Jeffrey Stephen Bagnell

Mr. Bagnell, founder in 2009 of Lucas Bagnell Varga LLC, has more than twenty-five years’ experience representing individual and corporate clients in the areas of employment law, civil rights, contract disputes, executive compensation, trademark law, and related civil litigation and appeals.  For the last four years, he has been named in Best Lawyers in America, an honor reserved for few practicing attorneys in the United States.  In October 2017, he was named a Fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America, an invitation-only honor recognizing his substantial accomplishments as a litigator and trial attorney.   He has been named as one of the Top 50 lawyers practicing in Connecticut by Superlawyers Magazine, and has been similarly recognized as one of the to 50 litigation stars in the State by Benchmark Litigation, and has been described as an “experienced and able" trial attorney by a senior federal judge in a published opinion.  He can be reached at  All communications are confidential and privileged though they do not create an attorney-client relationship without an agreement being in place.  

A graduate of Holy Cross College and Boston College Law School, his practice is entirely devoted to civil litigation and appeals.  He has recently been invited to be a member of the Million Dollar and Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum and the National Association of Distinguished Counsel.

In July 2016, he concluded a marathon eight-year insurance coverage battle againt AIG, having defeated the company’s motion for summary judgment on the claim of unfair insurance practices under Connecticut law.  "While the delay and anti-plaintiff bias in this case, as well as the underlying case, were incredibly extreme, we were pleased with the final outcome made possible by a new judge.  Under no circumstances may an insurance company delay a coverage determination for more than four years.”  

Among other successful results for clients, with attorney Scott Lucas he obtained a $17.4 million arbitration award in December 2012 on behalf of five former executives of a public life sciences company who were denied certain change in control benefits following a merger in November 2008. In June 2009, he obtained a $1 million settlement of an age discrimination claim on behalf of a terminated cosmetics executive.  In July 2008, he obtained a $4.2 million jury verdict on behalf of a former employee of the New Haven Register, who was terminated in retaliation for refusing to give false testimony in a state administrative proceeding. In August of that year he successfully opposed a motion for summary judgment by General Electric Company in an Age Discrimination Case involving an E-band executive.  He represented the plaintiff in Doe v. Norwalk Community College, 248 F.R.D. 372 (D. Conn. 2007), a case in which he was among the first attorneys in New England to obtain sanctions for spoliation of electronic evidence.  

In preparing his cases for trial and selecting juries, Mr. Bagnell works very closely with a Virginia-based jury consultant, Carolyn Koch, Esq. of Jury Solutions Inc., to ensure the best possible presentation to the jury.  

Articles on cases he has handled have appeared in the National Law Journal, Lawyers Weekly USA, the Connecticut Law Tribune, and various legal journals. He has obtained precedent-setting decisions in the areas of E-discovery and spoliation, insurance coverage, wrongful discharge, wage and hour laws, and the Family and Medical Leave Act.  He has been a frequent speaker at bar association events, including the Connecticut Bar Association’s annual meetings. He has authored articles on evidence issues arising under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, litigating cases under the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), as well as Supreme Court jurisprudence on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. He was a contributing editor of the American Bar Association’s Model Employment Law Jury Instructions, Second Edition, as well as the American Bar Association’s Employment Litigation Handbook. 

He is also the author of One Question Too Many: The Trial of Captain Charles B. McVay, a study of the court-martial of the captain of the USS Indianapolis.  His work on this article, which included locating and obtaining a copy of the original 1945 trial transcript, led him to be consulted by the actor who will portray the Japanese submarine commander in the upcoming motion picture “USS Indianapolis:  Men of Courage” starring Nicholas Cage, which is due out in May 2016.

He has argued cases in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, U.S. District and Bankruptcy Courts in New York and Connecticut, as well as the Connecticut Supreme Court. He has tried jury and non-jury cases to successful verdicts, and has obtained some of the largest jury verdicts in his field in the nation.

Mr. Bagnell is a member of the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the U.S. District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York and Connecticut. He is admitted to practice to the state bars of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Previously in his career he served as associate counsel for a $300 million, publicly traded communications company in Milford, Connecticut, with over 2,000 employees, where he advised management on a broad array of issues involving international and domestic business transactions. He also served as an attorney with Garrison, Levin-Epstein, Chimes & Richardson, P.C. in New Haven, Connecticut, a firm that specializes in civil litigation and white-collar criminal defense, where he worked closely with the firm’s founding partner, Joseph D. Garrison on a variety of cases and successful trials, including $1.6 million and $500,000 verdicts against companies for violation of the FMLA in 2003 and 2005. 

He has served as a member of the executive committee of the Connecticut Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Section, and is a Sustaining Member of the National Employment Lawyers Association and the American Bar Association’s Section on Litigation.  He is accomplished cyclist and avid sailor.