Joel T. Faxon
About Joel
A board certified civil trial lawyer and co-founder of Faxon Law Group, Joel handles life-altering personal injury and medical malpractice cases, commercial truck crashes, railroad derailments/crashes, aviation disasters, admiralty cases, birth trauma, sexual molestation cases, sex trafficking prosecutions, and product liability claims in Connecticut, New York, Vermont and across the United States.
Innovative in his thinking and tireless in his approach, Joel assertively handles his client’s cases as if they were his own. Highlights of Joel’s practice include $44 million in lifetime benefits obtained against a Connecticut hospital for a birth trauma case resulting in a child’s permanent cerebral palsy. In 2005, Joel made Connecticut history by obtaining the largest settlement ever in a sexual abuse case involving a parish priest and resolved dozens of cases against St. Francis Hospital arising out of one of their doctor’s sexual abuse of children under the guise of a growth study funded by the hospital. In 2012, he secured a $24 million payment for his badly injured client—the highest pretrial settlement in a personal injury case in Connecticut history. In 2017, Joel arbitrated a $93 million award for several of the victims of the Middletown Power Plant Explosion and his result in Thompson v. National Union Fire Insurance Company was published as #3 in the Top 10 insurance liability cases of the year. In 2019, Joel obtained reversal of the dismissal of a wrongful death case against Metro North where the railroad asked the U.S. Supreme Court to immunize it from state jury trials. In the ensuing years, Joel has prosecuted many sexual abuse and sex trafficking cases involving sophisticated international criminals–bringing justice to many brave survivors.
Joel has lectured before the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association, the Connecticut Bar Association and local bar groups on trial law and lien issues, and is the contributing author of Truck Accident Litigation, Second Edition, published by the American Bar Association. Joel has also been elected a James Cooper Fellow of the Connecticut Bar Foundation. The Fellows support activities and programs that further the rule of law and assist in efforts to improve the administration of justice in Connecticut.
AV-Rated (highest rating) by his peers, Joel has been selected annually to the Super Lawyers® list by the publishers of Connecticut Magazine for the past 18 years and has been named among the Top Ten lawyers in the state. He was also elected by his peers to membership in the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) and is annually listed in Best Lawyers in the specialty of Personal Injury Litigation. Joel has been the recipient of a number of awards in his community including the Community Champions Corporate Award, presented by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) for his outstanding service in the battle to eliminate drunk driving. Outside of his law practice, Joel enjoys traveling, golf, and outrunning his three grown kids in the annual Faxon Law New Haven Road Race. In late 2023, Joel retired as the longest serving Chairman of the Newtown Police Commission, allowing other community members to take the reins.
numbers to live by
Faxon Law Group often is the first to step up, give more, or say YES. We look for opportunities that exist outside the box that could elicit a positive change and ask “what if?” and “why not?” So it is with much pride that we share our 4-3-2-1 impact with the community and vow that the first three numbers in the sequence will only continue to grow.
Since its inception, Faxon Law Group has donated more than $4 million dollars to over 300 local, non-profit organizations, and has impacted an estimated 200,000 community members served by non-profits.