Christopher Anderson

Christopher P. Anderson is a trial lawyer based in Norwich, Connecticut, where he represents injured plaintiffs at Anderson Trial Lawyers in personal injury, products liability, wrongful death, and workers’ compensation matters. For more than thirty years, he has focused his practice on taking cases to trial before juries across eastern Connecticut.

Anderson grew up in a trial lawyer household. His father, Carl D. Anderson, was a well-known Connecticut trial lawyer and a former president of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association. After a winding path into the profession that included time in construction and loading trucks, Anderson found his direction studying political philosophy in Virginia, earning a Bachelor of Arts from Virginia Wesleyan College in 1991. He went on to Vermont Law School, where, despite the school’s reputation for environmental law, he concentrated on trial practice and received his Juris Doctor in 1994.

Anderson returned to Connecticut and joined his father’s Norwich firm in 1994, and was admitted to practice in the State of Connecticut and the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut in 1995. He began trying cases almost immediately. His early years coincided with an era in which insurance carriers, emboldened by public reaction to the McDonald’s hot-coffee verdict, resolved to try even minor soft-tissue cases in an effort to drive down settlement values. That pressure, he has said, made trial lawyers of a generation of young attorneys who learned to select juries, choose the right cases, and try them – the skills on which Anderson built his career.

In 2006, after a partner departed, Anderson assumed sole control of the firm and its finances through several lean years. He studied the firm’s balance sheets closely to understand the cyclical cash flow of a personal injury practice and steadied the business. In 2008, he obtained a two million dollar jury verdict – one million dollars for lost earnings and one million dollars for pain and suffering – on behalf of a self-employed veterinarian who shattered his ankle on ice at a motel. The result ranked among the top verdicts in Connecticut that year and secured the firm’s future.

Anderson has built Anderson Trial Lawyers into a practice focused on personal injury, products liability, wrongful death, and workers’ compensation, serving clients throughout New London County, Windham County, and the surrounding areas of eastern Connecticut. His recent results include a 2.71 million dollar jury verdict for a man seriously injured in a Coventry car accident. He has tried difficult cases in conservative rural jurisdictions where, as he describes them, good personal injury cases go to die, and he speaks candidly about learning more from the trials he has lost than from those he has won. He deliberately renamed the practice from Anderson Law Firm to Anderson Trial Lawyers as a statement of purpose.

Anderson serves on the Board of Governors of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association and is a member of the American Association for Justice. He remains active in his community, including service on the Board of Directors of the North Stonington Education Foundation. He continues to encourage other lawyers to take cases to trial, believing that a jury verdict gives injured people a voice at a moment when many distrust insurers and large corporations.