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In a historic settlement reached last week, families of nine Sandy Hook victims won $73 million following an eight-year legal battle with gun manufacturer Remington Arms. 

Remington Arms produced the AR-15 style weapon the Sandy Hook perpetrator used to murder 26 kindergarteners, first graders and adult staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Katie Mesner-Hage LAW ’13, as well as lead attorneys including Josh Koskoff and Alinor Sterling at Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, were able to land the settlement after developing a novel legal theory to find gun companies legally responsible for their roles in gun violence incidents. Meanwhile, Day Pitney, the Connecticut law firm which originally represented Remington Arms, as well as Yale, filed to terminate their representation of Remington in December. 

Hired as the first fellow in a program that Koskoff had launched for new graduates of law school, Mesner-Hage was brought on due to her previous experience in law school with gun laws. She had published articles in Slate on gun and firearm related policies and the law during her time working as a research assistant for Law School professor Emily Bazelon. She left the firm in 2019 for personal reasons not related to the case. 

Gun manufacturers like Remington have traditionally been shielded from liability under the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, which prevents parties from suing gun companies for selling weapons. Mesner-Hage called the law “unprecedented” as it provided an “airtight immunity for the industry writ large.” 

According to Mesner-Hage, she worked with Koskoff and other lawyers at the firm to first dive into PLCAA, and then find gaps in the law that would allow for a lawsuit to sue Remington. 

“We honed in on a couple of the exceptions,” Mesner-Hage said. “The one that carried the case through to its finality into the settlement is one that basically says if a gun company violates a state or federal law, that in some way relates to the sale or marketing of firearms, which is the basis for a lawsuit.”

According to Mesner-Hage, the process of developing this theory focused specifically on the way Remington had advertised the AR-15 to civilians and how this marketing campaign may have violated the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act, or CUPTA.

The Sandy Hook families and law firm honed in on how the advertising done by Remington perpetrated tropes of toxic masculinity and evoked caricatures of “lone gunmen.”

“Remington’s marketing conduct was exactly the kind of dangerous and irresponsible business conduct that CUTPA was enacted to prohibit,” Alinor Sterling, a partner at Koskoff, told the News. 

At a press conference following the settlement, Koskoff reviewed the history of AR-15 marketing they studied. AR-15s which were adopted by the military were also available to the public, but remained a niche, small market for 40 years. Then, following marketing campaigns launched by Remington and other gun manufacturers, AR-15 sales rapidly boomed, with 100,000 sold in 2005 in the U.S. In 2012, the year of the Sandy Hook shooting, over two million such guns were sold in America.  

“The marketing angle was kind of in my head from day one,” Megner-Hage said. “The theory of the case that would end up being that this marketing campaign amounted to a basically a knowing plan to market this weapon, which is designed to inflict mass casualties by targeting this … population that was probably at greatest risk of using this weapon, dangerously of becoming, you know, a lone mass shooter… And so that was kind of how we were able to puncture the plaque, you know, liability shield.” 

After filing the case in a Connecticut state court in 2014, it was originally denied during the first trial in 2016. After an appeal to the Connecticut Supreme Court in March of 2019, however, the lower court’s decision was reversed. Remington Arms applied for certiorari to the United States Supreme Court in 2019, but the motion was denied. 

Unlike typical settlements, Alinor Sterling, an attorney at Koskoff, noted that the Remington Arms settlement does not require the plaintiff to keep the documents they collected in discovery confidential. This means that when the families decide to do so, they can release thousands of those internal documents in addition to depositions of Remington executives. According to Sterling, these would be helpful both to aid existing cases and also in “lifting the veil of secrecy on gun company internal practices for the public.”

Sterling said that if those documents are available, lawyers can gain valuable background to learn about how the industry works from internal structures and shared information between companies. She said that this can help future cases as they can stand on the shoulders of settlements including this one. 

“It’s such a tremendous victory and the resolve of the families is so amazing,” said Mesner-Hage. “I cannot overstate to you how much this lawsuit got filed. Nobody thought this case had a chance of success, except maybe the families. And that’s just so important to say, because, you know, here we are seven years later, and the settlement, it does feel historic and important, but I think for some people, it also feels a little bit inevitable. And I can’t state enough how much it did not seem inevitable in 2014.”

Lawyers who formerly represented Remington continue to represent Yale  

New Haven-based legal firm Day Pitney LLP, which represents Yale, bowed out as Remington’s representation in late November after Day Pitney took controversial legal moves — including subpoenas for the academic, disciplinary and employment records of the slain children and staff. Moreover, Day Pitney has been accused of sending memes and GIFs in discovery sent over to the families of Sandy Hook victims. Despite connections to the case and concerns over the firm’s legal ethics, Yale has opted to retain Day Pitney’s legal counsel.

For years, Day Pitney has advised Yale in real estate and zoning work, bond offerings and is serving as local counsel helping Yale defend against a lawsuit that challenges diversity in admissions, according to University spokesperson Karen Peart. Student pressure to drop University ties with Day Pitney then mounted in October as 129 University community members signed onto an open letter criticizing the University for maintaining Day-Pitney as legal counsel. 

“Our tuition dollars should never have been used to fund the harassment of these families and in the future, I don’t think our tuition dollars should pay the salary of a lawyer who thought that that was the right call,” said Matt Post ’22 who penned October’s open letter with Thaddeus Talbot LAW ’22. 

Talbot called Day Pitney’s discovery practices in seeking academic and employment records to calculate damage rewards “pretty abhorrent” and added that their other stalling tactics were “quite disrespectful and showed a lack of integrity.”

Vice President for Communications Nathaniel Nickerson told the News at the time that University General Counsel Alexander Dreier had expressed his views to management of Day Pitney “in the strongest terms.” Meanwhile though, Talbot said students who had called on the University to address the issue were left in the dark. 

“We had no idea what that conversation was like, so we were just waiting idly around, just waiting for an update,” Talbot said. 

Post said he thought that Yale “did the right thing” by expressing its outrage to Day Pitney after listening to students call out the firm’s actions. 

In the future though, Post said Yale ought to keep in mind what he called Day Pitney’s “grossly poor judgment” in the case when determining who to retain for counsel. “Day Pitney may have withdrawn from the case, but they still haven’t apologized for harassing these families of dead children,” he said. 

Day Pitney Attorney Beth Sher declined to comment.

Post said that he has seen enormous interest in action around gun violence prevention among undergraduates and young people. He said he expects to see a rollback of federal protections for gun manufacturers and more lawsuits similar to the Sandy Hook settlement.

“The same students who walked out of school almost four years ago now and demanded change in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are now in college, graduating college, attending law school,” Post said. “Our generation isn’t going to stop demanding that policy makers ensure that the kind of devastation that happened at Sandy Hook never happens again in this country.”

In December, Nevada’s Supreme Court sided with gun manufacturers in a similar suit over liability in the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting that killed 60 people.