Dan Livingston

Dan Livingston was a labor and progressive activist even before becoming an attorney. A life-time member of the United Auto Workers Union, Dan is the product of the marriage of a Union President, and a Social Worker, who boasts of being on picket lines before he could walk. Dan worked for two years as a Union organizer before entering Yale Law School in 1979. He graduated in 1982 and has since been admitted to the Connecticut and Federal district court bars, as well as the to the bar of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court.

Dan has been a member of the Firm for over 40 years and has been a partner since 1984. He has extensive experience in labor and employment law including arbitrations, and litigation before the State Labor Relations Board, the National Labor Relations Board, the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights & Opportunities, the Connecticut Superior Court, the U.S. District Court, the Connecticut Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has represented hundreds of individuals in discrimination, harassment, and wrongful termination cases against their employers. Dan also serves as chief negotiator in contract negotiations, and lead advocate in interest arbitrations, including the successful effort of State Employee Unions to secure health and pension benefits for domestic partners of the state's gay and lesbian employees when Connecticut law refused to allow same-sex marriage.

Dan has been the Chief Negotiator for SEBAC, the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition since 1994. He helped craft the ground-breaking 20-year pension and health care agreement in 1997, and is proud to have served the Coalition in 2002 and 2003 as it fought to fend of then-Governor John Rowland's decimation of public services and his layoff of nearly 3000 state workers, and in 2009 and 2011 as it reached successful agreements preventing layoffs and preventing service cuts contemplated first by then-Governor Jodi Rell (2009) and then by Governor Dannel Malloy (2011). Helping SEBAC and other public employee unions protect vital public services and the members who provide them, as well as leverage their power to fight more broadly for all working families, remains one of the major focuses of Dan's practice.

Dan represents or works closely with a long list of labor and progressive organizations including - the UAW, SEBAC, the SEIU, UNITE-HERE, the IAM, the CFSA - and many of their locals, CWEALF, the CCAG, Working Families Party, CCNE, DUE Justice, Better Choices, and others. Dan also serves as the Chair of Connecticut Health and Research Trust, parent foundation of the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut and is a member of the State Advisory Board of Common Cause in Connecticut. Much of his practice involves working with groups and coalitions of labor and progressive organizations as they struggle to protect and expand the rights of working families against a resurgent right wing.

Dan is a member of various professional associations, including the Labor and Employment Section of the Connecticut Bar Association, the Union Lawyers Alliance of the AFL-CIO, the Connecticut Employment Lawyers Association, and he has been selected to be a James P. Cooper Fellow. He speaks and writes on employment and labor law topics throughout the country at various professional seminars, as well as labor and progressive seminars, conferences and conventions and is widely known for his leadership and expertise on those matters. Dan has received numerous awards and honors for his legal work and service to the progressive movement and has been recognized by his peers as a "Best Lawyer" and "Super Lawyer," but is listing it in his bio only because his partners insisted.