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A Case I Could Not Refuse

By William S. Bailey

December 1990 was a time of major transition in my law practice, as I prepared to leave the security of a large successful Seattle plaintiffs' firm for the uncertainty of a new two lawyer firm with my longtime best friend Steve Fury. I was also abandoning the asbestos product liability practice I had done for nearly seven years, feeling it was the legal equivalent of the assembly line workers I used to see on auto plant tours as an adolescent in Detroit . Beyond this, I was the sole source of support for a family of four, that was about to add one more member – my wife Sylvia was five months pregnant. As a child of the Depression once removed, I fretted every time I had to write another check for the laundry list of things we needed for the new firm – phones, furniture, photocopier, computers. The capital contributions never seemed to end.

Against this backdrop, I received a call from Steve Fury at home just before 9:00 p.m. on a dark mid-December evening. “Bill, we need to talk about a case I have now that would be one of the first our new firm handles – racial discrimination by the Washington State Ferry System. African American employees have received the most vile kinds of harassment. The State AG's office refuses to do anything to correct it. We'll have to try this, with $50,000 in costs we probably won't get back. Think about it.”

As I hung up the phone, I was filled with conflicting impulses. The moral imperative was clear enough. I had lived in New Orleans as a small child in the 1950's and seen the cruel edge of racial discrimination in a way that I would never forget. The facts that Steve had just presented to me were deeply disturbing – an agency of state government looked the other way while the worst kind of institutional racism was openly practiced. I was deeply offended that my tax dollars were helping to support this. I did not want to respond with silent passivity.

I struggled with a number of nagging doubts though, the strongest of which was that I had never handled an employment case before – good intentions are one thing, but these clients needed and deserved much more – a lawyer who could deliver justice through skill and commitment. Moral outrage alone wouldn't get the job done. As a raving perfectionist, I knew that I would make rookie mistakes against our more experienced opponent. I would have to work twice as hard to master the rules and strategies of the employment discrimination legal game. And then there was the money issue, taking a labor intensive costly case when I was worried already about making ends meet.

But in the end, I could not give in to these fears. I called Steve the next day – “If I don't do this case with you, I will never be able to justify it to the young idealist within, that showed up at law school in 1971 wanting to change the world.”