff, called him “the best. … He knew what he was doing and did it well.”
A year ago, Koskoff agreed to take on a long shot case against Harvard University. More than a century ago, Louis Agassiz, a distinguished Harvard anthropologist, set out to prove that black people were intrinsically less intelligent than whites. He enlisted a photographer to produce nude pictures of enslaved people in South Carolina. Tamara Lanier, a Connecticut woman, had heard family stories about an ancestor called Renty, and she learned that his image, and that of his daughter, her great-great grandmother, were among the Agassiz photographs.
After Harvard rebuffed her request for the return of the photographs, she turned to a Florida civil rights lawyer who asked Koskoff to join the fight. “Most people, if you tell them you have a conflict with Harvard, they don’t want to talk with you,” Lanier said. Koskoff was all in. He filed an unprecedented lawsuit being watched by the art world and museums across the country. “It was an incredible closing of the loop” of his career, Josh said. “He was going back to his roots, fighting for social justice and equality.”
Despite his successes, Koskoff remained modest. “He was so busy seeing humor in himself and poking fun at himself that there wasn’t any need to tease him,” Rosen said. “He wasn’t overblown. He was fully aware of his own value and his abilities, but he didn’t think that made him better.”
A decade or so ago, Koskoff married his love of the theater and the law in a screenplay he wrote about a criminal case tried in Connecticut by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall when he was a young lawyer. (His co-author was his son Jacob, a Hollywood screen writer.)
A white Greenwich woman claimed that her black chauffeur had raped her, and the NAACP sent Marshall to defend the driver, who was acquitted by a jury. The 2017 film, “Marshall,” starred Chadwick Boseman and was a critical success, though Koskoff thought it deserved better and questioned why it wasn’t nominated for best screen play, said his daughter Juliet Koskoff Diamond. “He had a blast filming it. He loved being important, meeting celebrities, hobnobbing in that world.”
Koskoff was sustained by a dogged optimism. “He had no fear and no sense of limits,” his daughter said. “The core characteristic that made him very successful was that he was an unabashed and utter optimist,” said his son Josh. “There was no glass you couldn’t find half full. … If he believed in something, he was incredibly persuasive, and he refused to be brought down by pessimism or hurdles.”
He is survived by his wife, the former Rosalind Jacobs, whom he met while taking a summer course at Harvard and married in 1963; his four children, Josh Koskoff, Juliet Koskoff Diamond, Jacob Koskoff and Sarah Koskoff, eight grandsons, and two sisters, Elizabeth Koskoff and Susan Glazer.