City’s Top Lawyer To Resign

by Thomas Breen

Corporation Counsel Patricia King will step down from her role as the city’s top attorney at the end of this week — after a six-year tenure that saw the city weather the novel legal challenges of the Covid pandemic, the second Trump administration, and a police-misconduct lawsuit that ended with a $45 million settlement.

The city’s most recent personnel report states that King will resign from her role as corporation counsel on Friday, Jan. 9.

King has served in that job since Mayor Justin Elicker first assumed office in January 2020.

An experienced local attorney who was first licensed to practice law in 1983, King previously worked as a juvenile court advocate, assistant state’s attorney in Waterbury, assistant corporation counsel for the City of New Haven, and in the state Office of the Chief Disciplinary Counsel. She also spent nearly a decade on the City Plan Commission and six years on the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA), where she also served as chair.

On Monday, King told the Independent that she plans to step away from full-time employment. She’ll be teaching an ethics class at UConn’s law school this spring; otherwise, she’s looking to “spend more time doing things that I want to do while I still have my physical and mental health intact.”

“It’s really the most interesting job a lawyer can have,” King said about being the city’s corporation counsel. “Every day is different.” If she wanted to remain working full time, she’d stay in this job. But “the time has come for me to not work full time anymore.”

“I wish we could keep her,” Elicker told the Independent in a separate interview Monday. “She’s just been fantastic. … She has risen to the challenges [presented by this job] over and over, and is curious, positive, and excited about the variety in the job.

Elicker said that the city has posted the position on its job application portal, and that he’ll be interviewing applicants to replace King. He said he plans to figure out this week if he’ll need to appoint an interim successor.

As the job posting states, the city’s corporation counsel serves as the city’s chief legal officer. “This highly responsible executive position provides legal leadership across all aspects of municipal government and plays a critical role in advancing the Mayor’s policy priorities while ensuring compliance with federal, state, and local law. The Corporation Counsel directs all legal operations for the City and serves as a trusted advisor to elected officials, boards, commissions, and senior leadership.”

King said her office currently has roughly a dozen attorneys on staff. It also works closely with a number of city-hired outside law firms.

King and Elicker pointed to the Covid pandemic as one of the first, and largest, challenges faced by city government’s attorneys during King’s tenure.

“I don’t know the last time the city declared a state of emergency,” Elicker reflected upon that time just three months into his and King’s time in office. King helped craft executive orders allowing the mayor “to do some things without legislative body approval,” and to navigate “all kinds of challenging and novel legal questions around mask [mandates],” limiting capacity at certain locations around the city, and requiring employees to get vaccines. “Over and over again, there were complex legal issues that the city had probably never faced,” and King helped lead the way in responding to them.

King recalled drafting the city’s first executive order during the pandemic, “and looking at an old one, and sort of having to wing it.” She remembered much time spent researching the charter, local statutes, and figuring out “what we could do” as a city. “We had meetings every day on Covid. I don’t think we had a day off until April.”

Meanwhile, over the past year, the city has signed onto lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit against the Trump administration in an effort to protect against a federal effort to defund municipalities that protect undocumented immigrants and support work to combat climate change.

While the city has been represented in those lawsuits by the organizations Democracy Forward and the Public Rights Project, Elicker said that “Pat and her team have vetted the lawsuits to make sure that it’s appropriate” for the city to participate in them. King also “participates in regular meetings with attorneys from other cities” involved in those cases. King described one of her office’s key responsibilities in these cases as gathering information “to make sure we have the appropriate facts we can allege to ensure we can be properly involved in the complaint.”

“Between Covid and the Trump administration,” she joked, “I wonder what the mayor and I had done in a prior life to deserve this.”

King was also the city’s top attorney when a 36-year-old New Havener named Randy Cox sued the police department after he sustained paralyzing injuries while in police custody in 2022. Cox was represented in that case by civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who shined a national spotlight on the city through protest after protest as the lawsuit made its way through federal court.

New Haven was represented in that case by an outside lawyer. Nevertheless, “Pat and her team played a role in engaging outside attorneys, participating in settlement conferences, making sure we got the right outcome,” Elicker said.

Ultimately, the city settled Cox’s lawsuit for $45 million. “That was a very, very difficult decision,” Elicker said, “about balancing what was right for Randy Cox” and what was right for the city. (In a separate case in 2024, the city — again represented by outside counsel — settled a fatal-fire lawsuit for $14.5 million.)

“It’s hard to settle cases generally,” King said on Monday. “You’re always wondering, ‘Could I have done better.’ … We have very capable outside counsel. We’re very luck to have that resource.” King said she was involved in the mediations in the Cox case as a representative of the city. “Mediations are sort of a strategy game in general. You just have to make the best decision you can.”

One of the first major settlements of her tenure as top city attorney for the Elicker administration, meanwhile, involved a class action lawsuit filed by legal aid against the Harp administration around how the city’s health department handled child lead poisoning cases. Elicker described working with King to meet with legal aid attorneys multiple times “to find a positive” outcome. “Because we were very proactive in addressing legal aid’s concerns, it was easier to come to a positive settlement” in 2021.

Asked for advice she has for whoever works as the city’s corporation counsel next — and in particular if her successor has to navigate various crises like the ones King had to work through — King replied, “An interesting part of working for the city [is] we can only do what the state allows us to do. You have to be mindful of what authority you have.”

She described working for Elicker as “a pleasure,” and praised her team for their knowledge and dedication. “I hope whoever runs up against one of these situations in the future,” King said, “has the type of stability and commitment that our team has had.”