Kevin J. O'Connor

Kevin O’Connor is a Partner, Chair of the Business Litigation practice, and Co-Vice Chair of the Labor & Employment practice at Peckar & Abramson. Kevin is a United States Air Force veteran who served with distinction for six years in the Strategic Air Command and later graduated from law school with honors in 1995, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Rutgers Law Review. He went on to develop extensive experience as a trial attorney with a focus on business litigation, employment law and construction law. Kevin is certified by the Supreme Court of New Jersey as a Civil Trial Attorney.

Kevin has extensive experience in the areas of EPLI and D&O defense; class action defense; partnership and corporate dissolutions; construction litigation; unfair competition; restrictive covenant and trade secret litigation; RICO and securities law defense and Computer Fraud & Abuse Act and Computer Related Offenses Act claims.

Kevin has tried to conclusion (bench and jury trials) and has arbitrated (both domestically and internationally) many cases, some with amounts in dispute which exceed $1 billion (US). He is a frequent lecturer on employment and business litigation topics and has published numerous articles in those practice areas. Kevin was appointed to the District XA Ethics Committee by the New Jersey Supreme Court in 2007 and was elevated to Chair in 2021 for a two-year term. Kevin also serves as the New Jersey Chair for the Association of Defense Trial Attorneys, as well as the New Jersey Editor of the Bloomberg treatise “Employment at Will, a State-by-State Survey.”

Kevin is a key contributor to P&A’s Business Owner Rights Blog.

Kevin is also highly active in the American Bar Association as well as the Defense Research Institute (DRI) where he is involved in the Retail & Hospitality, Employment Law, and Construction Law Committees. In 2016, Kevin was invited to join the Claims and Litigation Management Alliance (CLM) in which he remains an active participant. More recently, in 2019 Kevin was elected as a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation which is a global honorary society of attorneys, judges, law faculty and legal scholars whose public and private careers have demonstrated outstanding dedication to the highest principles of the legal profession and to the welfare of their communities. This prestigious distinction is limited to one percent of lawyers licensed to practice in a given jurisdiction.

Kevin is admitted to practice law in the States of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania and practices before federal courts in both New Jersey and New York, including the District of New Jersey, the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Eastern, Western and Southern Districts of New York, as well as the Second and Third Circuits.