Empathy plays an important part in Chris Mattei’s ’96 work as a trial lawyer, never more so than when Chris presented a case this fall on behalf of Sandy Hook families against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who spread lies to his millions of followers about the 2012 mass shooting.

The Connecticut jury in October returned a $1 billion judgment against Mr. Jones and the parent company of his Infowars website, and the court later added $473 million in punitive damages.

In a forum in the Norton Family Center for the Common Good on Monday, December 5, Chris, a lawyer with the firm Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, discussed the case, his career, and the importance of his Loomis Chaffee experiences in his life. Woven throughout the discussion with Loomis students and faculty was the concept of empathy, this year’s theme at Loomis.

As lead counsel for the Sandy Hook families and first responders, Chris said, he spent 80 percent to 90 percent of his work time over the last two or three years on the case, much of it with families of the children and staff members who were killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Getting to know the families and reflecting on what it must have been like for them to lose a child or other loved one in this violent attack had a profound effect on Chris, he said. “I internalized their stories deeply,” he said. “It changed me.”

As a result, Chris felt an enormous responsibility to present the case in a way that respected the families, their stories, and their grief. He also felt that the jurors would perceive his genuine empathy and compassion for the families, giving him credibility with the people who would decide the case.

Credibility was especially important because Chris and the other attorneys for the plaintiffs would ask the jury to award a billion dollars in damages — monetary compensation for the suffering caused by Mr. Jones’s lies. Through his media channels, Mr. Jones purported for years that the shooting never happened, that the parents of the victims were actors, and that the massacre was just a ruse to enable the U.S. government to take away citizens’ guns. He later acknowledged that the shooting did happen, but by then, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued, he had made millions of dollars from the lies.

“We wanted to make sure [the jurors] understood how this lie that the children didn’t die and that the parents were actors spread online and through social media” to hundreds of millions of people, Chris said. The magnitude of the lie’s dissemination meant the damage it inflicted was immense as well, he explained.

Chris joined Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder in 2015 after serving for eight years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Connecticut, where he led the Financial Fraud & Public Corruption unit and helped to prosecute a number of government corruption cases. Chris, who grew up in Windsor, earned his bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and his law degree from University of Connecticut School of Law. Before attending law school, he taught English on a Navajo reservation in Arizona and worked as a union organizer for health care workers in California.