James E. Toner, Esq.

James Toner was born and raised on Long Island and graduated from Chaminade High School in Mineola with the class of 1985. He earned a B.B.A. in Finance at Hofstra University's Frank G. Zarb School of Business, then stayed at Hofstra for law school, taking his J.D. from the Maurice A. Deane School of Law in 1992. While there he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Hofstra Property Law Journal.

He did not wait for a diploma to start trying cases. In his second year of law school he worked as a certified legal intern at the Miami-Dade County Public Defender's Office, and he won his first not-guilty verdict there, on a felony jury trial, as a student.

It set the shape of everything after it. He returned to New York and joined the Nassau County Legal Aid Society, where he tried felonies and misdemeanors in volume. Legal aid is where trial lawyers are made, because the caseload does not permit avoidance: you learn to pick juries, cross-examine police officers and sum up, because there is a trial next week and the week after that.

For roughly three decades he practiced from an office directly across the street from the Nassau County courthouse in Mineola. The firm is now in Garden City, a few minutes away, and he still appears in the same courts he has appeared in his entire career.

In that time he has represented thousands of people charged with crimes in Nassau County and throughout the New York metropolitan area, and has tried homicide, Medicaid fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, white-collar, narcotics trafficking and driving while intoxicated cases to verdict.

Alongside the criminal work he has recovered millions of dollars for people seriously injured in accidents. Beyond motor vehicle cases, he has recovered substantial sums in claims involving bullying, theft of wages and overtime, premises liability, construction accidents and fire.